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Debian IT

Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election 525

Posted by samzenpus from the rock-the-vote dept.
daria42 writes "A record low voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that two-thirds of the candidates have not yet cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"."
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Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election More

Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election

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  • Slashdot confirms... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:02PM (#12095267)
    ... Debian is dying. (It had to be done.)

    • Shouldn't it be (Score:5, Funny)

      by InfiniteWisdom ( 530090 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:22PM (#12096013) Homepage
      Debian confirms it?

    • Re:Slashdot confirms... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @01:50AM (#12097803)
      Actually you could be right. The recent delays in the release of the next stable, are extremely problematic. I am a former debian user who now moved to Ubuntu (probably like many others) The problem really was/is for me the release cycles. Testing sort of is okish, but still running X11, unstable broke too often. And stable, forget it, hell freezes over before they release the next stable. Probably many users of Debian moved to Ubuntu and other apt based distros. If Debian could go for a better release cycle mechanism they could get the uses back. But Debian really is stagnating currently. 10 years after the first installer, they finally have one, still one of the few distros running on XFree 4.3 (and they will be for the forseeable future) KDE and gnome even if they pump out now the next stable already again a year behind the latest releases etc....

  • One Meaning: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:03PM (#12095280) Homepage
    No one cares enough about Debian to vote for a leader. ;)

    • Re:One Meaning: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lewp ( 95638 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:17PM (#12095425) Journal
      I hate to say it, but this sounds about right. I ran Debian for years, and got many other people started on it. I've never considered myself a zealot about anything, but Debian was about as close as I've gotten.

      It's just not relevant anymore. It feels like the HURD of distros. What's worse for their userbase is the fact that other distros (Ubuntu, Knoppix) have taken their base and made something that's actually worth using on top of it.

      This is, of course, a good thing for the community as a whole, so it's hard to cry about it. Debian will either evolve or be folded into one of the projects it spawned. Nothing's lost either way, umm... hooray for open source?

      • Re:One Meaning: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:28PM (#12095543) Homepage Journal
        * What's worse for their userbase is the fact that other distros (Ubuntu, Knoppix) have taken their base and made something that's actually worth using on top of it.*

        uhh.. isn't that pretty much the whole GOAL of debian, to be a solid base for building such distros around it? I see ubuntu as a huge win for debian.

        personally.. I trust the judgement of the guys who know these guys so that they choose the right one for the job - personally I'm a debian user but have no frigging idea who does what and who would be the best one for the job.

        • Re:One Meaning: (Score:5, Informative)

          by lewp ( 95638 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:47PM (#12095715) Journal
          No. The goal of the Debian Project is to build an OS. It happens that the way their project works actually makes it great as a base for building other distros, but AFAIK that's not their stated goal (and it's not what their website says).

          If that's changed over the last few years, well, I've been away :).
      • Yes, Debian is the Hurd of distros. Only people who aren't complete idiots and aren't full of bull-shit use it.

    • Re:One Meaning: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SquadBoy ( 167263 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:19PM (#12095447) Homepage Journal
      As a dedicated Debian partisian and elitist bastard I hate to say this but you are damn close to right.

      A big part of the problem is that they guy that a *lot* of users and developers would like to see run didn't and a lot of the current leadership don't want to see him run or god forbid win.

      Long live Overfiend.

      • Re:One Meaning: (Score:4, Informative)

        by Jay Carlson ( 28733 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @10:33PM (#12096830) Homepage
        A big part of the problem is that they guy that a *lot* of users and developers would like to see run didn't...Long live Overfiend.

        What are you talking about? Branden's [debian.org] running. [debian.org]
    • No one cares enough about any distro to vote for the leader. Only newbies who think they are expert Linux users don't care about distros like Debian. But I must say, these newbies seem to form the huge majority.

      • Re:One Meaning: (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Taladar ( 717494 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:43PM (#12096146)
        Debian is designed for production use. If there are not much people using (as in being admin for) it they are doing a good job. If it were hard to use and had frequent downtimes they would need more admins.

        • Re:One Meaning: (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Kent Recal ( 714863 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @06:51AM (#12098680)
          Mod parent up, he's kinda right on spot.
          These "Y is dying" kids are getting on my nerves.
          Neither BSD nor Debian will go away in the near future.

          Only because linux in general is becoming more kiddy-friendly with shiny, polished up distros like Ubuntu or Fedora (which is a good thing) doesn't mean the proven, stable distros are going away.

          What you newbs are are running on your dual-boot desktop is not representative of what people that need to get work done choose as foundation for production systems.

    • Re:One Meaning: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )
      I might not want to run Debian on the desktop, but it's the only linux distro I'd choose for operating a production server. I've been running Debian for five years as my production server (web, email, database). So simple to install. So simple to upgrade and update. I can't imagine dealing with Gentoo or Mandrake or something in this regard. They may be fine desktop solutions. Maybe even decent small-time server solutions.. but in my environment where even an hour of downtime is a significant pain in the as
  • Is it something easier to use I might understand and be able to install myself?

  • I'm sorry... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ArmenTanzarian ( 210418 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:05PM (#12095297) Homepage Journal
    I, for the 199 voters, welcome our Debian Project Leader.
    • 199 voters? I hope you're kidding. We had almost that many users of -MkLinux- follow us to a new list server, and that's an OS that only supports a limited subset of PowerMac hardware built prior to 1999....

      *sigh*

  • This is good. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by r00t ( 33219 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:05PM (#12095299) Journal
    When nobody votes, it means that all the candidates
    are equally good. (or equally bad, but lets' be
    optimistic)

    No matter the results, few will be upset.

    I'm not seeing a problem here.

  • geeze (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dAzED1 ( 33635 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:06PM (#12095315) Journal
    so lets get this straight:

    there's 3 weeks to vote. 1 week (and 30 whole minutes) have passed. That leaves 30 minutes less than 2 weeks to go.

    any chance people will simply vote within the final 2/3 of the time alloted? No mention if this is the lowest turnout after 1/3 the time had past, or if she's comparing 3/3rds of the other times with 1/3 of the time this year...

    • Or, we could read the article... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bonhamme Richard ( 856034 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:56PM (#12095794)
      only 199 of 960 active developers had voted -- well down on the 315 who had cast ballots at the same stage last year.

    • Re:geeze (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aqua ( 3874 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @12:26AM (#12097396)

      I'm a Debian developer, and I haven't voted -- yet. I'll cast my DPL vote towards the end of the cycle, as usual. Here's why:

      • At the start of the cycle, I hadn't made up my mind. That's generally the case, except in one or two General Resolution votes where I already understood the issue under consideration (e.g. the non-free vote.)
      • I haven't finished reading the candidate platforms and debate material yet. When voting opens, the project leader debates are just freshly over. This year, since once again I couldn't attend them live, I have to read them afterward, which takes time. Last year the debate was cancelled, because an email debate had already occurred on debian-vote -- same situation. Voting in Debian is just like voting anywhere else, you often have to do a lot of reading to understand the issues. Debian developers are shy about this right now, because the Social Contract clarification [debian.org] vote a ways back opened a huge unforseen can of worms concerning the freeness of documentation, and derailed Sarge again, until a second vote was undertaken to put the issue off [debian.org] until post-Sarge.
      • With Sarge at a release tipping point (RC3 on the installer, and the Vancouver proposal [debian.org] still kicking around), I delay voting so I can see how those issues play out and adjust my planned vote.
      • My local Debian meetup [debian.net] is unpredictable, and there might be one, where some longtime DDs show up and can enlighten me on the machinations going on in the Debian functional committees. You know, all those smoke-filled rooms in which the ftpmasters and application managers and buildd administrators meet to shoot heroin and plot how they're going to sabotage the next planned release date and sell the sparc porters into slavery or whatever.
      • I am a lazy procrastinating bastard.
  • Given some of their ultraconservative politics towards including software (I mean, if you have to compile newer versions of code because the distro has years old stuff that's no-longer supported -- in essence recompiling the entire distro) this comes as no suprize.

    • Re:Debian... distribution... politics (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Colol ( 35104 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:23PM (#12095482)
      Indeed.

      I'm sure you and I both will be modded as troll or flamebait, but that's pretty much the reason why I moved on to greener pastures. Even sid got to the point it was untolerably out of date, and combined with Debian growing seemingly more political and stodgy about their DFSG-only bent, I moved on.

      I use the best tool for the job. If that means it's closed-source or not free enough for Debian, fine with me. If I wanted politics with my OS, I'd stick with Debian. Instead I moved on to Gentoo (where I found quickly portage to be a hell of a lot more flexible than apt, despite years of learning apt voodoo), on to FreeBSD, and finally on to Mac OS X.

      There must be a reason newer Debian-based distributions are doing so well, and I'm willing to bet a large part of it is politics. Every time Debian talked about finally doing away with the non-free repository, I laughed. There's a ton of stuff in there -- fairly common stuff, even -- that there was no replacement for. When you stop serving the users, you start losing the users. It's that simple.

      That younger distros like Ubuntu offer an easier take on the Linux desktop is just icing on the cake for many people, I'm sure.
  • So why exactly does Debian need a overall leader? I would offer myself except I like SuSE more.

    On a serious note, maybe the way they setup the project has more to do with this lack of enthusiasm.

    • I would offer myself except I like SuSE more.

      On a serious note, maybe the way they setup the project has more to do with this lack of enthusiasm.

      After spending the day fighting with a my first experience with SuSE, this was very funny read wrong.

  • That's because... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:10PM (#12095347) Homepage Journal
    They're using Diebold's voting machines.

    • Diebold? (Score:2, Funny)

      by AtariAmarok ( 451306 )
      In North Korea, only dead people cast votes via Diebold.

    • Re:That's because... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nyri ( 132206 )
      They're using Diebold's voting machines.

      If it would, the news would be:
      Record High Turnout in Debian Leadership Elections
      daria42 writes "A record high voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that four-thirds of the candidates have cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the highest participation ever in a

  • In typical fashion (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:10PM (#12095353)
    The voting body is simply taking as much time to select a new project leader as they do to get new releases out.

    • Re:In typical fashion (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:55PM (#12095787)
      I don't get why long release cycles are a problem. I like them. Is it something to do with ADD, or needing something new and shiny every day? I don't want to waste my time constantly tinkering with my system. The OS is the foundation and it shouldn't be changed every five minutes.

      This is something that I think Microsoft gets right and does well. We have servers running Win2K, and will will keep running it for a number of years. Perhaps one of the impediments to this in the Linux world is that ABI compatibility is constantly changing and being broken - thus it's a PITA to run new stuff on an older base. That's not Debian's fault. Is backward's compatibility such a hard thing to ask for?

      I think the reality with Debian is that it tries to be one size fits all, but unfortunately this doesn't satisfy everybody.
      • Go out and buy a new computer or motherboard and you'll discover that Debian is too old to run on it. What's the point of maintaining old versions of software for bugs and having Debian maintainers pestering developers to fix their old, obsolete versions?

      • Backports (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
        Until recently I would've agreed with you on the matter of servers (running Debian stable for a desktop is IMO utterly hopeless).

        My view recently changed when I realised that most of the system I was operating was from backports.org not Debian stable. To get some of the basics I needed I was having to go out to 3rd party repositories - ones with no guarantee of security support.

        I agree with your view about ABI compatibility, but as a developer also understand why. That constant breaking of compatibility i

  • Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GeorgeMcBay ( 106610 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:11PM (#12095359)
    The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.

    I'm not necessarily saying they should release more, and there is certainly a benefit to stability over many releases in a lot of computing enviornments, but we're hardwired to be attracted/interested in the newest, flashiest and best things (advertisers don't spend billions of dollars a year because they have too much money). So it stands to reason that no releases means declining interest.

  • Color me unsurprised... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by raytracer ( 51035 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:15PM (#12095400)

    Let's face it: Debian just isn't very glamorous, and open source relies to a certain extent on glamor. You need to have regular, exciting releases that deliver better experience to users, and baseline Debian is about as far from doing that as any of the top 10 distributions out there.

    Put another way, the only real reason that distributions like Ubuntu exist is because of frustration at the slow, plodding pace of Debian development.

  • Much of the energy has gone to Ubuntu... (Score:5, Informative)

    by meldroc ( 21783 ) <meldroc@NoSpAM.frii.com> on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:16PM (#12095409) Homepage Journal
    Ubuntu's like Debian, except it has regular release cycles, up-to-date software and a thriving community. And it is based on Debian - so in effect it is Debian, only better.

    http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ Try it, you'll like it. Much of Debian's developers are working on Ubuntu - you'll see them in Ubuntu's IRC channels, forums, mailing lists, etc.

    • Re:Much of the energy has gone to Ubuntu... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The only reason Ubuntu worked out was because Debian was pretty far along with Sarge. Ubuntu faces a serious problem that nobody wants to talk about.

      What happens when the next release of Ubuntu is out and Debian still hasn't released? That a very real problem. Does Ubuntu then become a complete fork from Debian? Because at the rate Debian is going no way Ubuntu can track with their releases. Think about it.

      --
      Gratis Internet employees are lying theives. Class Action lawsuit heading their way 3,2,1...

  • The tyranny of the majority hurts Debian (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:17PM (#12095418)
    Debian is bloated. I personally know 2 or 3 "developers" that can't even program a linked list in C, who package small insignificant apps, but have the same voting rights than other true developers. This turned Debian a huge, sluggish, amorphous organization, unable to reach consensus, unable to work, ever stuck in the morass of debate.

    The FreeBSD model is much better in this respect. Because you package or port something, it doesn't not mean you get to say where the project is going. "Thou shalt not commit bikesheds", the saying goes. The FreeBSD (and others) are solid and going ever forward. In the BSDs, it's like in the Linux kernel: meritocracy, not democracy. And as Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD) makes clear crystal clear (to those that read their lists), it is not one man, one vote. There is a vision and a method. In Debian, sadly, all that remains is the vision. Their method failed. Ubuntu proves the point.

    Debian would do best to review this whole developer process thing. Trouble is, bound by democracy, the tyranny of the majority, this will never pass.

    Therefore, it's a good thing if hundreds of those "developers" actually abstain.

    • "Debian is bloated"

      It's really the users, not the product. Easy and common mistake.

    • Re:The tyranny of the majority hurts Debian (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:42PM (#12096140) Homepage
      I agree, unfortunately. I've seen some packages that just have no business being released - the original packager threw something together in 10 minutes then went AWOL and ignored all the bug reports.

      eg. Bug 280859. The packager forgot to package the runtime library FFS. 138 days old. Unfixed.

      There's just no quality control on the packages, and that brings the whole distro down.

      I had one instance where some clown had packaged a dev package so that it pulled in most of gnome 2. The library wasn't GUI related, the include files definately weren't GUI related... it was down to one optional binary that few people used anyway... I suggested weakening this to 'suggests' as it made the library essentially unusable to me (since to compile my app people would have had to install 50MB of junk) and just a got torrent of abuse back from the maintainer telling me I was 'stupid' for not having gnome (on my headless fileserver with no X).

      Couple that with the X debacle (where debian is usually 6-12 months behind in releases, even in unstable) and I'm really looking for something better... unfortunately there are few other server distros out there (especially not using apt, which I wouldn't do without having tried others).
      • Bug 280859. The packager forgot to package the runtime library FFS. 138 days old. Unfixed.
        There's a reason why this bug hasn't been fixed, and that reason is bug 289856 [debian.org].
        Quoting from the bug: [debian.org]
        Hi, my apologies for the late response.

        After the original report came in, I had a moment of doubt, and went back to
        check through the APSL 2.0. I came to pretty much the same conclusion (but I
        do think there needs to be some kind of review of the DFSG and commonly used
        new licenses, cf. Matthew's reply, yada yada).

        Here's what I'm going to do about it:

        * Propose that we remove howl from the archive in its entirety. It is not
        the most beautiful implementation, and it does not have enormous buy-in
        throughout the FOSS community so far (only 31 rdepends in sid atm).

        * Talk to the Debian GNOME team about how much pain this will inflict on
        them, offer to buy beer for them, etc.

        * Make a public statement about howl's removal, in the hopes of inspiring
        new, Free implementations to be finished (or written).

        "When there's public debate and mass hysteria, that's when the patches
        roll in." - Michael Meeks
        As you can see, the ASPL 2.0 isn't even DFSG free, and moreover no one really is using this package. Expect it to be jetissoned from the archive RSN.

    • Developers (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Craig Ringer ( 302899 )
      While I generally agree with your views, I can't entirely agree on the matter of developers. In my view, in the context of the Debian distribution, a "developer" has quite a different set of required skills.

      A Debian developer - think "person who develops packages for Debian" - needs to be able to work with the Debian packaging system, needs to know quite a bit about porting apps to different archs, and needs to be a build system wizard. They don't need to know how to write a linked list in C - but they mig

    • Re:The tyranny of the majority hurts Debian (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Panoramix ( 31263 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @01:21AM (#12097641) Homepage
      Debian is bloated. I personally know 2 or 3 "developers" that can't even program a linked list in C, who package small insignificant apps, but have the same voting rights than other true developers. This turned Debian a huge, sluggish, amorphous organization, unable to reach consensus, unable to work, ever stuck in the morass of debate.

      I don't know enough about the Debian internal organization to agree or disagree with that characterization, being as I am a user, not a Debian developer. I do think it is at least partially accurate: as is common among democracies, the whole debating and voting and whatnot makes for slow processes and sometimes inefficient bureaucracy. Debian is indeed huge, sluggish and somewhat amorphous.

      That said, I strongly disagree with regards to your assertion that "the method failed". As a Debian user, I can't praise enough the results that this organization produces. I happen to administer way more GNU/Linux servers than I would like to, and to even think of using anything else than Debian makes me shudder. Debian makes reliable software. I want to be able to trust that installing or upgrading this or that won't break my servers. Or stuff down my throat some obnoxious license, or code by some unknown h4x0r wannabe that may or may not hid a trojan horse inside a binary. And I certainly don't want to spend hours fishing for dependencies and auditing and building software. And I want security updates as soon as holes are found, and, as much as possible, updates that don't force me to switch to a new and incompatible version of some service or tool that me or my users depend on.

      Debian gives me all that.

      Even more: I want to run the most recent software in my laptop. I want the latest programs and the latest kernel, and I don't really want to spend much time building that either, nor fixing the mess that immature software sometimes make.

      Debian gives me that, too.

      All in all, I consider the Debian process a huge success in producing a quality product.

      Besides, democracies have their downsides, but all in all, I think they are the best practical social structure known by mankind so far. Or the least bad, if you prefer. Everything else seems to turn ugly and evil much faster. Linux has been doing great under Linus direction, the man is unquestionably an excellent leader. But I honestly don't know what's going to happen the day he retires. In a system like Debian, I don't really worry about that kind of thing (I don't even know who's the head honcho these days).

  • Debian is dying. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:19PM (#12095445)
    It is official; Netcraft confirms: Debian is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Debian community when IDC confirmed that Debian market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Debian has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Debian is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Debian's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Debian faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Debian because Debian is dying. Things are looking very bad for Debian. As many of us are already aware, Debian continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

    Debian is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Debian developer Manoj Srivastava only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Debian is dying.

    All major surveys show that Debian has steadily declined in market share. Debian is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Debian is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Debian continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Debian is dead.

    Fact: Debian is dying

  • apt get vote (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sean Clifford ( 322444 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:25PM (#12095506) Journal
    apt get vote

  • FYI: Vote is Developers Only (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:27PM (#12095535) Homepage Journal
    Not the general public.

    One reason for the low turnout could be the same reason for the percieved lack of Debian attention to "customers" (like the accustations leveld against Gnome). If the developers aren't interested, they dont work on it. Kinda like Gnome.

    Possible reasons that developers must be "staying away in droves" (Yogi Berra) maybe because:

    A) they dont see any real impact/difference to whoever gets elected,

    B) else they arent working on Debian all that much since its such a slowly developed platform and most devs want to work closer to the leading edge

    Both of which mean they just dont care who gets voted in.

  • Linux changing in nature (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Grip3n ( 470031 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:27PM (#12095536) Homepage
    I believe there is a trend setting in here with the linux market, and it can be viewed as either something positive or negative, depending on your perspective. To me it is the answer why Debian isn't necessarily as popular as it once was.

    Linux has been maturing steadily over the years, and it is beginning to take the shape of something viable for a casual user. It certainly isn't there yet, but there have been notable strides. As linux continues forth, it will only get closer and closer to being a very intuitive system.

    That being said, I compare Linux to the likes of computer graphics. There was a stage where it just wasn't "there yet", and graphics clearly looked pasted on. This was fine because our mind said "hey, that's a graphic!", and we could easily tell what it was. Today, for the most part, we can only tell if something is a graphic because we know what is possible and what is not possible. Nothing is exceptionally glarring. Take a look at LotR, the graphics were incredibly seamless and only someone looking at them from a "possible" standpoint could truely make out the difference.

    However, there was a stage in between these two levels, I liken to the example of the Final Fantasy movie, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The graphics were good, but not perfect. Our minds went from "Hey, its a graphic!" to "I guess that's kinda real", and we got confused. It winds up being confusing and awkward for us to watch, because we cannot get out minds to sort out what the heck we are seeing.

    Linux is on that stage right now. It was previously something for the elite, it was difficult to use, it was extremely console based and you had to manually enter everything. I recall for the longest time needing to enter in my monitors horizontal and vertical refresh rates, plus then manually specify what resolutions my monitor could do, additionally state the size of my video card's ram. It was as elitest as operating systems really got, and we understood that.

    Today, we find ourselves in the middle. Its not quite as plug and play as Windows or Macintosh, but its got some. Our minds are left thinking "Is this mainsteam or not?", and we don't know where to settle. Fedora installs the video drivers well for me the first time, but it was a nightmare getting Limewire to work.

    So how does this relate? Well, because Linux isn't exclusively seen as an elitest operating system as much anymore and transitioning into something a little on the brain to use, we're seeing the depature of people from "Middle of the Road" distributions. Gentoo has its niche for the hardcore, but most distributions will attempt to make life as easy as possible for the user, a la Fedora or SUSE. They are trying to remove that middle ground and place themselves firmly into the "easy to use" category, while still retaining the power and flexibility Linux inherantly offers.

    Those that did use Debian and the sort are moving on, they don't see the need for the elitest economy as much anymore, as Linux itself isn't as unique and hardcore as it once needed to be. We begin to see users use Linux not just to experiement on, but to actually use in a working environment, something to be taken a little more seriously.

    In the end, the flourishment of distributions will begin to phase out, and personally I believe its for the better. We will be left with a handful, but those handful will have the attention of a much larger user and developer base, rather than having them spread thinly out. In the end, I believe this is a good thing. It looks like Debian may perhaps be one of the first examples.

    • Re:Linux changing in nature (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr Ambersand ( 862402 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:40PM (#12095649)
      However, Debian has never been strictly or even primarily about tinkering or experimentation (you cannot go a year or more between releases and be considered 'experimental').

      No, Debian's niche has been the fact that while other Distros have been commercial (slackware, mandrake, etc) Debian has been the only one commited to the ideals of Open Source and to using the net to non-commercially distribute their software.

      With Debian sliding further into irrelevency, we're now left with only the commercial, professional distributions to fall back on; and we are all sadder and poorer for that lack.
      • Debian sliding further into irrelevency
        Did Netcraft confirm that, or are you blazing new trails here? Silly, silly. Let's see what other factors may have affected voting... Let's see.... What happened last week... How about EASTER! But please, don't let me stop you from jumping to conclusions on your own!
    • Great post. I don't agree with your conclusion though. First of all, the lack of voter turnout says nothing about the vitality of Debian, and secondly, I think Debian is more relevant today than ever before.
      All the new, popular distributions are based on Debian. (Ku/U)buntu, Knoppix, Mepis, Linspire, Xandros, Progeny, etc.
      A few years ago, all of them were Red Hat derivatives, now the standard platform is Debian.

      I'd like to see Debian release a bit more often for those using the stable branch for servers

    • mischaracterization (Score:3, Insightful)

      by idlake ( 850372 )
      I think you fundamentally mischaracterize Debian when you look at it as some kind of bleeding edge system for hackers and nerds.

      Debian and its package management system is still the easiest way of keeping a software installation up to date, for anybody, hacker or not. SuSE and RedHat are trying, but they aren't as good or easy to use yet.

      And Windows and Macintosh aren't even trying to do anything comparable--software installation and maintenance on those platforms is in complete shambles compared to Linu

  • Root cause of low voter turnout identified (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ingolfke ( 515826 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @07:34PM (#12095597) Journal
    It appears that the root cause of the low voter turnout in the most recent election of a leader for the Debian project is that all of the potential voters are still compiling the latest version of Firefox on their Gentoo boxes and are unable to access the Internet to submit their votes.
  • So, between the fact that not only is Debian getting publicly ridiculed by leaders of the Free Software Movement (such as Bruce Parens, IIRC) for the lenth of time it's taken them to release Sarge; but now they can't even stir up enough interest to get people to vote for posistions inside their own company?

    I love Debian, and I used to use it before I switched to OpenBSD, but I honestly wonder if the project shouldn't hand over their resources to a vibrant and living project such as gentoo or ubuntu and ste

  • What's with all the Debian bashing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TripHammer ( 668315 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:14PM (#12095948)
    I feel those of you that are bashing Debian are making several crittical errors. First, is the assumption that a stable release in a ditro like Fedora is equivelent to a stable relase of Debian. Debian stable actually MEANS something. Releases are made with a purpose, not on a set schedule. Second, the vanity associated with running the latest version of a packages goes away quickly as soon as you have a cittical system break. I see a lot of posts with people switching to Gentoo for their desktop...that's all fine and good but when you are responsable for several dozen servers (or more) your perspective on packages changes considerably. Lastly, you can't beat Debian stability with the power of apt. I can do inline upgrades of my Debian machines, that's more then the Fedora users can say...I'd have to go to each server and put the new CD in, then go through the whole setup cycle. There are a lot of things to consider when looking at Linux distributions, just because you don't understand your can't appreciate a distribution does not mean you need to post. After all, us Linux users are all on the same team right?

    • Re:What's with all the Debian bashing? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I feel those of you that are bashing Debian are making several crittical errors. First, is the assumption that a stable release in a ditro like Fedora is equivelent to a stable relase of Debian. Debian stable actually MEANS something.

      Please entertain us the meaning, then. Because I'm looking through the Woody package lists right now, and I see things (like OpenSSL 0.9.6c) that would be unsafe to use on a production system. Sure you can 'apt get' everything, but in that case you're no longer running the

    • Debian stable actually MEANS something.

      It's been retroactively been given a meaning, thanks to Debian's inability to release anything else which could be called stable within a reasonable amount of time.

      That doesn't mean there's not some good stuff in Debian, but no admin I respect as as an admin would ever run Debian Unstable on a real server. And far fewer are running Stable, either, because it's so old; the world's moved on.

  • Would if I could (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bahamat ( 187909 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:20PM (#12095993) Homepage
    ...but Debian voting requires me to be an official Debian member, or developer, or something-or-other, and they must have my PGP key on file beforehand, and lots of other I'm-not-good-enough-to-vote reasons.

    I understand the need to prevent ballot stuffing (especially with a purely electronic voting boothe) but it's damn near impossible for mere mortals to vote, even though I'm active in the Debian community, contribute bug reports, run a data center with 50 Debian servers and my vote would probably be representative of a large portion of Debian users.

  • Debian has a release coming out? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jocknerd ( 29758 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @08:43PM (#12096145)
    Honestly, I don't care. And I run Debian. People, the whole power of Debian lies in the fact I don't need to wait for a new release. I've been running Debian Testing on my servers for two years. I'm already running the next release. I couldn't stay on Woody. It got too old. I needed newer releases of PostgreSQL and Apache and others. So I made the decision to upgrade to testing and haven't had one problem on any of my 8 servers. Its no big deal if there isn't an updated release on a CD in my opinion. I can't stand installing from CD anyway. I've got SuSE Pro 9.2 and SuSE Enterprise 9 and Debian is far easier to administer and keep up to date.

    • Its no big deal if there isn't an updated release on a CD in my opinion. I can't stand installing from CD anyway

      It matters a big F deal to those stuck with dialup or a very intermittent connection... or even dialup on a good connection... just think about doing "apt-get install KDE" over dialup... in some back-woods country in the middle of Africa... over a very noisy line where you can't go over 9600 Baud if you're lucky... and the line only goes up around 4 hours in any 24... and it's a party line...

      the

  • speaking as a debian developer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @09:22PM (#12096397) Homepage
    I had not yet voted when this announcement went out. (I have now, however.) The main reason I took so long to get my vote in is that the number of candidates (and the number of new candidates, since the incumbent isn't running) is higher than it has been in recent years, and I needed extra time to figure out who they all were, and how I thought they should be ranked. The last few elections, I had a fairly good idea of how I was going to vote before I even started looking at the candidates in detail. This year, it was a really tough choice, and I had to spend a lot more time on it. So, I wouldn't read too much into the low turnout at this point.

  • STFP - Ship The Product (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @09:33PM (#12096458)
    "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far."

    I really hate to say this, knowing that I'll be flamed and modded down, but if Debian would actually release something once in a while, it might help the project's image. I know they want their stuff to be the "best" but there is a rule in software: STFP - Ship The Product (the "F" is silent)... People appreciate that a lot more than just waiting until Real Soon Now (tm).

  • Clearly... (Score:3, Funny)

    by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @09:39PM (#12096488) Homepage Journal
    ...they're running Debian Vote Stable.

    They'll catch up with the current vote in two or three years.

  • nobody cares (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @12:34AM (#12097430) Journal
    First of all, this isn't because Debian is a bad distro--it's actually very good.

    It's also not actually because of the painfully slow release model that Debian uses. It's a problem, yes, but not THIS problem.

    The problem is that software and OS development shouldn't be about politics and beaurocracy; and quite honestly, people are getting TIRED of the political aspect of the whole damned open source universe.

    Write software. Release it according to whatever license you see fit. If you're spending any time at all worrying about election turnout or such things, then register a trademark, get a business license, and start making money. Just keep it all somewhere else.

  • Debian Fastest Growing (Score:5, Informative)

    by mverwijs ( 815917 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @03:50AM (#12098228) Homepage

    Please, people: stop the panic. T'was only one year ago that Debian was the "fastest growing distribution"[1] according to the almighty Netcraft.

    And all of a sudden it's dying?

    Please....

    Kind regards...

    Maarten

    [1] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/01/28/debia n_fastest_growing_linux_distribution.html [netcraft.com]

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