ITWire

The normal reaction from said subject, were one to return with the same request, would at the least be a healthy dose of scepticism.

Not so with Anthony Towns. The Brisbane resident, current leader of the Debian Project, was getting ready to attend the annual Debian conference in June, when I contacted him in May. We agreed to get back in touch after he returned from Mexico but I never did.

Six months elapsed, and then, given the current focus on the project due to the rather noisy resignation of a developer, I made contact again, prefacing my request with an apology. Towns was gracious, unlike a host of others I've encountered, and what follows is the result of his willingness to be interrogated.

When the Debian GNU/Linux project made its second release in January 1994 - version number 0.91 - there were a few dozen people involved. The project was five months old and the release itself had no name. The last release, in June 2005, version 3.1 codenamed Sarge, contained around 15,400 binary packages and 14 binary CDs in the official set. There were more than 1000 developers involved.

One would think that, with this number of people involved, a huge management structure would be needed, with memos flying hither and thither, with meetings occupying most of the day and with politics ruling over process. The reality is that there is a structure, there are teams, there are leaders but the conversation flows between equals, not superiors and hirelings. There is politics as there would be when more than one human is in a place for any length of time. But in toto, this is the one of the best examples of a volunteer project producing high-quality software. It is also the best example of a democratic project.