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Can the Debian Project ever fall?

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  Can the Debian Project ever fall? Shayan Akbar <shayanakbar94@gmail.com> - 2022-06-06 17:00 +0200
    Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> - 2022-06-06 18:10 +0200
      Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2022-06-06 19:10 +0200
    Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2022-06-06 23:00 +0200
      Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Pierre-Elliott Bécue <peb@debian.org> - 2022-06-07 00:40 +0200
      Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> - 2022-06-07 01:10 +0200
      Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2022-06-07 07:00 +0200
        Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Jonathan Carter <jcc@debian.org> - 2022-06-07 19:10 +0200
    Re: Can the Debian Project ever fall? Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> - 2022-06-07 03:30 +0200

#12835 — Can the Debian Project ever fall?

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Hello Debian folks,

As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?

How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need to
control and own?

How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
benefiting billions?

Shayan,
A curious linux user.

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#12836

On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:37:27AM -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:
> Hello Debian folks,
> 
> As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
> cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?
> 
> How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need to
> control and own?
> 
> How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
> benefiting billions?
> 
> Shayan,
> A curious linux user.

Be more curious and ask

  How to get Debian in a better shape?


Yes, that implies going from good to better.



Regards
Geert Stappers
-- 
Silence is hard to parse

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#12837

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On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 05:07:50PM +0200, Geert Stappers wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:37:27AM -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:
> > Hello Debian folks,
> > 
> > As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
> > cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?

[...]

> Be more curious and ask
> 
>   How to get Debian in a better shape?
> 
> 
> Yes, that implies going from good to better.

:-)

I was thinking along the lines of: "it won't fall if and only if
you help".

Cheers
-- 
t

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#12838

On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:37:27AM -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:
> Hello Debian folks,
> 
> As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
> cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?
> 
> How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need to
> control and own?
> 
> How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
> benefiting billions?

We are doing well.  The RPM world is collapsing -- Red Hat pretty much
committed suicide, it had ~70% of the market but chosen only fat lucratious
corporate clients, who grant mucho $$$s but these days development is so
open that the NDA world is not enough to sustain enough upstream work to
prevent Red Hat from rapidly shrinking.  The CentOS debacle was quite the
fat lady singing.  They follow the Solaris tracks both in scheme and timing
-- first market share loss, then buyout by a corporation known for
nickle-and-diming, then hiring freeze, then last free release, then...
The track is set.  Is sad to see them go but I have little hope.  Fedora is
merely Red Hat-unstable.  SuSE is quite independent and, while small, does
enough own development to possibly survive Red Hat's collapse.  But IBM's
Red Hat...  it'll have several great quarters then go down the hole that
swallowed SCO, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, etc...

The popcorn world: Gentoo, Slack, Arch, Alpine -- they do produce quite a
bit of innovation that _is_ relevant, but as for number of users -- naah,
they hardly count.

Ubuntu on the other hand is WTF-level unstable.  First the Unity/GNOME
disaster, then they totally snapped over, then their last LTS is so buggy it
tends to randomly crash whatever I do, especially on !x86.  Ppc64el falls
apart, when I tried to use vectorscan:arm64 it had heisenbugs not
reproducible on Debian, etc.  I may need to touch Ubuntu for work stuff
porting, but as an user, on random hosting VMs, I'm gone.  Crossgrading
to Debian is an instant fix that brings stability and when not paid, I'm
not going to spend my copious free time to debug Ubuntu bugs.

What we do suffer though, is insane politics.


Meow!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁                                   Loongarch's name is loong.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀

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#12839

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Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote on 06/06/2022 at 21:55:40+0200:

> On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:37:27AM -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:
>> Hello Debian folks,
>> 
>> As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
>> cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?
>> 
>> How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need to
>> control and own?
>> 
>> How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
>> benefiting billions?
>
> We are doing well.  The RPM world is collapsing -- Red Hat pretty much
> committed suicide, it had ~70% of the market but chosen only fat lucratious
> corporate clients, who grant mucho $$$s but these days development is so
> open that the NDA world is not enough to sustain enough upstream work to
> prevent Red Hat from rapidly shrinking.  The CentOS debacle was quite the
> fat lady singing.  They follow the Solaris tracks both in scheme and timing
> -- first market share loss, then buyout by a corporation known for
> nickle-and-diming, then hiring freeze, then last free release, then...
> The track is set.  Is sad to see them go but I have little hope.  Fedora is
> merely Red Hat-unstable.  SuSE is quite independent and, while small, does
> enough own development to possibly survive Red Hat's collapse.  But IBM's
> Red Hat...  it'll have several great quarters then go down the hole that
> swallowed SCO, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, etc...
>
> The popcorn world: Gentoo, Slack, Arch, Alpine -- they do produce quite a
> bit of innovation that _is_ relevant, but as for number of users -- naah,
> they hardly count.
>
> Ubuntu on the other hand is WTF-level unstable.  First the Unity/GNOME
> disaster, then they totally snapped over, then their last LTS is so buggy it
> tends to randomly crash whatever I do, especially on !x86.  Ppc64el falls
> apart, when I tried to use vectorscan:arm64 it had heisenbugs not
> reproducible on Debian, etc.  I may need to touch Ubuntu for work stuff
> porting, but as an user, on random hosting VMs, I'm gone.  Crossgrading
> to Debian is an instant fix that brings stability and when not paid, I'm
> not going to spend my copious free time to debug Ubuntu bugs.
>
> What we do suffer though, is insane politics.
>
>
> Meow!

That's… a bit salty.

Not that it's wrong, but some things could probably be nuanced.

Cheers!
-- 
PEB

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#12840

Le Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:55:40PM +0200, Adam Borowski a écrit :
> 
> We are doing well.  The RPM world is collapsing
> 
> The popcorn world: Gentoo, Slack, Arch, Alpine -- they do produce quite a
> bit of innovation that _is_ relevant, but as for number of users -- naah,
> they hardly count.
> 
> Ubuntu on the other hand is WTF-level unstable.

Hi all,

I would like to pay tribute to Arch Linux in this thread.

When I have a problem, its solution is most often in the Arch wiki.

Hats off, Arch !

Have a nice day,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy                         Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team         http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tooting from work,           https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy
Tooting from home,                 https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy

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#12842

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On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:55:40PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 09:37:27AM -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:
> > Hello Debian folks,
> > 
> > As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life, I
> > cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?
> > 
> > How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need to
> > control and own?
> > 
> > How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
> > benefiting billions?
> 
> We are doing well.  The RPM world is collapsing [...]

Wow. Just wow. Did you know that Redhat is more or less single-handedly
financing GCC and libc since... like ever?

> [...] SuSE is quite independent and, while small, does

You count SuSE to the Redhat world just because at some point in their
past they adopted RPM? A distro is more than its package manager. And
oh, they are feeding more than one kernel developer. Would you like a
world where every Linux kernel developer is in the belly of some big
corp the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Intel et
al?

> The popcorn world: Gentoo, Slack, Arch, Alpine -- they do produce quite a
> bit of innovation that _is_ relevant, but as for number of users -- naah,
> they hardly count.

[...]

Again: wow. Just wow. As Charles put it in another thread, the world
(and as a part of it, the Debian world!) would be much poorer without
Arch's "popcorn", most probably without the others, too -- just my
little brain is too limited to provide concrete examples for each
and every one.

Thing is, Debian is living in a wonderful environment and "steals"
right and left (and is "stolen from"), courtesy of the free software
idea. And we're all richer for that!

> What we do suffer though, is insane politics.

This is what makes Debian what it is: it's one of the differences
to the other distros.

Your standpoint is... strange.

Cheers
-- 
t

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#12843

On 2022/06/07 06:48, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Thing is, Debian is living in a wonderful environment and "steals"
> right and left (and is "stolen from"), courtesy of the free software
> idea. And we're all richer for that!

Well, the views of people (or even Debian developers (or even the DPL)) 
on this list don't necessarily reflect the views of the entire project. 
But I for one can tell you that I value the work that Arch, Alpine, Red 
Hat, Ubuntu, etc does, and hope that the positive relationship and areas 
where we can contribute together (examples: lts kernels, reproducible 
builds, that kind of stuff) continues to happen and expand so that there 
are more areas we can work on together and duplicate less work.

As for the future of Debian, I consider it a very young project, some 
people consider it old because it's one of the distros that's been 
around along time, but we're still going through teething problems, and 
so is the software industry as a whole, if you'd compare us to the motor 
industry, I think we're just about transitioning out of the Model T Ford 
era right now, the future of software is exciting and I think the pace 
of development is going to increase to the point where in a few years, 
we could easily clump together the computers we have today along with 
the ones from the 90's.

As for Debian, I think we're either going to figure out how to adapt and 
move faster, and play a bigger role in the world of software, or another 
Debian is going to come along with similar values that's more organised 
and does it instead.

-Jonathan

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#12841

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On Mon, 2022-06-06 at 09:37 -0500, Shayan Akbar wrote:

> As someone who depends on the Debian project a lot in my daily life,
> I cannot seem to let this idea go... Can the linux project fall?

The Linux kernel project has been around since 1991 and is supported by
a large number of companies and volunteers. As with any project, Linux
of course has weaknesses and threats, but it is likely that Linux will
be with us for a long time.

https://lwn.net/Articles/895800/

Should the Linux project no longer be viable, Debian could expend some
effort to shift focus towards one of the many other kernel projects
that have been created since 1991.

> How does the project maintain itself against the man's intrinsic need
> to control and own?

Debian's structure and culture tries to balance the needs of each
participant in the project as well as balancing the needs of our users
and our philosophy. Through our focus on universality and pluralism we
are doing reasonably well in providing solutions for diverse needs,
retaining and attracting a diverse set of contributors to work on those
solutions and balancing the many external influences on our community.

https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy
https://www.debian.org/social_contract

> How many years can it stay strong and stay a free operating system
> benefiting billions?

Debian has been around for almost 30 years now and we have enough
participants and new contributors that we can probably continue.

In case you are interested in helping Debian stick around and stay
relevant for the next 30 years, please join us in improving Debian,
there are many different ways to help out using the skills that you
have now and you are sure to learn new skills while helping out:

https://www.debian.org/intro/help

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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