On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 05:06:38PM -0400, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > On 8/19/2022 4:44 PM, piorunz wrote: > > On 19/08/2022 18:57, Chuck Zmudzinski wrote: > > > > > I have noticed that some Debian bugs are ignored for a long time [...] > > > > Hi Chuck, > > > > Maybe because developers/maintainers are not paid by the hour, but mere > > volunteers, don't you think? There is another point: the package maintainer is very autonomous in how (s)he does her thing. This has advantages and disadvantages. There are processes in place for resolving such situations as when a maintainer becomes unresponsive (perhaps (s)he has moved on to other things, perhaps (s)he is in some situation of distress). Among others, there is the NMU [0]. This question comes up regularly in this list. Had you searched the archives, you'd found things like this [1] with advice (hint: this would leave developers more time for fixing bugs ;-) There is good advice by Jonathan Dowland in the linked thread on how to do something about it. Want to give it a try? > So that means "free" software written and maintained by volunteers will never be as > stable and secure as software that is written by people who are paid by the hour. This is, of course, nonsense. This would be only the case if the instance giving out the cash had an interest on the software being "stable and secure". Most of the time they have an interest on the software being sold, or on it generating cash flow via other means (gathering user data, for that to be sold, for example). So they will allocate their resources accordingly. I've worked in the belly of big corps for a while and I assure you that my boss wouldn't allow me to fix a bug unless (s)he could justify to their bosses that the 1400 dollars "spent" on this are coming back in some way. Witness the whole history of Microsoft software with its incredible ecosystem of malware, and you'll see how wrong your idea is :) So each "world" has its upsides and (surprise!) its downsides. That doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see projects like Debian better funded, mind you. There are also people thinking about this. There are companies which sponsor Debian, there are companies which let employees work for Debian on their company time; one seemingly successful example is Freexian [2], which offers services by keeping alive older versions of Debian. I get you want to contribute? ;-) Cheers [0] https://wiki.debian.org/NonMaintainerUpload [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/05/threads.html#00028 [2] https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html -- t
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