Nota de un desarrollador de Debian
Hola muchachos, encontre esta nota en linux-watch.com, pense q tal vez
le interese leerla, es bastante interesante, es una carta de un
desarrollador de debian al editor de la web.
To: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
From: Thaddeus H. Black
Re: Debian
I have read with interest your several recent remarks on Debian.
The Debian Project is not always easy to understand, as seen from the
outside, but the Project will be all right. Could you attend Debconf7
in Edinburgh this summer, meeting the body of Debian Developers in
person and attending their meetings, sessions and hacklabs, I think
that you would come away with a rather different view of Debian's
long-term prospects. Several points follow for your consideration;
make of them what you will.
1. Debian's main, high-volume mailing lists necessarily give a
distorted view of Debian Development culture. A relative handful of
disgruntled people, not all of whom are even Debian Developers,
account for a surprisingly large fraction of the volume on the lists,
and for an even larger fraction of the heat there.
Debian Developers learn over time who the persistent hotheads are,
typically configuring their email filters quietly to catch and trash
the hotheads' mail. A visitor from the outside reads a lot of ranting
in the list archives, but the typical Developer probably ignores most
of the rants, never even opening the emails.
In this sense, most of the rants, never read by the body of
Developers, really are not even part of the Debian process. My own
email filter is configured to catch and trash emails from the dozen or
so worst offenders; so, from my perspective, Debian Project discourse
is actually pretty civil. I can certainly understand how it would
appear otherwise from your perspective! The appearance, however, is
mostly an illusion in my view.
2. There is a longstanding disagreement within the Project over the
role of a certain small platoon of Debian old-guardsmen. That platoon
fundamentally objects to the Project's democratic process, and
begrudge the authority of the elected Project Leader.
This, however, is not such a crisis as it might seem. One needs to
understand how fundamentally a volunteer project like Debian differs
from a corporation. No one can make a volunteer do anything. This is
important, because a member of the old-guard platoon who loves Debian
usually does more good for Debian, despite opposing the democratic
process, than does a Debian volunteer who simply stops working and
disappears. Yet of course the latter happens all the time, every
month. The old-guard dispute is not simple -- -surely it does fuel a
certain low level of simmering dissent -- -but it is a colorful thread
in the complex fabric of Debian Project life. It's all right.
3. On the Firefox trademark issue: if you will permit me to say it,
then I think that you have misread the situation.
Debian's core purpose, its reason for being, is to produce a free
computer operating system. The word "free" is essential to Debian, in
a fundamental way which differs from Ubuntu, Red Hat or SUSE.
It is no part of Debian's purpose, plan, wish, desire or mission to
provide or support non-free software. Now, this does not necessarily
make all non-free software bad, exactly; it merely makes it not part
of Debian. As well to complain to the police department that the
school bus comes late, as well to complain to the electrician that the
cabinets are badly installed, as to complain to Debian that Firefox is
not called by the name the public expects. To do so simply is not in
Debian's brief, nor ever has been, nor ever will be. If Red Hat or
whoever calls it Firefox, that's fine; but calling free software by
non-free names just isn't Debian's job.
Regarding the analogy between the Debian and Firefox trademarks,
consider: Debian asks that people who wish to use the Debian trademark
not use it to mark things which are not Debian. This is the normal,
ordinary use of a trademark, and if someone is unhappy with it, then
they merely are asked not to use the mark (they can use all Debian
software however they please; without fee, only they may not use the
mark).
Mozilla asks that people who wish to use the Firefox trademark agree
to follow certain rules which are not usual in the free-software
world; if someone is unhappy with this, then again they are asked not
to use the mark. So, Debian is not using the mark, exactly per the
mark holder's request. There is no scandal here. The Debian Project is
simply acceding to the stipulation of an important upstream developer
of software Debian distributes.
I think that some open-source users who like Debian will nevertheless
always be dissatisfied with Debian because Debian fundamentally is not
what they want it to be. Some are dissatisfied with Debian's slow
release cycle. Others are dissatisfied with Debian's refusal to
distribute non-free firmware. Yet others are dissatisfied because,
when they want a new feature, they may be asked to implement it
themselves and then submit their implementation as a patch to Debian's
bug-tracking system. You may be dissatisfied with Debian's naming of
software which commercially is called by another name!
It seems to me that all of these dissatisfactions somehow descend from
a fundamental misconception of Debian's nature, purpose and mission.
Debian cannot be something which it fundamentally is not. Debian would
be foolish to try.
Thanks for your interesting editorials. Continued good luck with Linux Watch.
--
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http://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/
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