Freedom in Debian
Dear Debian Project Team,
I hope you are well. I have been using Debian GNU /Linux since early
2000s, and found this project very helpful and inspiring for my own work
in a non-IT area. Currently, Debian GNU/Linux 11 is the only operating
system on my computers. It has also been adopted by some of my students.
I have used the advanced expert installation mode, and my system is
relatively highly customized. I found the Debian Installer shipped with
version 11.3 very helpful to quickly ad conveniently set up the system.
I have noticed that various companies have been promoted on the Debian
website in exchange for their donations. It is great that the Debian
Project can secure important financial support and promote free software
among companies. However, I have also felt that some promotion using
very large logos of companies that do not share many of the free
software values may go a bit too far, beside directly offering links to
log into their web services. To avoid any misunderstanding, I want to
say that it is great to engage corporations to support and participate
in free software projects as long as the free software and ethical
values and their adoption are amplified rather than distorted. I hope
that the Debian project will lose its unique character with freedom and
ethics at its core. I personally have used some academic services by
companies such as Google Scholar. I wish non-corporate platforms for
aggregating academic outputs and its metrics could be adopted in the
future. I feel ORCID is a step into that direction, but I do not quite
follow ORCID's ownership and corporate policies, and they do not
aggregate citation metrics (yet).
Personally, I am considering applying to join your project to help with
Debian activities related to development and scientific computing using
Modern Fortran based on my background in engineering sciences.
Best wishes,
Wojciech Lipiński
Canberra, Australia
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5478-6887
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