Debian made this developer unhappy

by Sam Varghese

Friday, 08 February 2008

Page 4 of 5 What was it that surprised you about the reaction to your leaving Debian? Was it the volume of the talk or the nature of the comments? Well, I didn't think I was that interesting. I was leaving Debian because it was making me unhappy. I felt there were things wrong with Debian, but then it's Debian's job to determine whether those things are important enough to want to fix any of them. I don't expect - I don't have any right to demand that things change. I felt that if I did this (leave the project), I must say why I was doing it and let people decide whether they wanted to do anything about it. Ultimately the whole thing became a debate on the lines of, 'Debian is bad, Ubuntu is good'. That's not how I would put it. That's not how I see it. I think there are differences in that Ubuntu is much tighter and there's more successful social behaviour that makes it a much easier place to work. What do you mean by that? The Ubuntu code of conduct is designed to make statements about how people behave with their Ubuntu contracts, what sort of behaviour is acceptable on mailing lists, or on IRC. When you're working you should remember you're always working as part of a team. You shouldn't denigrate people. You shouldn't be inconsiderate. Debian has a less strong idea of that. It's very easy to meet people in Debian who think that that kind of behaviour shouldn't be there but there isn't any strong movement to--- Tone down the flaming? Not tone it down. On average I'd say it has decreased since I left. People who flame do not .... nothing bad happens to them as a result of flaming. There are no consequences for their actions. People say the worst that can happen is they say, 'Okay, I've had enough of that'. How would you control things when you're working in a community software project? I don't think you can do that without losing some proportion of the people who are working for Debian. Not necessarily because people want to go on flaming, but because they feel a project like Debian shouldn't try to control people's behaviour. When I spoke to the OpenBSD guy, Theo, some years ago, he said that the only thing which he considered bad was if people did not work enough. And his response would be to cut off their commit access. It's very difficult to change a project from one kind of social atmosphere to one which is totally different. I don't think you could easily change Debian. Yet you were there for four years. Did you progressively get disillusioned or did it happen all at once? I must say that during my time in Debian I was more part of the problem than anything else. There are many emails I've sent to the Debian mailing lists which I'm very embarrassed about now. I would not send them if I had the opportunity to do things over again. As I came to this realisation, I also realised how much it was putting me off. There's also a question of putting off potential contributors. At what stage did you start thinking that you should leave? Two years? Three? Three and a half? It was towards the end of 2006 that I first started realising. That was around the time I realised I wasn't particularly interested in making it better anymore. Was there some kind of seminal event that triggered it? No. Debian was making me unhappy so I decided that I didn't want to do it anymore. << First page <   1 2 3 4 5 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751