Debian: some people just don't get it

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 21:49

Opinion and Analysis

I was also surprised that Vaughan-Nichols got carried away by the discussions on Debian's mailing lists - there are always a number of wars that go on on mailing lists and given that there are 1000-plus developers from 43 countries, a bit of crosstalk is bound to ensue. It just accentuates the fact that while many people often liken free software development to a bazaar - Eric Raymond's work on open source development was titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar - few of them are aware of what a real bazaar is like. And it is extremely unlikely that any of them would be comfortable in such surroundings.

As the developer Black pointed out, "a visitor from the outside reads a lot of ranting in the list archives, but the typical developer probably ignores most of the rants, never even opening the emails." It's surprising that Vaughan-Nichols was unaware of this.

One quote from Vaughan-Nichols article shows a certain naivety: "It seems to me that while Debian in the past has been the solid foundation of such excellent distributions as Ubuntu and MEPIS, this release shows that openSUSE and Fedora are the community Linuxes of the future."

How one can even begin comparing the Fedora project (set up by Red Hat Linux) and OpenSuse (set up by Novell) to Debian beats me; while Fedora and OpenSuse are so-called community projects the fact is they have both been set up by commercial entities which hope to benefit from outside contributions. The prime motive behind these projects is not to give; rather, it is to take.

On the other hand, Debian has no commercial motive behind it. True, some developers who are part of the project do benefit by just being associated with Debian; others have gone on to hold top positions in commercial companies on the back of the profile they have built up while being part of Debian. But that is common to any community project, it is friendly fallout which many people deserve.

Debian is unique in the FOSS ecospace and if people are unable to see this, then one can't really help them. Unlike any other community project, Debian has yearly elections and picks a leader. Neither Fedora nor OpenSuse have anything even remotely like elections. There is much more that is unique about Debian but I think I've made my point.

Trying to demand that every distribution fit into the same little yellow box (remember the old song?) will result in destroying the individual quirks of different distributions - quirks which make each and every one of these projects exactly what they are. Debian is what it is because it has been an oddball project all along. What is important is that it has produced a high quality distribution. There are different ways of reaching that goal and the Debian way just happens to be different.