Re: 1 year release good enough.
"dE ." <de.techno@gmail.com> writes:
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
> You might have 60% usage of Debian but for the world it's 0.02%.
I've never been fond of putting too much weight on this sort of
statistic.
One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of
a group of people who are working together to create something that,
primarily, we all want to use. Making it usable for everyone else as well
is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot
about. But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that
world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the
Debian project to be a success.
Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian,
every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran
into because it's Debian and I can help make it better. It's *fun* if I
can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an influx of
new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but that's
about *keeping* Debian successful, not about *making* Debian successful.
If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the
rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a
success, and I don't really care whether that number ever moves off of
0.02%. One of the great things about free software is that we're not a
business: we don't live or die by market share, we aren't going to get
bought out by someone else if we don't become a big enough fish, and we
don't have to grow 10% a year or implode. It would certainly be *nice* to
attract more people and more users and improve even faster, and I
certainly wouldn't want to stand in the way of that, but it's not part of
my metric of success.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: