A market perspective on the impact of dunc-tanc
Howdy,
I'm a sysadmin of the Unix half of a small University
main server room. Recently we have been trying to
decide on a replacement for FreeBSD for 14 servers.
I favor Debian, however I can't make that decision on
my own. I found it was a challenge to convince
others in the decision making process that Debian
is solid and here to stay when the Dunc Tanc causes
the Weekly News to drop out of consistent appearance.
I know there are alternate sources of information, but
one must consider that non-Linux users are amongst
the visitors of the Debian project web site.
It is small things about the web site for Debian which
make Debian look less maintained than it really is.
I understand the political tug of war the DWN editor
is involved in, but in the end, holding a gun to the head
of what you like isn't helping anything. The missing DWN
is one missing piece of "product" continuity, and reading
the "why" just makes things worse. The people involved
are shown to be struggling for their individual rights
on the same level as teenagers refusing to return
someones possessions until the other person returns
something they are missing (regardless of whether
they really need it). Principled self-righteousness is
something that even 6 year olds can master (I have one).
Its absence in mature people is sometimes mistaken for
lack of awareness or apathy.
It would be great if snarls between perspectives of developers
had no impact on DWM and other aspects of Debian. If a person
developing Debian truly loves what they are doing, the Dunc Tanc
should have no impact on what they are contributing either way.
One way to protest it is to ignore it and stick to the essentials.
It might seem insane, but there are people in the world
who plant crops while bullets and mines are real threats.
There is no point protesting when what you need to do
is ensure you have food to live on in the future.
It is the same with Debian. It will only grow stronger with continued
efforts of volunteers. If it woobles and appears like the project web
site of something much smaller, decision makers will not
trust Debian as a mature, robust and trustworthy source of
Linux and Linux applications.
So far, I have failed to convince other decision makers that
Debian deserves more roles in our server room, and we
are headed to adoption of Redhat. Yes, it is insane that
decisions like this are made by someone with 20 minutes
of experience installing Linux, but that it how it is. They
might have been more willing to consider my opinion
if Debian's web appearance, newsletters, etc. demonstrated
that Debian is backed by a "thousand plus" highly talented developers.
Typically when I have criticism of something open source, I hear
back retorts of "why don't you volunteer to fix it?". I will answer
that right now. It takes all kinds of people to make Debian a
success, not only people writing code and documentation.
I have contributed to open source projects where I've
had the time and talent to do so. At the current stage
of my life I don't have the time to do more. So my main role in
supporting it will be advocate, user, product demonstrator
and perhaps once in awhile, commenter.
If there are other users who also feel this issue has degraded the
appearance of the Debian project and its web site, you might share
your view.
--Donald
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