Dear Debian developers, for some reason I am subscribed to debian-devel and even try to read most of the posts. I guess I do that to stay in touch with the most recent developments, but it is also I fairly good indicator of the projects climate ... which seems to be getting colder ... But I cannot understand _why_ this is happening. Posts in the thread started by the resignation of our secretary (but, in fact, also countless times before) have speculated that it might be due to an unfortunate (self-)selection of people generating most traffic on the major mailing lists, preferably about supposed-to-be-negative aspects of this project. What can be done? Let me express my appreciation and gratitude for Debian. I believe that the Debian project (not just the OS it produces) is an outstanding and unique example of what can be jointly achieved by people from a huge range of cultural backgrounds, access to monetary ressources and types (or sources) of motivation. Given the reality on this planet, the sheer existance of the project after so many years is so unlikely that Hollywood should think about a movie. I am really proud to be able to contribute my bits to Debian. Debian is about freedom and Debian is setting the standards. The project is percieved as the mothership of free-software. Software that is not in Debian is hardly distributed somewhere else. If you want to have something in Debian, you have to do it _right_. Not just on the software-enginering side, but also wrt the legal situation. A lot of people only start thinking about what a license really is about when forced to obey it by some Debian packager. IMHO this is very important as it propagates the idea in an effective and productive way -- much more than a disfunctional wireless device due to a missing firmware. Sorry, for the long intro -- here is my 'success story'. I work in the neurosciences. Fortunately, over the last few years the idea of open-source (sadly not necessarily of free _and_ open source) got established in this science community. More and more great pieces of software become available. But even better: more and more software also becomes part of Debian (see http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/imaging.html for the ones relevant for my research). Debian can be considered the optimal environment for brain imaging research (compared to all other possible operating systems). It allows neuroscientists to setup a functional analysis environment within a few hours ... and keep it that way for years with minimal effort. This is only possible due to the _joint_ effort of the whole Debian project. I can only fail to list and thank all the subprojects and developers who contribute to that success, therefore I will only pick a few examples: You cannot make people try the universal OS if it doesn't run on their hardware. Thanks to the amazing Debian installer it runs on almost anything. In a number of neuroscience labs I know it is often the case that people are forced to work in some predefined environment, set up to fulfil the needs of the sysadmin, not the researcher. Quickly installing Debian in a VM is actually helping a lot of people to be more productive. But for sure it serves as a proper desktop, the powerful workstation and the computing cluster equally well. Thanks for that. I am also part of the upstream developer team of a machine-learning framework geared towards neurocientific datasets (http://www.pymvpa.org and of course http://packages.debian.org/unstable/python/python-mvpa). This framework is intended to glue together lots of generic packages and make them available for neuroscience research through a uniform interface. Again, Debian is the optimal environment to do that, as it provides almost any software package that is useful for our purpose. I went through the process of providing binary packages for this tool and its major dependencies on other operating systems. For some it is almost impossible (win), for some painful (mac). The OpenSuse build service is a great tool to compile stuff for a wide range of RPM-based distros, but still you have to do it yourself, as there is not a strong neuroscience-related community. In Debian however, you have a great Python team and the Debian-med blend, that make it a nice and pleasant job. Thanks for that as well. But the best is that people get used to things being to easy and just work that they start to demand more. With a (admittedly still low), but increasing frequency you hear people: 'I have this Debian setup, will your new tool work in it?' ... setting standards. I hope Debian will continue to provide this rich environment (even for the very-special-interest software) and propagate the idea of freedom. I could go on for a while listing examples of what makes me happy about Debian, but I guess this message is already long enough. I'd love if the feeling while reading -devel would become a bit more similar to the one I get when using the OS. Michael -- GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke ICQ: 48230050
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature