Hi,
I',m impress. The responses to 'why debian' show that it has won some strong converts and it is supported by some staunch loyalists. I need to know more. There was mention about "never for profit", "protected non-profit". It is compared to US democracy and monasteries in medieval England.
My picture of the Debian organisation as gathered from the responses is as follows. I'm ready to be corrected.
Debian GNU/Linux is a version of Linux developed freely by volunteers. These voluntary developers are organised as a hierarchical organisation with leader(s) at the top.
Questions.
A big project like this will definitely incur expenses. Do volunteers contribute financially too? If that is the case, in my opinion, Debian could disappear in two possible ways.
1. The volunteers decided that there should be some financial reward for their work. They could accept an offer by a well established enterprise to 'buy' over their work or they could collectively decide to form a corporation.
2. Volunteers dwindle to an ineffective few, preferring to spend their time on work with more reward and recognition.
What is the geographical spread of the Debian organisation, is it US-centric? Are the developers mostly US-based? Right now, under the initiative of Oracle, there are companies in China, Japan and S. Korea coming together to develop another version of Linux called Asianux. This may start a new trend of 'regional Linux'.
I roughly know that the US and non-US version got to do with encryption. But what is the restriction? People in US or outside US can download either version, right?
Cheers
Ken