<toc-add-entry name="russ">On Debian and popularity</toc-add-entry>
Russ Allbery wrote<a
href="http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2012-01/004.html";>an
interesting blog post</a> about Debian and popularity, fully reported
below.
<br />
<q>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.
<br />
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<strong>keeping</strong> Debian successful, not
about<strong>making</strong> Debian successful.
<br />
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 the percentage of Debian users in the broader computing context
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.</q>