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Re: Question to all candidates: In eight years...



On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 07:27:55PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> this is the echo of a question asked two years ago in the 2010 campaign.
>   http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2010/03/msg00057.html

“In ten^Weight years I'd like Debian...”:

- to be backed by a massively diverse community, even more than today,
  with all kinds of contributions (packaging, Debian-specific sw
  development, sysadm-ing, porting, documentation, translating,
  communication, marketing, user support, ...) balanced in terms of
  available contributors

- to be recognized as THE distribution who care the most about software
  freedom, by all Free Software actors, be them technical or more
  "political" entities

- to have an ecosystem similar to that of the Linux kernel today, in the
  following senses:

  1. have downstream vendors (derivatives distros, hw vendors, and
     whatnot) compete to have their changes integrated where they
     belong, i.e. either in Debian or further upstream

  2. have both volunteers and companies participating into Debian
     development, with both kinds of actors equally submitted to Debian
     customs (peer review, RC bug fixing duties, NMUs, etc.)

  3. as a corollary of (2), have a healthy, visible, and transparent
     ecosystem of Debian-related jobs that allow those who can't afford
     contributing to Debian as volunteers, to do so nonetheless

- to be more uniform in package maintenance practices, in terms of used
  VCS and packaging helpers, in order to minimize the barriers to
  package contributions and automate more easily our packaging
  work-flows

- to have 1/ all packages maintained in VCSs, and 2/ commit access to
  those VCSs open _by default_ to all DDs

- to have, in addition to stable releases, a new Debian product ---
  which I should call "rolling" for the lack of fantasy --- that is
  suited for the needs of software developers and "bleeding edge" users
  than the current mixture of stable/testing/unstable

- to have at least 5 year security support for stable releases

- to have (at least) one non-Linux port up to par with Linux ports

> In addition, do you see major changes happening in the recent or next
> years, and how do you think Debian should react to them ?

I've mentioned this in various interviews, and I'm still convinced that
one of the most important changes for Free Software is the advent of the
so called "cloud", in its various incarnations. As a result of them,
more and more of user-relevant computations are moving away from user
computers to remote servers that are not under user controls. If the
trend continues, we risk to see Free Software succeeding on user owned
computers, whereas they would have become nothing more than dumb
terminals back in the days of mainframes.

Debian should react first of all by ensuring that public "cloud"
providers deploy Free Software distros, possibly Debian, on their
infrastructures. Then, we should encourage upstream who produce
distributed / federated network services and make them trivial to deploy
on Debian as more old school server software used to be. Finally we
should make technically easy to deploy Debian-based private "clouds",
because they tend to be way more close to user control than public ones.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli     zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences   ......   http://upsilon.cc/zack   ......   . . o
Debian Project Leader    .......   @zack on identi.ca   .......    o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

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