A conversation with Anthony Towns

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 20 September 2006 05:46

Opinion and Analysis

• Announcements

Atop this whole mass of humanity sits the the Debian Project Leader for whom a formal election is held every two years. Towns, a product of Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland, has been leader since April 17 this year, and is the first Australian to hold the post.

Unlike many others, he tends to see the popularity of derivatives - other distributions based on Debian - as a plus, not a negative. In recent times, there has been much muttering about the popularity of Ubuntu and claims that it takes from the project more than it gives.

Says Towns: "Personally, I think Ubuntu has done an excellent job of bringing Debian to a group that, personally, I'd never expected Debian to be successful at introducing people to Linux. I thought it would always be the distribution people ended up using once they'd had a few years experience, having them essentially using Debian from the start of their Linux lives is
absolutely awesome, in my opinion."

At the same time, he recognises that there are problems and is working to resolve things. "One of the changes I've been working on is a 'partners programme' so that we can work more closely with the various derivatives - certainly including Ubuntu, but also Linspire, Xandros, Knoppix, and many, many others. The idea is to provide some simple steps that derivative distributions can take to make it clear they support Debian's ideals, and thus give people the confidence that they're not trying to harm Debian and they're good people to work with."

He's also more than aware that the problems with Ubuntu are more pronounced. "There have been a few Ubuntu specific activities happening to make things work better there; one is the Utnubu project, which incorporates people from Debian who are working to include Ubuntu's changes back into Debian (hence the name, "Ubuntu" in reverse). I believe they're hoping to have a report of what's been going on out in the next few days. Matt Zimmerman's been doing a lot of work from the Ubuntu side in trying to get things working out, and I think he's hoping to be able to include a 'demystification' page as part of the report to better explain how Ubuntu works from a Debian perspective."