Debian at the crossroads

Sam Varghese
Monday, 26 March 2007 09:26

Opinion and Analysis

 Voting is in progress for the next leader who will take over on April 17. Eight candidates are in the running, including the incumbent, Anthony Towns.

Apart from the platforms put forward by the candidate and an exhaustive debate, all of which is online, an interview given by the founder of the project, Ian Murdock, may also have some influence on the outcome.

Murdock's interview was published in part by Linux Format, a British magazine. (Curiously, the magazine chose not to create any online payment options for those who wanted to read the entire interview; the only way to do that is to buy a copy. The fact that such interviews are of interest across geographical borders probably did not cross the publisher's mind.) But the published part alone had sufficient meat in it for Murdock to anticipate some reaction and create an entry in his personal blog saying: "I knew midway through that I was about to step in it, but these are things that needed to be said, and I’m pleased with how it ended up."

In the interview, Murdock expressed disappointment with the way the Debian project was moving on some fronts; in the main, he attributed the problems that had arisen to the democratic process which Debian follows.

To quote him: "I believe that open source projects are no different from businesses or any other kind of organization (sic) in that to get any meaningful work done, there has to be strong leadership. That leadership has to be empowered to make decisions even when those decisions are unpopular. I think that's part of the reason why Ubuntu has done well: there is a strong leader, and that strong (leader) is empowered."