Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
I wouldn't say that. I think in Debian, there are quite a few people who do development in their spare time. Students - I think we have quite a few students. But we certainly also have people who work for companies. Some of them can do Debian-related work in their company time. But I don't think that's the majority.
How much of a future can you see for a project like this?
Well, I think that it's going to be an issue. I think we've seen that already, because in the past, Debian has been very innovative. We implemented things like apt-get and only years later did companies like Red Hat do it. Now as a full volunteer project, it's very hard to compete with a distro with lot of paid people. I think that's an issue, and that's going to be increasingly an issue.
Gentoo is facing some issues now...
Yes, they had a non-profit foundation and their charter expired and was revoked because they didn't submit some of their papers on time. But that's just one example. The other thing is that the founder left Gentoo, but then he came back. Then he had some disagreement and then he left Gentoo on the same day.
Some big companies have a stake in Debian, enough to ensure that the project continues. Companies like HP, for example.
I think there is definitely commercial interest. HP has, for example, very successfully used Debian for the telecommunications industry, because that's something where there's no solutions available. Then they used Debian to customise things for that specific market. That's something you can use Debian very well for - customisation, if you need to make some changes. I think another reason why Debian is very relevant is because it's really THE community distribution that tries to get things right. We care about how you interact with upstream developers or issues like licences, documentation, images, what it means for them to be free.
We're driving a lot of discussions which are needed not only in Debian but in the whole free software community. I think people do appreciate that in the long run, even if some things are quite controversial. People say that Debian has a very extreme position - I think it's good in a way because it starts discussion about some issues.
After Sam Hocevar took over as DPL, there's been very little news about Debian. When Anthony Towns was the project leader, Debian was always in the news, generally for all the wrong reasons.
I think that Debian has lost some of its relevance because of Ubuntu, which provides similar technologies and reliable release cycles. But I think that Debian is still very important in the whole community. Like I said, it's looking at different issues, it's trying to solve problems. And then when you go to a conference, people will generally talk about Debian. It's still very strong in the community.
David Bass
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