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Debian Software Linux

Branden Robinson Lays Down the Law at Debian 386

Posted by timothy from the testing-the-mic dept.
darthcamaro writes "Newly elected Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson posted his first report as DPL. From the looks of it, Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand. In an interview on internetnews.com, though, Robinson talks about whether Debian should even hold onto any money at all. Holding onto cash is also likely not what those who donate to the Debian Project expect either, according to Robinson. "People who donate us money ... seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near-term, not towards establishing an endowment,' he said."
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Branden Robinson Lays Down the Law at Debian More

Branden Robinson Lays Down the Law at Debian

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  • Holding Out? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:14AM (#12345108)
    Well I don't see any problem with holding on to money for the long term, as long as they make this perfectly clear. Organizations like the Red Cross got into trouble because people donated money thinking they were donating money to x, when really they weren't.

    Personally I would like to donate to Debian knowing that my money would be used on improving the server aspects of Debian and not be spent on making GNOME or KDE look pretty. They should adopt something similar to Crossover Office where you can choose what your money should be spent on.

    Well bitching aside I love Debian, I am just Joe Sixpack and I haven't had to so much as touch my mailserver or audio server (Ampache) in a LONG ass time, my uptime is pressing on over a year.
    • You make a good point, that is, a lot of people donate with a certain aspect in mind.

      Why don't they make a form for you to fill out along with your donation. This goes into a poll, with 1 vote for every dollar or something spent.
      That way, they can prioritize what the people who fund them want. Everyones happy!
      • Sounds like the US government.

        • Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by silentbozo ( 542534 )
          Sounds like the US government.

          Except we never really get to vote on spending. We vote representatives into office who immediately start ignoring us in favor of special interests (pick one - environmental lobby, business lobby, pro-welfare, anti-welfare, pro-military, pro-peace, interventionalists (both liberal and conservative), isolationists, etc.

          Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willi

          • Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by badfish99 ( 826052 )
            I think he means that the US government is controlled by whichever corporations pay it the most money.

            Since what you pay in tax isn't voluntary, you don't get a vote.

          • Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by timeOday ( 582209 )

            Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willing to pay for?

            I dunno about that. Our biggest expense is social security, medicare, and medicaid, and they're so popular that changing them is almost impossible.

            Then there's military. I seem to recall Zell Miller getting quite a bit of applause in the Republican primary by accusing Kerry of trying to cut funding for the B1 and B2 bombers, leaving

    • Endowment? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:02AM (#12345394) Homepage
      I can only imagine the great things endowed chairs for software development in the public interest could do. Think of it like this. For a million dollars one could probably update Open Office pretty well, paying 10 software developers for a year to gut the old codebase and update it to something less bloated. Or you could create two endowed chairs, paying two software developers to create or work on software in the public interest for life. And once they die, you pay the next pair for life. And the next.

      10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.

      Speaking of which, does anyone have a donation link?

      • Re:Endowment? -- donation link info (Score:5, Informative)

        by OA ( 65410 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:27AM (#12345496) Homepage
        See following pages for donation info for Debian:

        http://www.debian.org/donations

        This tells us basically to go to:

        http://www.spi-inc.org/donations

        Here you find link to donate money. Please note you should designate your money to "Debian" to ensure it is used only for Debian. Otherwise, money will be spread over all the projects supported by SPI, I think.

        Osamu

        • Re:Endowment? -- donation link info (Score:4, Insightful)

          by samjam ( 256347 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @03:18AM (#12345911) Homepage Journal
          By the time I got this far it seemed to complicated so I gave up.

          It's hardly good for impulsive donations, and certainly a long way away from 1-click-ordering.

          I did suggest they take pay-pal to make it easy for people to donate quickly and simply. I was told they had talked about it before and would bring it up again later.

          In normal debian timescales they could be getting on quite quickly with making debian donations easy.

          I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.

          Sam
          • I haven't donated but I will when they take pay-pal.

            I tried donating once about 2 years ago. Unfortunately (for Debian and the SPI), I raised a big stink about them not accepting Paypal, credit cards, or anything electronic. This wasn't received very well. I finally just sent them a check for $50 but it was never cashed. I don't know whether it was lost or if the treasurer just decided he didn't want my money.

      • Re:Endowment? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Paradise Pete ( 33184 )
        10 software developers for a year...Or you could create two endowed chairs

        Only if you know where you can earn a steady 20% interest (let alone after taxes and adjusting for inflation.)

      • I wonder if there is a "time value of money" equation for the rate of evolution of technology. You have to innovate at least as fast as the "market rate" in order to stay current. If you could burn through a lot of cash (and still remain somewhat konstant (there are communication costs as the number of people in a project increases) in terms of value recieved) you would jump a generation or two ahead of the competition. Might this not be worth considering? What good would be getting DOS really really ri
      • The idea of an endowment has some appeal. But your own scenario misses a key point.

        Investment in the short term would result in both preservation and extension of its base, which is likely to bring more funds (assuming 10 developers would improve the release date for Sarge, over 2 developers).

        At the rate we're going, Sarge will take forever and people will start to abandon the project and new developers will go to Centos and Ubuntu. But, IMHO, we need a project/organization like Debian and we really nee

      • Re:Endowment? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ryan Amos ( 16972 )
        Debian is largely irrelevant now anyway; which is exactly why organizations like this should not really plan for the long term. Open source projects are notorious for forking, and open source users are fickle. Debian was the rock star of the Linux world 5 years ago, but now they seem like a shadow of their former self and on the decline in the face of newer distributions like Ubuntu. I don't know anyone who uses vanilla Debian anymore; the package system is cumbersome if adding packages from anyone but Debi

    • Re:Holding Out? (Score:4, Funny)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:40AM (#12345549) Homepage Journal
      Organizations like the Red Cross got into trouble because people donated money thinking they were donating money to x, when really they weren't.

      If they wanted to donate money to X, maybe they ought to have sent it to, say, Debian...

      But, in general, organizations hate it when you donate money for a specific purpose, because that purpose invariably goes out of date before the money is entirely spent. For example, the server aspects of Debian are already so good that you don't bother to change them; what good does throwing more money at that do?
    • I agree for the most part. Especially as the current situation is such that (K)ubuntu appears to be taking care of the debian desktop market, perhaps the debian core group could really focus on updating the core aspects and server side. Of course a ppc installer that supports firewire disk installs is always a sure way to get me interested ;) (and no, I don't want YellowShnog on an Ipod)

      Me's gonna pop my 5$ in the pot for Debian, and you?

    • Re:Holding Out? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by grahamlee ( 522375 )
      Which of the Linux kernels are you using that hasn't had a security hole fixed in the previous year? Thanks.
    • Personally I would like to donate to Debian knowing that my money would be used on improving the server aspects of Debian/i>

      Although it's a commercial entity, they should have something like CodeWeaver's Compatibility database. This is the entry for MS Project 2002 [codeweavers.com] and it has two pledges at $119 or so.

  • What do they need the money for? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:15AM (#12345113)
    Now that we have bittorrent they can drop the ISO mirror farm.

    • Re:What do they need the money for? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:29AM (#12345210)
      Either way the bandwidth is donated. That's not where the money goes probably.

      Maybe on travel to conferences and new hardware for compatability? I'm sure it's documented somewhere.
    • Some of us still need the ISO farm. ETSU blocks bittorrent in their dorms and I imagine a lot of other schools do to. ETSU is just stupid about what they block from the dorms though recently. You can't even access the campus SMTP server from the dorms now!!! and they don't plan on ever changing it so students can....

  • There's only one thing to do. (Score:3, Funny)

    by crottsma ( 859162 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:16AM (#12345123)
    40 thousand dollar?! This is what Texas Holdem's all about!!

  • So? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TelJanin ( 784836 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:17AM (#12345125)
    I doubt many people expect their money to be spent immediately. Much better for the Debian team to keep a nice cushion in case of a major problem than to suddenly say "Shits, we ran out of money. Now what do we do?"

  • Million Bucks? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:17AM (#12345127)
    When asked what he would do if someone donated a million dollars, Branden Robinson promptly responded, "two chicks at the same time man!"

  • Broke? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Attackman ( 95672 ) * <.moc.iksonatsotmot. .ta. .mot.> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:17AM (#12345128) Homepage Journal
    Debian is flat broke, with only $40,000 or so in cash on hand
    I can only wish I was broke like that. Usually, I wind up eating canned chili for a week, not with 40 grand in my pocket.

    (yes, I realize that's broke for a major project, but seeing broke and 40 thou in the same sentence still messes with my head).

    • Re:Broke? (Score:5, Informative)

      by psamuels ( 64397 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:28AM (#12345207) Homepage
      yes, I realize that's broke for a major project

      It's not. Debian has very little need for money. Hardware? Donated. Bandwidth? Donated. Staff? Volunteer, or in a few cases salaried by companies with an interest in Debian. Conferences? Sponsored by those same companies. I'm sure there are things the Project could do with a huge budget, but all in all there are a lot more needy nonprofits out there.

      • Makes me wonder what the value of their assets are, and if one shouldn't evaluate the donated time as if it were a revenue stream (even though it isn't really liquid, it replaces what a commercial company would have to direct a portion of their revenue stream towards paying for). Their debt/equity ratio is probably zero :-) It is, at the very least, an incredible organizational experiment.

    • Broke? Another misleading Slashdot article. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:38AM (#12345276)
      keep in mind that Brandon Robinson neither 'laid down the law' or meantioned anything about being 'broke'.

      He said, matter of factly, that he is trying to figure out Debian's assest held for it by different originizations. "Software in the Public Interest" (SPI) has 40,000 dollars, and that's a Debian offshoot. Debian originazation in Britian has another 4 thousand and various other moneys are spread around in places like Brazil.

      He didn't say that it was enough, or more then enough, or less then enough, or that Debian is broke or Debian is rich or anything like that.

      The 'broke' is a pure, 100% manufacture of the slashdot author's imagination.

    • Re:Broke? (Score:5, Funny)

      by daft_one ( 532587 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:04AM (#12345401)
      Ooooo, look at Mr. Fancypants with his "chili" in a "can." *bitterly goes back to his ungarnished rice*
    • Yeah, the old KD / PBJ dinners here. I wouldn't mind being $40k broke, no sir, not at all.
      • If you have some time, making your own wheat bread for those sandwiches can be cheaper than buying it. Plus, you get that freshly baked bread aroma.

  • Please!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by XanC ( 644172 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:20AM (#12345148)
    Finish Sarge!
    • Come on now, this is insightful? Everyone knows sarge isn't out yet, and I don't see how saying "finish sarge" is going to get it out any faster. Why don't you help? I'm sure they'd appreciate your donation, whether it's money, code or documentation.
    • It's a sad sign when "Finish Sarge!" is marked as +4 Funny.

    • how bout Oh Please!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by dbcad7 ( 771464 )
      Get your Sarge bittorrent here.. http://cdimage.debian.org/pub/weekly/torrents [debian.org]

      There you go, your done, the waitings over..

      Don't you fell better now ? .. Seriously, what's the deal with this Sarge release hysteria ? It's out there, I use it, it works, it seems pretty stable to me (in my case more than Ubuntu warty was)

  • I get scared when people 'acronymize' their title (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Frennzy ( 730093 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:33AM (#12345241) Homepage
    It has always seemed to me that when people start referring to themselves as a TLA (three letter acronym) that they tend to lose touch with the people they work with.

    I don't know this guy, and I don't know much about what he is doing, but the tone and inflection of his statement seems to be self-aggrandizing...to me at least. I'm not flaming him, I'm just stating an opinion of how I read the text. Honestly, I don't really give a rat's ass about this Debian debate...but I do see why someone could use this particular article as ammunition to attack his credibility.

    • What? You're referring to "DPL" for Debian Project Leader? Dude, we've all called the DPL the DPL as long as there has been one.

    • Branden Robinson (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dink Paisy ( 823325 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:39AM (#12345545) Homepage
      Branden Robinson led the Debian X strike force that patched and packaged XFree86 for Debian. During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended. At the time I continued using Debian, and just built my own copy of X for a while, but I would say that his attitude is one of the significant reasons I no longer use Debian.

      Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness. I don't know him personally, so I'm not the most qualified judge, but I do not consider his election a good thing for Debian. Leaders should ideally be good at communicating, and less good at ignoring and insulting people, and what I've seen of him reflects those negative traits more than the positive one.

      • Re:Branden Robinson (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Heretik ( 93983 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @03:27AM (#12345935)
        I'll take a good honest, humorous "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" over canned corporate PR bullshit any day.
      • During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended.

        Its still there I think. I use it as my desktop. Its funny dammit!

      • Re:Branden Robinson (Score:3, Interesting)

        by martinde ( 137088 )
        > Maybe he's changed since then, and maybe the attitude problem was more one of poor communication than of obnoxiousness

        Branden has really mellowed out a lot over the years. He did a decent job communicating as treasurer of SPI[1], and I think he is ready for the role of DPL. Time will tell, of course, but I find his initial email encouraging.

        [1] SPI has had several "accounting scandals", info is publically available [spi-inc.org] if you're interested. Some people want to lay the blame at Branden's feet, but IMHO

      • Re:Branden Robinson (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Branden Robinson led the Debian X strike force that patched and packaged XFree86 for Debian. During that time, he had a graphic on the top of the X strike force page telling users to "Have a nice cup of shut the fuck up!" When I first installed Debian and wondered if my video card would be supported any time soon, that was the first place I looked, and I was mildly offended. At the time I continued using Debian, and just built my own copy of X for a while, but I would say that his attitude is one of the si

      • Re:Branden Robinson (Score:4, Informative)

        by JianTian13 ( 525365 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @10:25AM (#12348406) Homepage
        Umm, not flaming you as such, but this needs to be up here, lest everybody think that Debian in general and Branden in particular are a bunch of assholes.

        That graphic went up during a time when X was in flux, there had been a major upstream release, and Branden was trying really, really hard to provide a consistent, stable set of packages for X across all the umpteen platforms that Debian officially supports. This is a very, very hard thing to do. And while Branden was trying to do all this, there were the legions of i386 n00bs jumping up and down, moaning complaining, and not contributing, asking "Hey, when are you going to give me my updated X packages??!?!!!one"

        Branden at some point got sick of it, and simply told people what they deperately needed to hear: HAANCOSTFU.

      • Re:Branden Robinson (Score:4, Insightful)

        by macshit ( 157376 ) * <snogglethorpe&gmail,com> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @03:10PM (#12351359) Homepage
        I think the problem lies with you, not with Branden.

        There are a lot of obnoxious twits in the FOSS world, who are quick to flame for silly reasons -- but Branden is not one of them. He neither ignores people nor throws around gratuitous insults. If you compare him to a real flame-master (read a BSD development list sometime...) he seems almost boring.

        He isn't afraid to call a spade a spade though, nor to use humor, and he apparently doesn't subscribe to white-bread corporate standards for discourse.

        I personally find his honesty, straight-forwardness, and humor refreshing, and think his election is a very good thing for Debian.

  • Typo? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Slant675 ( 168902 )
    Hmm, I noticed that the quote said "put to work for us." Perhaps he meant "for use?" That just sounded wrong.

  • A better use for 40k:Support for non-standard CPUs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Debian is the only maintained distro I'm aware of that still supports Alpha, let alone MIPS or other "non-standard" CPUs. I can appreciate the "let's light a fire under the developer's asses" rhetoric, but that doesn't solve pressing problems, like a lack of builds for "orphan" architectures. There are people out there that still want a Linux distro that works for their machine, and they don't always run x86; maybe this guy should invest a few $$$ on eBay to get some servers for different arches that are
    • But... Why? I mean... Why? I mean nine out of ten people who are going to want to use Linux on anything except the mainline architectures are going to be running Gentoo anyways d/t the complete and total ease of installing it anywhere Linux boots...
      • What kind of logic is that? Debian isn't harder to install than Gentoo, and everything's always precompiled which is more convenient. Furthermore, Debian puts a lot of work into every supported architecture (of which there are a lot), to the point where they practically port software such as XFree86 to those architectures themselves. No other Linux distribution does that, including Gentoo. Just because you're compiling from source doesn't mean it will work on any architecture. And to the extent that Ge
    • They are non-standard" CPUs because nobody uses them. Putting money into supporting them doesn't do jack for the average user. Putting it to work improving support for x86, x86-64, or PPC would do a hell of a lot more good for the distro's users (the ones who donated the money to begin with).

    • Debian is the only maintained distro I'm aware of that still supports Alpha, let alone MIPS or other "non-standard" CPUs. I can appreciate the "let's light a fire under the developer's asses" rhetoric, but that doesn't solve pressing problems, like a lack of builds for "orphan" architectures. There are people out there that still want a Linux distro that works for their machine, and they don't always run x86;

      Or perhaps find some competant people to fork Debian into a distro for bizarre, dead arches? Hel

  • Well ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sonic McTails ( 700139 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:42AM (#12345308)
    Debian's main source of income are donations. However, Debian-stable hasn't been updated now in 2-3 years. Most people I know don't use Debian anymore because stable is SO old, can't, or don't want to bother using testing or unstable. If they want money, make a damn release, or die. It's really THAT simple.

    • Re:Well ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by civilizedINTENSITY ( 45686 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @02:17AM (#12345691)
      I don't get this attitude. I just don't see where you are coming from. If you want current stuff, run testing or unstable. No big deal. Or run mostly stable, and just upgrade select items to testing, and other select items to unstable. Hell, if you really want to be on the bleeding edge, CVS and compile and help with testing. I couldn't imagine anyone running debian stable unless it was critical to be *rock-solid* stable. Which means heavy load servers, in my mind.

      I moved from Mandrake to Debian because I like estoeric math software. I ran into trouble with Mandrake where I could get some stuff from Mandrake's unstable, but I couldn't satisfy all the dependencies. What is the point of having an RPM if it can't be installed? Debian allowed me to install a ton of stuff with apt-get that I was having to download tarballs to try install. I admit I *love* debian :-)

      • Re:Well ... (Score:3, Informative)

        by mindstrm ( 20013 )
        When I pushed this organization onto Debian (from redhat), STABLE had current, up to date packages on it. Not bleeding edge, but current. If it could somehow magically be "stable" and have current packages on it 3 years ago, don't you think it's logical that it could do the same today?

        Do you honestly think STABLE is supposed to have 3 year old packages in it? This is the oldest, most out of date STABLE we've ever had.

        It's not old because "that's how you keep it stable"

        It's old because of an organization
      • Let me guess, you're only managing your own systems. Maybe a pet system or two at work.

        How many other employees depend on your systems to get their work done? How many CUSTOMERS depend on your systems? How many of these systems do you have immediate access to if there's a problem, vs. systems colocated at ISPs so you have thick pipes to the internet?

        I know, you referred to "rock solid" stable. You're right about that, but wrong that that's only servers with heavy loads. Anything that others depend on
    • Windows 98 hasn't been updated now in about 5 years. Most people I know don't use Windows anymore because 98 is SO old. If Microsoft wants to make more money, they need to make a damn release, or die. It's really THAT simple.

      </paraphrase>

      (Or maybe you could try running testing? It works fine, you know.)

    • Exactly. I hear everyone yelling to just use testing/unstable. But seriously, if those are really that solid, make a new release! If they're not, then the entire process is indeed painfully slow and the distro will likely wither and die.

      I'm also reading here that the guy didn't actually say they're "broke". Which is good, because I'd choke if I heard about a volunteer project with no expenses crying elephant tears over only 40k.

    • Re:Well ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:15AM (#12346766) Journal

      Most people I know don't use Debian anymore because stable is SO old, can't, or don't want to bother using testing or unstable. If they want money, make a damn release, or die.

      Most people I know well who use linux run Debian sarge, or a hybrid system, including me. (That's about four or five people.) It still works great for a personal workstation and whatever the label, it is relatively stable compared with some other distros.

      Support isn't an issue because it's a personal workstation in a distro that's realisically aimed at people who have some level of technical competancy to manage their systems and resolve problems from time to time. If you can deal with the package maintainers and the upstream developers, let alone post the odd question in a forum, you're still getting large amounts of unofficial support that (in most cases) beats anything official.

      The installer isn't an issue because, for me at least, it's already installed... and the unofficial Debian installer (in sarge) is still quite reasonable if it isn't perfect.

      As another response said, I really don't get this attitude. Debian might not be the best distro for you, or "stable" Debian might not be the best distro for you, and there are certainly some policies that may need reviewing for the future.

      Claiming it's going to die, however, just because you personally and friends in your local community see no use for it, is silly. Sarge is still a perfectly workable and mostly up-to-date distro for a lot of people, even if it's somehow trendy on slashdot to bash the project right now. For many, including myself, making it officially stable is irrelevant. All that will do from my perspective is allow for some new packages to flood into testing and unstable.

  • Save the money! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ded_si_luap ( 846428 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:42AM (#12345311)

    They should save it up. At 2% interest, they'll double their money by the next release.

  • Truth be told... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nimrangul ( 599578 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:45AM (#12345324) Journal
    I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise.

    I think it would be better if they set their developers to specific tasks for the betterment of their distrobution with that money than simply hold on to it and wait for that eventual rainy day though.

    • Re:Truth be told... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fishbowl ( 7759 )

      "I hardly think they should be holding more than a couple grand on hand, but it does make sense to have a cache of sorts for when any hardware issues arise."

      It's really impossible to comment on the 40,000 number without understanding it in terms of their expenses. Is Debian a US corporation? A LLC? A NPO? What does $40,000 represent?

      I'm sure you could find all kinds of businesses that don't keep $40,000 in a cash fund.

  • About donating to Debian (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nanoda ( 591299 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:49AM (#12345351)
    As I use Debian at home and at work, I seem to recall trying to donate to them a while back.

    The two relevent pages I can find at debian.org [debian.org] are this one [debian.org] listing companies that have donated hardware, bandwidth, etc., and this page [debian.org] saying that they recommend giving to Software in the Public Interest [spi-inc.org] and the Free Software Foundation [fsf.org]

  • Sensationalistic article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Overfiend ( 35917 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:51AM (#12345363) Homepage
    The submitter seems to be a little breathless.

    Here are a few facts:

    1) Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI), has held roughly the same amount of money (USD 40,000) in trust for Debian since as far back as the middle of the year 2001 (when I became SPI Treasurer and began receiving the monthly and quarterly statements from the financial institutions where that money is kept). It is therefore difficult to conclude any more of a cash crisis for Debian now than there was four years ago.

    2) SPI is not the only organization that holds assets in trust for Debian. As noted in my first DPL report (linked from the /. article body), I am currently surveying the developers to establish the details of what other organizations are holding monies for the Project. My report triggered a flurry of replies within hours. There are assets in Brazil, the U.K., Germany, Italy, and France, at least. Generally speaking, because it's a good idea and because regulations typically make it difficult for large amounts of currency to leave a country, Debian keeps its money close to where it's needed. Debian is a global organization; we have hardware, developers, and conferences all over the world.

    3) People should read the internetnews.com article, also linked from the /. article body. But why don't I just go ahead and quote from the IRC interview, which I still have in scrollback:

    12:43 INTERVIEWER: In your Debian Project Leader report for 2005-04-24, you provide status on the state of Debian's assets. On the surface it doesn't look like debian has "much" in the way of cash assets now - is that a problem for Debian? If so, how will you try and "fix" the problem?

    12:44 ME: can you clarify the question? "much" relative to what? :)

    12:45 INTERVIEWER: by "much" i'm refering to the fact that commercial distros (Red Hat etc) have xx millions in the bank - so in comparison it doesn't look (to a layperson) like Debian has "much" in terms of cash assets

    12:45 INTERVIEWER: does that help?

    12:45 ME: ah, compared to a commercial interest.

    12:45 ME: yes, it does help.

    12:47 ME: Because Debian is a non-commercial, not-for-profit entity which derives most of its value from the donated labor of hundreds of individuals, I think it stands to reason that our books wouldn't look like those of a publicly-traded, incorporated body which has labor and capital expenditures.

    12:48 ME: I think there are several reasons Debian doesn't have much in the way of cash assets relative to a for-profit Free Software company, though.

    12:49 ME: 1) Debian has no source revenue apart from fund-raising, which to date has been regularly undertaken at trade shows, to those who happen to pass by our booth.

    12:49 ME: s/source/& of/

    12:50 ME: 2) Debian tends to spend its cash assets, at least in the United States, approximately as fast as they come in.

    12:51 ME: 3) There have been conflicting ideas among Debian developers in the past over whether Debian *should* attempt to accumulate a war chest of cash reserves.

    12:51 ME: An argument in favor of that is that we should do so in the event we, or one of our developers, is sued for doing something we consider legitimate, like offering freely-modifiable software gratis to the world.

    12:51 ME: s/is sued/are sued/

    [the interviewer moved on, but we came back to this subject at the end of the interview]

    13:03 ME: okay. Reasons *not* to build up a war chest...

    13:04 ME: Two arguments against building up a "war chest" are 1) actually having a large quanitity of liquid assets is felt to make us a more inviting target for lawsuits, because there is the possibility of damages on top of injunctions;

    13:05 ME: 2) People who donate us money, by and large, seem to expect us to put the money to work for us in the near term, not towards establishing an endowment.

    13:05 ME: In my years on the SPI Board and as

    • Re:Sensationalistic article (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:33AM (#12345517)
      I think I speak for everyone when I say, cheers for that, very informative.

      And in relation to deciding for ourselves, you have a good point about slashdot. But this fits into a wider pattern of editorial behaviour that was always present, but has amped up recently, which is to post "troll" articles which will cause much furore in the linux community.

      Yes, Slashdot has always had such things. But I believe there is a deliberate editorial policy now to post such things. In addition, I think there are submitters who know this. In addition I think there are journalists on tech news sites who know they can troll linux with a "omg not ready for the desktop" or somesuch and likely get linked to and have a storm of click-throughs (from which they derive their money remember).

      So tech journalists, submitters and editors all have a vested interest in these "troll" articles to the detriment of well formed and intelligent debate. It's getting almost as bad as GNAA and other troll groups whose stated goals are to cause controversy and not add any "signal" (as in signal to noise) to the slashdot. So basically the editors are doing the trolls jobs for them (or is it the other way around?).

      It's why I block slashdot ads, and why I will never subscribe. I encourage others to do the same.
    • Man, what a telling commentary about the decline of slashdot when the article's subject shows up posts, yet only three people notice.
    • what does "in scrollback" mean?

      thanks.

  • Broke? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mjg59 ( 864833 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @12:57AM (#12345381) Homepage
    Debian's income is larger than its outgoings. Money is good to have - it means that we can deal with hardware failures, get more people to conferences, and pay the fees for some industry representation bodies, but we don't need vast amounts of it. We've currently got about as much in reserve as we could possibly want.

  • 40k - (cost of releasing) = ? (Score:5, Informative)

    by LodCrappo ( 705968 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @01:10AM (#12345424)
    I love Debian.. I have used it for a long long time. I enjoy the environment, the stability, and the package manager you can trust not to screw up your machine even when you tell it to do fairly stupid things. All in all it's a system does make sense and does follow convetion enough of the time to keep me productive and having fun.

    Used to be, when the people I knew who knew what they were talking about talked about linux, they probably were talking about Debian GNU/Linux.

    Things are changing. More and more smart folks I know are frustrated. Most Open source projects are using a "release early and release often" mentality that is a stark contrast to Debian's recent "don't release at all" policy.

    Yes, there is always unstable for those that want the latest(ish) versions of things. That's really not the point, as I see it. People are frustrated with the lack of movement, the apparent lack of progress towards getting any new features into stable, even if they arentt the very latest. I think at some point, many people just like to feel like their system is getting new software even if they don't use any new features at all.

    Maybe the negative stuff I read on /. and here tossed around between friends is not accurate. Things might not really be as stagnate as they seem from a common user's prespective. But that Debian has gone from a Good Thing to a bit of a joke amongst the sys admins I respect makes me concerned about it's future.

    There are some distro's out there that are attempting to fill the void that debian has created, and some are starting to do a good job of it. A world where a debian based distro replaces a bulk of the debian based users is not hard to imagine right now. What happens to debian then? And what happens to a debian based distro when debian doesn't have users?

    It could work out great for almost everyone except the actual debian project. i think everyone in a position of influence there needs to compare the costs of addressing the current perception one way or another to the cost of bascially becoming irrelevant.

    I hope I am still enjoying doing my work with debian systems many years from now, but I am starting to wonder if I won't be working on some (probably debian based) alternative instead.

    well thats my rant, please forgive any spelling mistakes or generally stupid things I might have said. I'm not one of the smart ones.

    • Will you people please decide what you want? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lahvak ( 69490 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @02:47AM (#12345803) Homepage Journal
      Every time somebody mentions dpendency problems, rpm etc. in any discussion, people always start yelling "debian, debian, use debian" and "apt, apt, apt!"

      They are right about the first. Debian is probably the easiest distro to upgrade and maintain. Part of the secret is apt, that's true, but only a small part. The main reason debian "just works" and is so easy to maintain is the official repositories. You don't have dependency problems in debian (most of the time) because debian developers took enormous care to resolve all the dependency problems for you. Debian carefully backports(!) all security fixes they can, making sure that nothing breaks in the process, so that if there is a security hole fixed in say php, all your pages will just keep working like before. They have more packages than most other distros pot together, and they run on more hardware than enybody else. All this just takes some time.

      I am not afraid debian will become irrelevant. There is a reason all these new distros are based on debian. And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian. Debian stable may not be the system for a hobbyist's desktop, but a large company or city or whatnot does not care about frequent releases. On the contrary, the longer they can go without major update the better. And when the update actually does come, debian makes it easy with their repositories, their stable/testing/unstable system, and apt.

      And if you are a hobbyist, use testing/unstable and contribute your share. Debian is a community, not a company, and if use debian, you are part of the community. You want releases to happen more often? Then do your share. Do you use testing or unstable? Submit bug reports, fixes, if you are not a programmer, fix or update some bloody documentation, provide some missing icons, whatever! The only way debian can become irrelevant or obsolete is if we let it go irrelevant or obsolete.
      • And there is a reason the city of Munich chose debian.

        Uhm, it's not Debian but SuSE.

      • I used to be one of those "I wish Debian were more up-to-date" people until I got a server that was going to be used strictly for... serving. That's when I realized I don't need the "flash" of the latest greatest GNOME or KDE or fancy audio players or anything like that (headless server). I just need a machine that can run Apache, PHP (wordpress + Gallery), and MySQL. And I need this machine to be easily updateable with the lastest security updates. And for this, I have discovered that Debian is ideal:

    • Linux's management system back to bite them (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @03:05AM (#12345869) Homepage
      There's several issues with Debian stable.

      1. Hardware support. Unlike Windows, you can't drop in a 3rd party driver, you need to upgrade the whole kernel. This is by design (no stable ABI).

      2. Inability to update core systems. No software is ever officially "adopted" into stable. Why? Dependencies. Imagine if they could say "this version of [core software] is now so stable, we'll provide equal support with the original in stable".

      Debian stable is only good for systems that have been virtually unchanged since release, both when it comes to hardware and software. Hey if it works, don't break it. But what can Debian offer for new servers?

      The new "stable" will fall into the same obscurity if the same release system keeps up. They should try to support 10000 packages/3yrs + 20 extra releases of core apps/6mo, not just 10000 packages every three years. Server apps don't have that insanely many deps as desktops.

      Hardware, well that's just not easy with the current model. But solving half the problem is better than solving none of it.

      Kjella
  • Debian is quickly becoming akin to a fossil. It sits there, not actually doing anything. But it leaves evidence of having done something in the past.

  • people get pissed off with donating to debian because they never make any releases.
  • "An argument in favor of that is that we should do so in the event we, or one of our developers, are sued for doing something we consider legitimate, like offering freely modifiable software gratis to the world," Robinson said."

    sadly those days may be closer than we all think - especially if all the "intellectual property/patent lawyers" have their way in the US.

    please UK do not adopt software patents. there is no need for them and they are totally ridiculous.

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