Re: Will Debian grow and stay?
ken keanon wrote:
Hi,
I',m impress. The responses to 'why debian' show that it has won some
strong converts and it is supported by some staunch loyalists. I need
to know more. There was mention about "never for profit", "protected
non-profit". It is compared to US democracy and monasteries in
medieval England.
My picture of the Debian organisation as gathered from the responses
is as follows. I'm ready to be corrected.
Debian GNU/Linux is a version of Linux developed freely by volunteers.
These voluntary developers are organised as a hierarchical
organisation with leader(s) at the top.
Questions.
A big project like this will definitely incur expenses. Do volunteers
contribute financially too? If that is the case, in my opinion, Debian
could disappear in two possible ways.
1. The volunteers decided that there should be some financial reward
for their work. They could accept an offer by a well established
enterprise to 'buy' over their work or they could collectively decide
to form a corporation.
2. Volunteers dwindle to an ineffective few, preferring to spend their
time on work with more reward and recognition.
What is the geographical spread of the Debian organisation, is it
US-centric? Are the developers mostly US-based? Right now, under the
initiative of Oracle, there are companies in China, Japan and S. Korea
coming together to develop another version of Linux called Asianux.
This may start a new trend of 'regional Linux'.
I roughly know that the US and non-US version got to do with
encryption. But what is the restriction? People in US or outside US
can download either version, right?
I'm not a Debian developer - my experience is within the Apache software
foundation. However, much will be the same.
I don't know how Debian finances its infrastructure (a number of
servers). I'm impressed with the performance it offers, esp given people
download entire operating systems, and many won't change their
sources.list file to point to a mirror. I'd be curious to know how it is
funded.
As to financial reward, you will find that many developers and
maintainers, esp those of core packages like Apache, etc, will actually
be employed because of their Debian involvement, especially to do Debian
development. However, they will be employed by enterprises that use
Debian, not by Debian itself. So they get the financial reward, just not
directly from the Debian organisation. I've seen this work in a number
of places. Now, there's a risk here. Those employers could change OS,
and Debian could loose a lot of paid time. However, Debian would have to
get real bad - imagine an ISP with 1000 installed servers. How willing
would you be to convert all those to RedHat or Suse?
Volunteers could dwindle, but in my view, as an outsider, working for
Debian does give recognition, and has its rewards, and this isn't going
to change. So long as you recognise that there is a mentality behind
many developers that is driven by technical rewards, and even
philosophical, not by financial ones. This 'aint gonna change.
That's my thoughts.
Regards, Upayavira
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