Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization

andremachado writes "Two academic management researchers, Siobhán O'Mahony and Fabrizion Ferraro, performed a detailed scientific study about Debian Project governance and social organization from the management perspective. How did a big non-commercial non-paying community evolve to produce some of the most respectable Operating Systems and applications packages available? Organizations without a consensual basis of authority lack an important condition necessary for their survival. Those with directly democratic forms of participation do not tend to scale well and are noted for their difficulty managing complexity and decision-making — all of which can hasten their demise. The Debian Project community designed and evolved a solid governance system since 1993 able to establish shared conceptions of formal authority, leadership, and meritocracy, limited by defined democratic adaptive mechanisms."

Some, but not all.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Debian doesn't seem to mind Ubuntu, for the most part, except when Ubuntu users come to Debian forums asking for help.

But a simple example: Debian, for the longest time, had /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash, although they did have a rule that any script requiring /bin/sh should only use POSIX syntax, and not bash-isms. Sometime in 2006, I think, Ubuntu switched /bin/sh to /bin/dash. Dash is much faster than Bash -- so much so that this switch is the main reason that version of Ubuntu booted so much faster than previous versions (it was also when Upstart was first integrated, though Upstart is barely used)...

And since then, certainly, fixes to various packages' scripts which claim #!/bin/sh, but really want bash, have been sent back to Debian. (Either POSIX-ify them, or make them explicitly ask for bash.) But as far as I know, no major distributions outside Ubuntu actually have /bin/sh linked to dash -- some of Amazon's EC2 tools, designed to work on Fedora, need to be patched before they can work on Ubuntu, for that very reason.

Re:Just an observation

[innerweb]

From their own description [ubuntu.com] of the OS...Ubuntu and Debian are closely related. Ubuntu builds on the foundations of Debian architecture and infrastructure, with a different community and release process. ... Debian is "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built".

Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. A very good one.

InnerWeb

Re:Just an observation

[Nullav]

In my experience, they're pretty damn similar. If you want to compare defaults (Ubuntu Server Edition with everything needed for LAMP/SSH/DNS vs Etch with the same packages), Ubuntu is larger, uses more resources, and handles dependencies much better (<3 autoremove). As for the desktop edition, the only real difference (besides the brown) is the update notifier.
As for ease of installation, Ubuntu dumbs things down (on the desktop edition) for the 'I'm afraid to touch this' crowd, and Debian has the 'Goodbye Microsoft' installer, which I found quite nice to use (not as dumbed-down as Ubuntu's, but I was able to configure everything and install as much or as little as I wanted without it seeming the least bit complex).

tl;dr - Server: Debian; Desktop: Either one.

Re:Debian Rules!

[xenocide2]

Ubuntu in many ways lit a fire underneath Debian. I liked Debian in 2002; by 2004 I was getting a bit tired of stupid jokes about being out of date, and I was tired of running development versions just to get a modern desktop. For example, the last version of xfree was finally released around the same time most distros were shipping the new and shiny xorg project x server. So when Ubuntu came around, that was great. They brought in some X guys to hammer Xorg into a working package, at great personal sacrifice. They made a push for Default debconf priority, to large success. They adopted a LiveCD approach while Debian was adamantly fighting Knoppix. They had a Code of Conduct that laid out some important ground rules that Debian was missing and refused to find. The brought a focus on the desktop that I felt Debian was lacking. And they had a commitment to releasing frequently. Six month releases is a step back from someone like me who used to run Debian unstable, but I was getting tired of random kernel pushes breaking video drivers and the like.

Don't get me wrong; Debian testing is probably great for lots of people. If Ubuntu's trajectory continues as it is, I may one day return to Debian; as a result of Ubuntu's successes, they've adopted a number of Ubuntu's practices and policies. For example, they've adopted a wiki for community development, and a new proposal system for evaluating large scale decisions. And meanwhile, Canonical's success with Ubuntu has it focusing on strange contracts that draw resources from fixing bugs related to my personal uses.

As for your comparison essay, the "ubuntu-desktop" meta package now suggests / recommends most things, and apt is set to bring them in on updates but not remove the meta package if they're removed. That way, they can bring in new features, and you can opt out of some of them, and it'll remember that. The bloat charge is a bit unfair. The default install is something usable out of the box. You're free to do the minimal install the same way you did with Debian, but disk space is cheap these days, and people only have so many hours in a day. Hating release schedules is a bit silly. One way you update everything at once, and the other the updates trickle down to you. The everything at once has the advantage that you can deploy new compilers / libc during the early fork without worrying that someone will accidentally screw themselves. Of course the downside is that pidgin may be outdated quickly, but I think it's been fairly lucky at not breaking network compatibility recently.