Hey all, First note: this mail doesn't have anything to do with the second annual debconf ball coming up later this week. We're talking partner organisations, not dance partners. Just to be clear. :) One of the great things about Debian is all the organisations that want to work with us -- not just taking what we offer and doing cool stuff with it, but wanting to find ways to contribute back and make life easier for us. Debconf 6 in Mexico at the moment, eg, is being organised, paid for and assisted with the support of a range of organisations both local and international, including, (in back of proceedings order) HP, IBM, Intel, Yaguarete Security, Nokia, VA Linux, Ubuntu, Tallard, Aruba, alposNAZ, Collax Simply Linux, Xandros, fnb, gandi.net, gnuLinEx, Simbiotica, Linspire, Linux magazine, MySQL, IIE, NetApp, Opera, O'Reilly, Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, Sine Nomine Associates, Univention, AMESOL, Compugraf, NeoCenter, Copyleft, VoxKit, and ByteMark hosting. Thanks to the assistance of these organisations, Debian (in the form of a large, busy, and frequently stressed organising team) has been able to organise food, accommodation and bandwidth for a couple of week's hacking and chatting amongst the people lucky enough to be able to come, cover travel costs for a number of attendees, that should result in a bunch of great improvements to Debian. We're also currently in the stage of reviewing applications for the Google Summer of Code programme, which should give us the opportunity to have a few students spend a couple of months working full time on some neat development projects -- the applications aren't completely ranked yet, and we don't know how many we'll be able to accept, but so far it looks like we should have some excellent projects either built or with some serious improvements in a few months' time. There are too many other organisations that are contributing to Debian, to even imagine giving a complete list -- whether it be by donating hardware, donating bandwidth, turning a blind eye to (or even encouraging) developers who hack on Debian at work, building neat new stuff that lets more people benefit from Debian, going above and beyond the call of duty when looking over Debian-specific issues, or even just taking Debian's principles and adapting them or extending them for new situations and giving credit for the inspiration. Not everyone find the Debian project interesting, but we're in the extremely fortunate position that the people who do almost always seem to want to find ways to help us achieve our goals. So the point of this mail is to encourage everyone to think about ways in which we can help organisations that would like to be our partners work better with us. Because that's harder than it sounds: it's not just a matter of saying "give us money", we need to have some way to actually spend that in accordance with our principles before that actually becomes helpful; it's not a matter of saying "give us hardware" or "give us bandwidth" if we don't have the bandwidth to go with the hardware (or vice-versa), or don't actually use the machine when it's set up. Nor is it a win if we overload the machine to the point where it's unable to reliably provide services, or where it needs to be pulled or throttled by the hosting provider. And we can't accept every offer of help that's made, even when we're technically able: sometimes we will choose to work without help, because that help can't be made equally available to our users or others in the free software community, and it will be more of a benefit to both those groups if we find a way to move forward without the assistance. So I'd encourage everyone to spend some time over the next little while thinking seriously about other groups that are interested in Debian, and looking for a chance to help, and working out if there's anything you can do to help make that a reality. Sometimes even just listening to their ideas and making encouraging sounds or offering some small constructive criticisms is all that's needed. Other times, it's harder. One thing I've been thinking about is whether we should try to come up with a social contract for partners -- so that we would have a way of officially recognising the organisations that work with us on an ongoing basis, and so that employees can demonstrate to their bosses, or management to their shareholders that working with Debian provides tangible recognition that can be translated into goodwill from potential customers. And providing some good basic principles that we expect partners to adhere to -- and that they can explicitly agree to or even reject -- could provide a much more solid basis on which we can cooperate on projects in the future, and maybe avoid some of the mixed expectations and the problems they cause that have come up in the past. Problem is, I don't have any idea what such a social contract would actually look like. I guess it would have to be some sort of template, so that some organisations could (eg) commit to following the DFSG in everything they produce, and others could be recognised at a different level that lets them contribute without giving up existing commitments to proprietary software. Presumably there needs to be something about how to cooperate with maintainers who have wildly different ways of working, and different opinions on just what "volunteer" might mean, but what's a simple principle people can adhere to that would offer some good guidance on that for Debian? Maybe some of the aspects people could agree to will be "bad" in some sense -- distributing only DFSG-free software is a greater restriction than we place on ourselves, but if some partner organisation decides to do that, doesn't it deserve acknowledgement by Debian's standards? There probably needs to be some mention of the fact that working in Debian is a matter of cooperation, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still be competing tooth-and-nail with the same organisations in the real marketplace. I don't know if there's an answer to this, but I think it'd be great to hear the different things people think it means when an organisation joins the Debian community, and try to work that into some sort of a statement of principles that our partners -- both current and future -- will feel happy to endorse. Anyway, I need to be up all too soon to get to a BOF, so time to sign this mail and put it into the queue to send when I get to the hacklab tomorrow... (For those who're wondering, yes, this is pretty much what I'd been intending to talk about at the debconf welcome this morning if we hadn't taken so long moving from the Cabana de Cabala to the Casa de Cabala that we missed the opening...) Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns -- Debian Project Leader
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