Senior Debian developer quits core teams

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 08 May 2008 21:30

Opinion and Analysis

Towns made an oblique reference to his decision on April 18 with an entry in his personal blog which read, in part: "One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don’t you know), reality these days seems to be otherwise."

The reference to 2.1(1) was linked to a section of the Debian constitution that deals with decision-making bodies and individuals; a second link in his post was to the announcement by last year's project leader, Sam Hocevar, that he had appointed fellow developer Joerg Jaspert as a member of the FTP master team and as a full Debian account manager.

Hocevar and Jaspert were two of those who were prominent in their opposition to an experiment which Towns launched during his term as Debian leader in 2006-07 - a project called Dunc-Tank which paid some developers so they could spend more time on Debian and try and meet the release schedule for Etch.

Jaspert also referred to Towns' move in his blog: "...lets (sic) ...write a little about what happened since I gained that extra group: Aj (meaning Towns) resigned from anything that requires additional group privileges."

I wrote to Towns thrice asking him about the situation, twice before I had verified that he had quit the core teams and once after that, informing him that I would be writing this story and asking for his take. Initially, I was under the impression that he had resigned from the project altogether; he answered this bit of my query, saying; "I haven't done that, no."

He did not respond to queries about his quitting core teams. I also asked whether Jaspert's elevation had anything to do with his decision but he did not respond to that either.