Re: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community?
Chuck Zmudzinski <brchuckz@netscape.net> writes:
> To put it in the most brief terms, I come to that conclusion based on
> what many people are telling me: Debian maintainers cannot fix bugs in
> software because they are just volunteers. That explains why I almost
> always am at least annoyed by one or two bugs when running Debian
> software, and sometimes after an update the computer is totally unusable
> until I can debug it and find the fix, because volunteers don't have the
> time to do it for me. That is what most everyone on debian-user is
> telling me. Do you disagree with what they say?
> Also, in my experience, these bugs and catastrophic failures caused by
> updates of a supposedly stable release happened *much* less often when I
> used software that is written by paid developers.
So let's see if I've got this right. You don't like Debian's governance
structure or its constitution. You don't like that it's a volunteer
project. You think the software is lower-quality than software maintained
by paid developers. It has a bunch of bugs that annoy you that you don't
think you can get fixed. And you don't feel welcome in the community.
You... do realize that you can just not use Debian, right? It's okay to
use another Linux distribution that suits you better! This is an entirely
consensual relationship! We won't make you use Debian, I promise!
I'm all for sticking around and trying to fix things that you think are
broken, but these aren't some minor disagreements. These are some really
foundational mismatches. You seem to like Debian except for... literally
everything about how the project is organized and run.
There are a lot of other Linux distributions out there with different
philosophies and different organizations, and it's not some sort of
betrayal to go look at a different one. No one wants you to be unhappy
and frustrated, including everyone involved in Debian!
You could, for example, go give Red Hat money and then get that higher
quality software from paid developers that you want. They'll give you a
support contract and you can tell them what bugs you want fixed, and
they'll give you a quote, and you can give them money, and they'll fix the
bugs that you want fixed, and you can stop investing all this time and
effort in writing extremely long mail mesages to volunteers to convince
them that volunteering is bad, actually.
Or maybe the problem is that you want to be able to tell people what to
do, but you don't want to have to pay them? If so, uh, good luck with
that!
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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