Fwd: Are users of Debian software members of the Debian community?
On 9/15/22 8:33 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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!
>
I am sorry you misunderstand me. Please stop putting words in
my mouth. Let me speak for myself. I don't need you to tell me
what I think about Debian. I know what I think about Debian.
You obviously do not.
Best regards,
Chuck
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