On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 08:44:56AM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > We appreciate feedback while we continue our investigation of CDNs. Hi Tollef, thanks for bringing this discussion to -project. I'm myself against switching to a CDN, but it might be due to a lack of information on my part, so I'd love if DSA could fill in my gaps. Debian is a Free Software project. I think that is what should drive our choices and nothing else. As such I'd hate seeing Debian moving, by default, to a content delivery solution that is made of proprietary software parts. That would be very bad for the Debian Project, as it would send the message that while we do create an entirely Free OS for others, we are fine with using proprietary software to do so (Mako has expressed this concept much better than I could possibly do in his "Free Software Needs Free Tools" essay http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html ). In my mind, using a CDN made of non-free parts would be exactly the same as using a proprietary BTS, or replacing the DBMS that backs dak with Oracle Database. I do realize that most of the value of a CDN is not in its software parts. But I'm under the impression there is still quite a bit of software behind commercial CDN offerings. So my question is: would the CDN providers we're going to choose be able to ensure that the software parts behind their offerings to us are 100% Free Software? I don't think we have enough leverage to impose that. But if it is the case my "non 100% Free Software" concern above would certainly disappear. Another way of making my concern moot would be to use the CDN only as a non-default option that users should explicitly choose, and label it as some non official service. That would reduce the impression that the Debian Project endorses infrastructures that rely on non-free software. For instance, we could repurpose the cdn.debian.net name (assuming the current maintainer is fine with the idea) and present it as an option to our users. A corollary of this is that it would be difficult to use the CDN for things like www.debian.org (probably making moot many of the advantages you're looking for). An unrelated concern is that of technical independence. I do see a lot of value in Debian "social experiment" (quoting here a very nice way of calling it that Lucas has come up to) of trying to do almost everything by ourselves, from packaging to legal, from marketing to sysadm'ing. Of course it comes with a lot of drawbacks, and I don't think it is something rooted in Debian principles. But it is a very nice characteristic of our Project, and I think we should be very careful before giving it up, even if in only in specific areas. In your mail you've addressed the concern of excessive dependence on a *single* CDN provider, mentioning that you're looking into how easily switch from one provider to another. Would it be equally easy to get rid of the CDN --- or switch to a more home brew (set of) CDN(s) --- if things go awry? (FWIW, I'm not myself worried about dependency on money / hw coming from companies, I'm very well aware that Debian needs quite a bit of resources from companies. But that concern is very much mitigated by the diversity in donors, or at least by the fact that we can have that diversity. Technical dependency is IMHO much worse, because to get diversity there you need to have in place, beforehand, the needed abstraction layers.) Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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