Comments on: Re Debian “missing a big opportunity”

By: Brandon White

Brandon White — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:11:22 +0000

We need distros like Ubuntu, they remind us what we have and to not take it for granted.

By: Ibrahim

Ibrahim — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 11:19:47 +0000

Thank you for your good contribution to the free world and hope good life in sun but take care about heat :)

By: Mario

Mario — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:11:39 +0000

I began my GnuLinux adventure with Ubuntu, but now I’m an happy Debian user and I completely agree with Debian policy and social contract.

By: Glanz

Glanz — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:14:30 +0000

http://www.debian-administration.org/users/glanz/weblog

By: John Talbut

John Talbut — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:15:02 +0000

I am a user and supporter of Debian. I think both the concept and the operation are brilliant.
I think it may be helpful to get away from the idea of democracy. Democracy is fundamentally stuck with the idea that a set of people can have one “will”, with procedures to try to work out what that “will” is and with the consequent battles.
An idea that I am trying to promote is that of panocracy, which seems much more in tune with open source ways of doing things. Panocracy recognises that everyone has different needs and opinions. It takes a more problem solving approach, as Debian does, to trying to meet as many of those needs as possible. It is open to alternative and even competing solutions (like KDE and Gnome). And it supports strong leadership since leaders do not have to have anyone’s permission to lead. On the other hand they need to have sufficient consent (not the same as consensus) since, if they do not, people will simply ignore or bypass them.

By: CJ Fearnley

CJ Fearnley — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 00:27:57 +0000

Debian is a phenomena that is very hard to understand: no social organization in human history is analogous to Debian. Debian is a globally cohered and oriented, large scale, software engineering democracy with one of the most ambitious missions in computing; namely, to build an easy to install, general purpose operating system (which is something that huge corporations with strong leaders like Sun and IBM also have trouble achieving). Such a thing has never been attempted in human history.

The amazing thing is that Debian has made it so far!!!

I value the perspective of those critical of Debian: it is true that Debian has not achieved its objectives as effectively as any of its participants might like: And that truth must be expressed. But that doesn’t mean that Debian if facing a do or die choice. There is a third way: the gradual tendency of Debian to continue getting better and better and better (but never as quickly nor as efficiently as some might prefer). Since this is what has happened for nearly 15 years, I am quite confident that it will continue for a long, long time.

By: Cassiano

Cassiano — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:45:07 +0000

I really don’t think that Debian’s users are about to move on. If you hang around enough in the debian-users mailing lists, you’ll see plenty of people who came to Debian from other distros, especially Ubuntu.

Yes, there are people who try to go away from Debian because of its defects, but I can state my experience and say that I have always come back to Debian. And after trying out Ubuntu, I have decided to stick permanently with Debian, at least as long as its social contract and philosophy exist.

By: Dennis

Dennis — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:39:23 +0000

I liken Debian to an old professor that is about to retire and absolutely refuses to use a computer. That is, Debian refuses to change, and its userbase is about to move on.

By: David Nusinow

David Nusinow — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:11:11 +0000

While I think you’re right that Debian has plenty of problems, some of which might be offset by having a strong leader, I’m not sure things are so dire as they seem. With the kernel bug resolved, it looks like we’ll release at the beginning of April, which is only 4 months later than the target date. Sure, that’s too late, but in comparison to how late sarge was, it’s a major improvement.

I’m also not sure that a strong leader would have been able to get etch out on time either. Where would a strong leader have found someone to fix the kernel in time for release? Today the project is full of leaders, and the leaders themselves are teams (the release team and DPL for example). Realistically, the project is still figuring out how to make this all work and make it scale up even further, and I think that this release has gone much more smoothly than sarge’s indicates that we’re making progress.

By: Well

Well — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:46:11 +0000

Hope we will see something new after this short history of the computer sience. It is hard to do miracles at short time like pyramid in eegypt.