Debian Delayed by Disenchanted Developers 329
Torus Kas writes "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 was supposed to be due by December 4 and development is currently frozen. Apparently the saga was triggered by disenchantment towards funding of $6,000 for each of the 2 release managers to work full-time in order to speed up the development. Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else."
Dumb Editor (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
You've now got a subset of Debian guys motivated by money, and the rest of them still motivated by making a quality Linux distribution. Sometimes those interests are aligned (as the guys who set up dunc-tank observed) but sometimes those interests are NOT (as the guys who started Caldera and Novell now see when Microsoft can easily use the motivated-by-money lever to change the course of the projects).
IMHO, Debian should stay Debian - and stay as far away from money and paid work as possible -- and let organziations like Ubuntu build the corporate bureacracy stuff like release schedules, support contracts, etc. I hope Ubuntu buys dunc-tank.org and takes those employees with them -- because they and their work are useful for corporate marketing -- but do more harm than good to Debian development.
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. He's saying that he'd prefer that the people contributing to Debian are motivated by the desire to solve problems, and to make a good product better; as opposed to having debian be contributed by programmers whose attitude is "whatever, fuck it, it's good enough; where's my ten bucks?".
And he's not alone in that sentiment...not alone at all.
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one of the most self-righteous, idiotic statements I've ever heard. You're saying that anybody who gets paid to do something does it for the money and doesn't care about the quality of what they do. That's bullshit, of the smelliest variety. I get paid for most of what I do, but I take pride in my work. I've walked away from jobs — jobs were I was getting paid huge amounts of money — because there were other factors that made the job professionally or ethically unacceptable. And I'm not alone.
I'm guessing you've never had to worry about paying the bills or having a place to live. If you had, you'd know that sometimes people have to say, "God, I'd love to work on that, but I need to be doing something that brings in some money."
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NO U.
>You're saying that anybody who gets paid to do something does it for the money and doesn't care about the quality of what they do.
No, I'm saying that a lot of people would prefer that whoever is commiting to debian does so for the right reasons, and not because they're simply collecting a bounty.
>I get paid for most of what I do, but I take pride in my work.
So you're working in a stable and fulfilling job as opposed to
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to be charitable and assume that you have not actually spent a lot of time programming for a living.
As a consultant, I get to stick my nose in a lot of development shops, and I can pretty much guarantee that the number one cause of shitty software is people trying to do it on the cheap, by which I mean get the most apparent output for their dollars. New, quality-focused methods like Extreme Programming get a fair bit of their boost by making it much harder for the people with the checkbooks to exert time pressure on the programmers. (Instead, the time pressure is redirected into keeping scope as small as possible.)
That's not to say that open-source software is guaranteed to be of high quality. Some of it sucks. But you can be sure that you have removed a major cause of low quality, which is programmers giving up and saying with a sigh: "Well, that's not how I'd do it, but it's your money..."
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
First you talk about looking at source code then you show some assertion output to illustrate you point, which makes it sound as if you have never looked at any source code. Hardly gives you the credibility you need to go scoffing at anybody's software quality.
But let's consider your proposition: you seem to claim that assertion output (which you would only see if you run the app from a console) is some kind of indicator of software quality. Let me tell you what happens in a commercial development shop. The assertions never go into the code because such work is invisible and won't get the coder promoted. Who cares if some QVBox already has a message as long as the program doesn't crash when it runs? Answer: open sourcers do. Commercial developers tend to just want to bury the bad news and wait until it turns into bug reports. After all, closing bugs gets you promoted.
The assertion output you mistakenly characterize as proof of poor source code is actually part of the open source development process. Obviously, the first step in fixing a bug is to admit you have one.
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, the assertion is very fine if it is in. But that such obvious errors are not fixed before the release is rushed out is simply sloppy work that would not happen at our Open Source projects.
Third, as the CEO of a consulting company, I seem to work with better commercial developers than you do. And that is not only my own company, but also many other places where we work together with in-house developers. Yes, these folks put assertions in their code -- and they care for the case when they happen. That's because they are proud about their work and want to create good applications. They are not afraid of bad news, and closing bug tickets is not a metrics for their appraisal. (Client or user satisfaction is, actually.) Of course, there is a bad apple here and there; but that's not different to the authors of the thousands of OSS projects on SourceForge or elsewhere.
You seem to have a gripe with commercial software development -- you might have a bad experience in your own job. If you do, I have a recommendation for you: Look for a different company where developers are allowed to do their job. It pays in the end, both for the developer and the company.
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a vast array of evidence that giving extrinsic rewards (like money) can reduce the quality and creativity of work when compared with intrinsic motivation. That's not to say that all people taking a paycheck will do shitty work. But I can list case after case in my professional life where I've seen reward schemes harm software projects.
For example, I recently charged some people a lot of money to clean up a mostly functional but hugely messy code base. The thing was almost impossible to debug, and completely impossible to improve. There were large amounts of what turned out to be dead code, a bunch of mismatched abstractions, and make-it-work hacks galore. What kind of idiot would build something like that?
It turned out that the programmer was perfectly smart, but the people who had hired him wanted the product really soon, so they structured it as a fixed-price deal with the price dropping every day. Naturally, he rushed, and by the time he pushed it over the line it was a terrible mess.
Re:Nice inflammatory troll (Score:5, Informative)
Well, actually, shelters that feed the poor and help battered women DO take donations to support the staff and the facility. Pretty much exactly what the folks paying the Debian guys were doing... put a little money in the pot so the facility can be open. So I'm afraid you came up with an example for the other side.
Re:Dumb editor, but there is an issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know a lot of people using Debian and other distros. With the OSS licensing, I don't see why Debian doesn't get more respect for focusing on stability.
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Re:Dumb Editor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dumb Editor (Score:5, Insightful)
Genuine Advantage in Vista? WTF does that mean? This is why Windows will never catch on.
iSight on a Mac? WTF is that?
If a well-educated slashdot reader has no clue what you're talking about, how is the general public, let alone my grandma, supposed to use Linux?
I would bet that most Linux using and a large portion of non-Linux using slashdot readers knew exactly what that meant. By your trollish and poorly thought-out comment, I would assume that you are not in the majority here. Terminology in technology always requires some domain knowledge. This article is NOT aimed at your grandma (doubt your grandma reads
Re:Dumb Editor (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dumb Editor (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dumb Editor (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't care about that stuff, then just use the version that's available right now.
I fail to see how this is any different between MS and Linux? With Linux the process is more transparent, so when you go to a site that bills itself as "news for nerds", you can read about all the gory details if you want.
Update and modest suggestions (Score:4, Insightful)
The article did not say what packages were delayed specifically, but Debian is known to have an insane number of packages. Perhaps some culling is in order. I'm not part of the project, just an appreciative user, but here are my two cents.
About the project being "frozen", I don't know about that. I have a laptop running etch-testing. I did an apt-get dist-upgrade in mid-Nov , put it away for a few weeks and ran it again in early-Dec (don't remember exact dates). Something like 70 packages needed upgrades.
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:5, Informative)
dont do it Debian... its great to be able to apt-cache search and apt-get install almost anything. such a huge collection of available software that JUST WORKS is great. a little (or lot) longer release cycle doesnt really effect the bulk of users who just use "testing" anyway.
my 2 cents. Debian's base of huge packages, and apt are great assets. apt-get into it
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Re:apt-get install almost anything (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't agree with you on this one. The biggest power of Debian is that most packages, even obscure one, fit into one distribution with all the testing and dependancies being resolved. I have experience with Red hat, Suze, and solaris (ouch on that one) systems where instal
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
You sure about that? I've read recently from an upstream Gnome developer that GTK lacks maintainers ( http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2006/12/20/0 [gnome.org] ), Etch will ship Gnome 2.14 because of unresolved GTK bugs, so what you're saying seems quite wrong...
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IMO, the value of a distribution is almost nothing but the number of supported packages, and how up-to-date they are. (Granted there is tension between these two). Even gentoo is struggling, as seemingly half the time, the package I want to install is masked.
Linux would be so much better if there were a single de-facto package management system, and vastly fewer dependencies between packages. The license is free!
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Have you EVER cleaned up your libraries? I'm fucking serious. Regardless of whether they're shared or not (and good luck with that one.)
Nobody keeps their house completely clean and the size of libraries is nothing compared to thee amount of pr0n or other shit on a hard drive.
Just STOP with the 'shared' library argument. One thing you can give Windows credit for is that it will even uninstall
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This doesn't work because it moves the burden of packaging onto distro maintainers. This model has proven infeasible, since no distro in existence has even a significant fraction of all the linux software in it, not to mention reasonably up to date. If there were one de-facto standard package type, and vastly fewer inter-package dependencies, then developers could package their programs themselves.
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:4, Informative)
Well, debian goes through a few stages of freeze. Base freeze was some time ago, general freeze was Dec 11th, but still there's something like 130 RC bugs that needs to be solved. I think the original plan called for something like 1.5mo of freeze, so probably sometime in January.
In any case, this is not what I call a big delay, it's maybe a month behind a release schedule of every 18 months, whereas the last took something like three years. 18 months is basicly the same as Ubuntu LTS and many other server oriented distros, if you want quicker updates go for (K)Ubuntu.
From what I gather the Debian system does a lot more than simply packing up whatever upstream does, but I think they could differentiate on levels of support. For non-server software I imagine that for many of the packages, there's no upstream support for so old versions anyway.
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases. Everything else can be put into contributed non-official repositories
I think that what's really great about Debian is that it has such wide support for everything. If there's a distro capable of being anything to anyone, and still doing everything pretty well, it's probably Debian. There are plenty of other projects that do just what you're talking about. They take Debian, reduce the number of packages to what makes sense for a particular purpose, and that allows more work to be done on fewer packages in less time, creating a distro that's more specialized. Why would you want Debian to do that, too?
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Yes, you could do that, but that's not what Debian is right now. It's not a core that has been heavily worked on. It's a huge repository of packages that are close to the vanilla version of those pieces of software, but tested to work together with the other packages. Changing what Debian is so drastically would possibly solve some problems, but would be just as likely to introduce others. For example, if you have this core with third parties working on extensions, what reason do you have to believe tha
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Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:4, Insightful)
You're crazy. The whole point of debian is so that you can apt-get everything in the freaking universe. I never have to go hunting down packages, that means a lot to me. Sure 90% of users only use 10% of the packages, but it's never the same 10%. So if you start just dropping packages, you're going to piss people off.
Cut the distro down to what will fit on one CD (two max). That will reduce a lot of Debian's headaches. Less for them to maintain and less to test between releases.
And less reason for anyone to use debian. If you want something that's pared down to a CD and doesn't offer you a lot of choice up front, try ubuntu.
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That will accomplish nothing. You clearly don't understand how Debian is developed. Each package is maintained by people who care about getting that particular package in the next release. If it's working at that point, it goes in. If it isn't, it gets thrown out, and nobody else wastes any time on it. There is no conceivable reason why throwing
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather have Debian release schedules, but have all the packages that are in it. Most of the sysadmins out there who deploy debian do it exactly because "Resistance is futile, you shall be packaged" and because "apt-get install light" works 99.99% of the time.
As a result there is a working platform on which to build services and commercial software regardless of what insane libraries your developers have chosen this time. Whatever it is, it can be apt-get installed. In the very rare cases you sometimes have to backport a version from testing, but someone has already solved most of the dependencies for you.
Trying something similar with RedHat quickly brings you into the land of RPM hell. I always love watching sysadmins suffering while trying to support development in a RedHat shop (especially where developers have su/sudo access). It is immensely entertaining to watch the network fall apart and be reduced to a random collection of machines all different from each other and each in its own circle of the RPM hell none being able to produce a release build.
So from the perspective of someone who has been running Debian driven networks for 6+ years and with 5+ years of supporting Debian as a base for commercial development I can say - no thank you, you misunderstood what brings most sysadmins to Debian. It is the best *nix development platform out there.
Re:Update and modest suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
You have just described RedHat. No thanks.
Yikes. This is so wrong. First, RHEL 4 comes on 4 CDs, not one or two. Second, many packages supplied by RH are patched so far that the original developers won't provide support on the mailing lists (Squid, OpenLDAP for concrete examples). Others are maintained by RedHat, which either makes them massively patched, or not patched at all. Neither of the points given really apply to RedHat.
I would rather have Debian release schedules, but have all the packages that are in it. Most of the sysadmins out there who deploy debian do it exactly because "Resistance is futile, you shall be packaged" and because "apt-get install light" works 99.99% of the time.
I'd bet that most of the sysadmins who prefer Debian do so because it's what they are familiar and comfortable with it...such as yourself.
As a result there is a working platform on which to build services and commercial software regardless of what insane libraries your developers have chosen this time. Whatever it is, it can be apt-get installed. In the very rare cases you sometimes have to backport a version from testing, but someone has already solved most of the dependencies for you.
Trying something similar with RedHat quickly brings you into the land of RPM hell. I always love watching sysadmins suffering while trying to support development in a RedHat shop (especially where developers have su/sudo access). It is immensely entertaining to watch the network fall apart and be reduced to a random collection of machines all different from each other and each in its own circle of the RPM hell none being able to produce a release build.
Am I to take it that you are saying Debian based systems are immune to this? Not so much the RPM hell (duh, Debian doesn't use RPMs), but the random collection of machines all different from each other even though the developers have root access? How, pray tell, do you manage that? Block access to the apt repositories?
So from the perspective of someone who has been running Debian driven networks for 6+ years and with 5+ years of supporting Debian as a base for commercial development I can say - no thank you, you misunderstood what brings most sysadmins to Debian. It is the best *nix development platform out there.
First, what does System Administration have to do with developing software? A Sysadmin's job is keeping the boxes running, not crafting applications to run on them. If a system admin WERE to develop software, perhaps he wouldn't use libraries that require such acrobatics his box is endangered? Second, big commercial software developers seem to disagree with you. For example, BEA, BMC Software, Hyperion, IBM, Sybase and Symantec [redhat.com], Lyris [lyris.com], VMWare [vmware.com], Oracle [oracle.com], and Elluminate [elluminate.com]. These are just software products that either I deal with on a regular basis or came up with in a quick search.
Why, if Debian is the best development platform in existance, would that be the case? Debian Stable changes at least as infrequently as RHEL, so it shouldn't be a matter of code stability.
Perhaps your dealings with RedHat based distributions have been less than plesant, but if you want commercial application support, it's either RH or SUSE. Tools for dealing with RPMs have advanced quite a bit in the last 5 years, and FWIW, I have no problems getting a bo
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Why would you want Debian to reproduce Ubuntu? Ubuntu already exists!
Debian's really great because it's Debian. It has packages for everything, and it has extensive testing that produces super-stable server releases. Everything fits together well because the developers are willing to patch stuff to make it work the way they want it to.
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I'll be one of the first to protest...
A lot of the stuff that I use every single day doesn't show up on the first CD. One of the benefits of Debian is that it has just about everything in deb packages already waiting for you to use. I find it an advantage.
And did you know that you can install Debian with only a 128MB USB memory stick or a single CD? I've never downloaded all the CD's and doubt that I ever will.
As for KDE and Gnome. I want the testing. There is nothing worse than a trashed desktop.
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Yes, Ubuntu has {un,mult}iverse, but only *because* Debian continues to support those packages.
L
Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
But it's actually a fascinating case of unintended consequences -- hiring some full-time workers seems to have had precisely the opposite effective of the intended. It's a lesson worth considering before deciding that, say, what some third world country really, really needs is millions of laptops dumped on their children.
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What I want to know is, who can afford to live on 6K fulltime?
Is there a zero missing?
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They're being paid for a month or two, not a whole year.
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In the Philippines the average yearly salary for software developers was right at $6K, last time I checked. I expect that other 3rd world countries are similar.
Not that deb guys were filipinos, just answering the more general question.
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"But what about dating? Cars? Entertainment? Retirement?" the student asked.
And the master did fling a Ramen noodle at the wall, and it stuck. In this way, the student was enlightened.
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hiring some full-time workers seems to have had precisely the opposite effective of the intended.
not workers... managers. I think most technical/coder/slashdot types have the same general opinion of managers and management (*cough* parasites *cough*). Many open source projects have paid individual programmers with no backlash. And many companies pay for programmers to write open source code. Sometimes it doesn't work out (ie, the XEmacs/Emacs split), but it doesn't usually outrage other developers.
The lesson here is: (Score:2)
Pffft (Score:4, Interesting)
i don't know what everyone else has their apt sources pointed at, but the rate of updates haven't changed any that i can see.
take your time, make it stable.
then i'll switch to what ever the next one is.
Re:Pffft (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not even sure who's clamoring for Etch to release. Anyone who needs the latest toys can run it already, and anyone who really needs the stability of Debian Stable knows that it will be released when it's ready.
It's the other distros that seem to be in a huge hurry. To each his own; that's why we have more than one distro.
Which part is delayed? (Score:3, Funny)
I kid because I love. :-)
-B
Should be "Disenchanted Developers Delay Debian" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Should be "Disenchanted Developers Delay Debian (Score:5, Funny)
The title of parent post should be: (Score:2, Funny)
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Er, that's not alliteration, that's assonance [wikipedia.org]. Pronounced ASS-onan-ce. 8^)
Heirarchy and human nature (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course this is all assuming you accept the premise to begin with, which I do.
Re:Heirarchy and human nature (Score:5, Insightful)
You see, both models are actually part of our intrinsic nature. As separate beings, capitalism makes sense. As cogs in a large system (or cells in an organism if you will), socialism makes sense.
Since we're currently on the borderline between separate beings, and part of one "uber-being" (society), such conflicts will always arise again and again.
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Maybe neither pure socialism or pure capitalism is the answer?
Re:Heirarchy and human nature (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was under the impression that most people are mortal.
Those who are on the bottom are those who constantly fail and hardly ever succeed or those who don't even try to begin with.
And with that, you completely discredit yourself.
To be a successful capitalist, you need *surprise* capital to start with. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouths. A lot of people work very hard and barely earn enough to feed and clothes their families. They
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It's not clear exactly what your premise is, but if it is that software ownership can be defined in terms of socialism and capitalism, then that would be a bad assumption to make.
The conflict between the two economic philosophies is mostly about the management of rivalrous resources, i.e. stuff that gets used up. Software is inherently non-rivalrous so any direct application of the ideas of either economic philosophy to softwar
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Once it has been made, this is true. But the development of said software still depends on limited resources, skillful programmers. Then once it is made it needs skillful maintainers. A few thousand open source contributers does not equal either. Their skill livels MAY be as good as the original developers, most often its
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Why does that sound so fami
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That is funny, my idea of a utopian system is where everyone who works gets compensated. I am not a fan of servitude, although our leaders (most recently Clinton and Bush) encourage it. It sounds like what happened with Debian is a perfect example of the system you favor breaking down. It is hard to convince people to work for free (thus taking away time from their family/friends or other interests) but rewarding them with compensation wo
nope its status anxiety (Score:2)
This seems odd (Score:2)
I know Debian is all about the Free, but it seems odd that paying a couple of people would cause problems with volunteers.
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This is where you have a bunch of people on one side of the fence yelling that there is perfectly viable bussiness reasons to adopt open source... and on the other side of the fence you have even more people that wouldn't pay for surgery that could save their own life. (Since practically no one pays for anything open source, no one really makes much money from it.)
Then you get people that start out with open source projects, and then turn the project
Straight From Debian Lists (Score:5, Informative)
This email from November 16 will pretty much bring everyone up to date on Etch status: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/200
Since its publication, Etch has gone into bug-fixing only.
Nice little bonus for debian users on the end if you read it all the way through.
Please, please
Meeting deadlines costs money... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bringing in managers, paying them, getting people on your back telling you what to do and when to do it, when you were doing this as a "hobby
12,000$ to kill Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
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Disenchanted... (Score:2)
Release managers worth 6000x more than others? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should the release managers be surprised? Afterall, they were paid money to improve their own work ethic. Are the developers, who are arguably doing more *actual* work, not worth as much as the release managers, or held to a higher standard than the release managers?
If they can't find developers to replace those who have reduced their contributions, and the lack of development contributions is the primary cause of the delay, then ver
WIR (Score:5, Informative)
Debian ships When It's Ready.
But for those of us who are holding our breath for release time, a good and rough indicator of when it will ship is the number of release critical bugs [debian.org]. When the number hits zero, Debian is (almost?) ready. Since the etch freeze was announced about a week ago [debian.org], the number of release bugs has wavered around 130, with a slight downward trend. This is the stock market of the free software world. :-) The etch freeze means that no packages can move down from unstable (sid) to the current testing (etch) automatically anymore (normally, packages in unstable are automatically moved down to testing by a script if no bugs are filed against them for some time, several days, iirc). Packages can still be moved from unstable to testing, but only manually if it's clear that they are stable enough for the next release.
The dunk-tank drama in the Debian mailing lists [debian.org] is old news. Yes, some developers expressed concerns about the dunc-tank project [dunc-tank.org], but I would hardly call this "frozen development". Developers are working hard to get the Debian release. I estimate January or February at the latest will be beer and pizza party time for all the Debian developers that have produced the largest binary free GNU/Linux distribution amongst which so many other distros depend [ubuntulinux.com].
Personally, I'm very excited. I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but Ubuntu has probably put pressure in Debian to more timely releases, and this release will be much more in time than the previous sarge release was. I've been given permission to install Debian in 20 workstations of our local network, and I'm waiting for the stable release and the renowned Debian quality and security to do so. I'll probably be tracking the next testing release after I install them, though, since testing works well for desktop use and workstations.
Gross Exaggeration (Score:3, Informative)
This is a gross exaggeration.
>
This is false. Etch (Testing) is frozen in that packages are no longer automatically moving into it from Sid (Unstable) but this is a normal part of the release cycle: it happens just before a release. Development continues apace in Sid.
Money and OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Having source code available is no guarentee of continuance. What matters is who is doing the actual work. I don't recall a single instance where a previously uninvolved third party has ever been able to successfully fork a large open source project after the original authors broke up or went commercial. Forking comes from within... it almost has to for it to have any chance of succeeding.
For Debian this means that the resolution to the problem must also come from within. Either elements within the existing core group must fork the project, or they must work to resolve the mess the money has caused and become a cohesive entity again. No third party is going to bail them out.
Matthew Dillon
-Matt
Bad article, full of misinformation (Score:4, Informative)
IMO, this is a bad article. It's full of misinformation and factual errors, and it paints a very inaccurate picture of the current state of Debian.
From the article:
The date of Debian's first release given in this article is only one of the many factual errors that it contains. The Wikipedia article on Debian ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian [wikipedia.org] ) tells that "The Debian distribution was first announced on August 16, 1993 by Ian Murdock" and "The Debian Project grew slowly at first and released its first 0.9x versions in 1994 and 1995." Debian version 1.1 was released in June 1996, version 1.2 in December 1996, and version 1.3 in June 1997.
Of course, the article also fails to mention that the Ubuntu distribution is based on Debian and Ubuntu's each new release relies heavily on the work that is constantly being done in Debian, and the article also fails to tell that Ubuntu takes most of the code it releases from Debian's development branch.
http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html [mako.cc]
From the article:
Actually, there's no factual evidence at all that the delay in Debian's release schedule is caused by developers doing their work slower than usual. It is not easy to grasp how large and complex the Debian project has grown and many journalists also obviously fail to understand the not-for-profit and volunteer nature of the work that is done in Debian. The huge size of the project and the volunteer nature of its work are sufficient reasons alone to explain why the release has been delayed for a month or two. Such delays can happen for purely organizational reasons even if every developer is working as hard as they can.
Debian is a non-profit volunteer organization where all the important decisions are made democratically. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy [wikipedia.org] ) This means that all important issues in the project management are openly discussed over a period of time and every developer has a chance to get their voice heard. From time to time there are disagreements among the developers and these disagreements are settled by voting where the opinion of the majority wins.
There was recently some disagreement among the Debian Developers about the experimental idea to fund two release managers' full-time work for a short period of time just before the upcoming Debian release. The Debian Developers voted about this issue and the majority of them decided to support the experiment. ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00019.html [debian.org] ) Most of the developers accepted this result but 17 of them have been protesting even after the results of the voting were published. It is perhaps worth mentioning here that Debian has over one thousand officially accepted developers and many more who contribute to the project without having the official developer status. 17 developers out of 1000 is a small minority but they can still make a lot of noise. Those other developers concentrate on coding instead of public arguing, so it is only too easy for the scandal-hungry journalists to ignore all these hard-working silent developers and concentrate on the loud complainers.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006 /10/msg00026.html [debian.org]
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with open source projects such as Debian is that they're volunteer and that people need to have continual interest in it in order for it to survive - with pay developers or no. That may sound like a obvious point, but it seems that more than a few open source projects are stagnating because of waning interest. NetBSD also comes to mind. What happens to D
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideologically, I support Microsoft rather than Linux because Microsoft allows people like myself to make a living. Granted lots of people do get paid to work all day on an open-source project...companies wouldn't do this unless it gave them a competitive advantage (i.e., Redhat can sell an OS by leveraging the work of others).
Apples and oranges (Score:2)
Microsoft is a company. Linux is a product. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Do you mean:
I support Microsoft rather than Debian
or
I support Microsoft Windows rather than Linux
or
I support Microsoft rather than the people that donate their time to work on Linux
Whichever way you put it your comment doesn't really make sense and needs more explanation. How does Microsoft help you make a living in a way that Debian can not do?
Is it just that you can make more money selling
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me be crystal clear: THIS IS NOT TRUE!!
What is happening is the value of software is shifting. In the future, you won't have to work on open source software "in your spare time." You will be paid to work on open source software by the company you work for, because they have a stake in the software's success. Software is a living thing and must be maintained. If my business directly depends on... say... Asterisk running correctly, then I'd better have at least one OSS hacker who knows the Asterisk source code... get it?
Remember the old mantra: Free Software was never intended to be free-as-in-beer. You still have to pay for it if you want any real commercial use out of it. Companies will slowly realize they don't have to pay a monopolistic empire for all their software needs, but rather can hire their local blue-collar OSS hacker. Only then will the economy make some progress...
-dave
Re: (Score:2)
Software
Re: (Score:2)
If you think this is how the majority of Free software gets written, then you need to educate yourself. I can assure you that the 6 digits I was getting annually to write FOSS was not manna from Heaven. It was money invested - and wisely, I might add - by my employer to leverage not only my time, but the time and efforts of a great many others. By
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes.
The fact that many people *also* get paid to work on Free software is beside the point. You can write complex software in your spare time.
The interesting question is: how do we scale up development so that we can have large numbers of people working on the same code base, while they each only put in an hour or so a day? In the Free software world there are many examples of fantastically large teams that seem to create content without the problems you see in the average proprietary shop.
Some of these things have to do with the nature of Free software. For example: the ability to fork development any time that you want; the lack of need to get approval for work to begin; the ability to use evolutionary rather than planned process (i.e., any crackpot can implement a feature and the choice of whether or not to add it to the mainline can be made after the fact *without significant cost to the project*).
Yes, having a team of full time developers has some advantages. But it is far from impossible to write code with volunteers. And there are definite advantages to working in such an environment (I have done both in my career).
Having said all that, my preference is for Free software that is supported by full time programmers and for which I can buy a support contract. If it's mission critical software, I want a support contract and I want it to specify that the supporter will fix bugs that are stopping me from achieving my work (something which I've found difficult to find in the proprietary software world).
Failing that, I'll definitely take source code over vague promises that my problem might get fixed in a subsequent release if several other people seem to be having similar problems and the vendor is still in business...
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I'm confused. You support Microsoft because they allow you to make a living (how gracious of them) and then you say that "lots of people do get paid to work all day on an open-
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Until they want your revenue stream. Your going to be out of a job in Microsofts vision of the future:
Software factories: http://www.softwarefactories.com/ [softwarefactories.com]
I wonder if the people at STAC, Netscape, etc. felt the same way as you do?
Enjoy,
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source is a development methodology. Free Software is a moral standpoint. Neither one says that you can't get paid. Neither one, in fact, says that you must do anything for the betterment of the community - once the appropriate license is used, EVERYTHING you do with the program that is legal contributes to the betterment of the community.
In fact what you and many other people miss is that no one does something for nothing. Sometimes they do it just because they are addicted to the good feeling that they get when they do something altruistic, but at the base level, they are feeding a stimulus-response pattern in their brain that causes them to want to do that. They are being paid in good feelings.
If I am contributing work for which many people get paid, and then I see that someone else is being paid for work which many others contribute, I may come to the realization that I need to pay my bills and they cannot be paid with good feelings which are unfortunately non-transferable and not considered legal tender for any but the most private of debts, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I'll just turn into a stingy bitch who wants some of that or y'all can fuck off. Either way, the contributions don't get made.
Ultimately, if you're going to have a release schedule and you plan to stick to it, you're going to either have to pay some people, or make sure some people don't need to get paid, which boils down to supporting those people, which is a form of pay even if you don't give them actual money. Otherwise you will have problems because people will have other motivations. This will continue until the cost of living drops so far through technology that people no longer have to work. Then we will have new problems.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not so sure that this isn't happening already. Look at the small percentage of income that is spent in the US on basic needs. Look at the small percentage of us who actually make things.
Re:You work for free, or... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but I don't think it's primarily the "I need to get paid" feeling which is tickled here. I think it's the feeling of fair. It's a very tricky feeling, and has nothing to do with technical or license issues. While there are paid developers which can be seen as a form of kickback by commercial distributions, the community itself is mostly built on common interest.
That common interest is like "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours", "we're all in this together pulling against the same goal", potluck dinner and so on. Once the focus shifts to attracting sponsors, it's every man for himself like if it was a beauty contest. Also I just had a horrible image of the swimsuit show, and now you do too. Anyway, the point is that it's not "why aren't I getting paid?" as much as "why should we be paid differently?"
For one you have the "It should have been me!" people, but there's also the "Now we're paying someone to do it" people. I must admit I'd have a pretty hard time motivating myself to do unpaid work to relieve someone who's getting paid. Even if I work 2hrs/week and you 40hrs/week, I have a pretty hard time accepting that you should be paid $X/hr and me $0/hr. Certainly, some people have "earned" it in my eyes, but if the feeling is "They're doing exactly the same as the rest of us, except they get paid" would you put up with that?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hence the reason why fully community-based projects are not suited for mission-critical applications, unless you are willing to support your own use of it.
Some people are, so that kind of software is fine for them. Others are not, and so it is not. It's just that simple.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you're talking about this: