Given the number of release-critical bugs remaining in the distribution - which Barth put at 157 on December 1 - it is likely that it will take a few more months for Debian version 4.0 to emerge. Or it may run to mid-2007. One never knows.

There are over 1000 Debian developers from various countries and it is remarkable that they produce one of the best distributions. Several commercial distributions are based on it and Debian itself is the second most popular Linux after Red Hat. It is unlikely that any company with this number of far-flung developers would be able to even remotely match what Debian achieves.

There is some murmuring, though, and it will probably continue for a while. It would be good to look at things the way Ts'o does: "Folks who are claiming that they are demotivated because two people have volunteered to give up a full month of their time to take on a job where they giving up something like 75% of their normal income - and the problem is that they gave up only 75% instead of 100% - those people who are kvetching should take a very deep look into their hearts and motivations. If that's what it's all about for those folks, maybe those people who have left Debian are really doing themselves (and the project) a favor..."

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