hckrnws

I am not native english so maybe it's just me, but I think the title is misleading because it suggests that Debian could be struggling with a situation where developers would massively drift away (my first reaction was "what ?? is there really a significant amount of devs that are leaving Debian now, and why ?"), while actually it's more a discussion on how to bring awareness to a team and encourage developers to better communicate with colleagues when they have a life change that would lower their commitment (which can happen to anyone, and in any project), so that the project can better handle when a developer "drifts away".

I am a native English speaker, and it's not just you.

It is a good way to see which commenters read the article instead of just the headline.

I believe the problem with Debian and many open source projects is that communities outside the US, Greater China, India, and some advanced European countries are relatively weak, making it difficult for project leader-level figures to emerge. I was born and raised in South Korea, a virtual open-source wasteland. Listening to testimonies from developers working here, many say, “I was captivated by the GNU spirit and wanted to contribute, but the Korean community's operations were poor, and clique-based territorialism was severe.” Ultimately, many open-source projects paradoxically miss out precisely because of their idealism and open management culture. I'd like to summarize it this way:

- Combining open source developers outside the core development regions and major cultural spheres could potentially secure roughly as many contributors as the entire US. - Funding shortages for non-profit foundations are deeply entrenched. Denying or attempting to fix this immediately becomes greed. - It is possible to manage language barriers, cultural barriers, and guidelines for distant countries without becoming a greedy for-profit entity. - This does not mean holding DebConf in every country. However, if the awareness is simply that ‘there used to be no borders, but now it's different from the 90s’ regarding the shortage of personnel, then improvements should be more proactive. - The 2020s are no longer an era of romanticism where one flies from Angola to Germany just for the sake of romance. - Especially as Debian has established itself as an invisible system, becoming the backbone of countless cloud services, there is less room for romanticism to intervene.

I've used Debian since 2015 and have had no complaints during that time. Korea also had ‘administrators’ who spared no expense on plane tickets for GNU since the 90s, but most have now stepped down due to age, or, exhausted from trying to salvage communities torn apart by toxic members, have turned around and declared ‘BSD was right’. However, the project's sustainability deteriorating due to a ‘lack of administrators’ is definitely something that needs to be considered. If sufficient people cannot be recruited, and given that we cannot extend the freeze cycle like Slackware at present, communication between upstream and downstream and the active recruitment of multinational developers are important to resolve the complaints of ‘dependent families’ like Ubuntu.

The challenge outlined by the article is the lack of communication regarding the change in availability of Debian volunteers themselves. TFA doesn't mention issues regarding recruitment of new developers.

Try making the term as a developer time limited, such as for a two-year period. The developer must actively renew the term. The point wouldn’t be to kick developers out after two years; there would be no limit on renewals and no requirement for approval. Rather, it makes the commitment a limited rather than unlimited one and forces the developer to periodically think: do I still want to do this? Then, passively taking no action causes the commitment to end, rather than the developer having to actively say “I don’t want to do this anymore.” This takes the shame out of it.

I once got rms himself reaching out to me, when my mails got stuck. Gmail probably dropping spam from unknown GNU accounts. That was quite a challenge! Hope it never happens to you.

[flagged]

It’s two sentences for goodness sake. Why on earth should anyone spend their time reading your “thoughts” when you don’t think it’s worth spending your time to write them?

More substantively, I don’t believe it is true, but hypothetically why would “the real” problem be having 100 distros on distrowatch with little to choose between them? The benefit of open source for the individual is supposed to be the opportunity to learn by doing and to have the freedom to do things however you want, and the benefit to the community is this extreme Darwinian process where lots of crazy people try all sorts of things and the community as a whole picks results they like. All of these benefits arise precisely because there are a lot of projects, many of which don’t achieve mass adoption.

I flagged him for that, and I hate flagging, usually only ever doing it for spam, but frankly, that's almost what it is. Completely disrespectful.

>Letting Claude summarize my thoughts for me on this:

Please don't. If you want to contribute, contribute your own words.

Debian's Data Protection Team was established back in 2018 for dealing with European data protection legislation like the GDPR.

perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik

Hahaha

Dude I play eve online! We compete for these unpaid space jobs where you have to read reports and click a button on a website without even logging into the game.

Heck I play with at least one ports commit guy from a bsd

And even that is more appealing than dealing with european regulators

Now do systemd.

When Debian is making decisions to abandon social media accounts which give them reach outside of their own bubble from the 90s consisting of mailing lists and irc it is hard to see there be a sustainable future for the project.

I'm confused, are you saying Debian shouldn't abandon social media accounts? Are there people following distros on social media to where it's that relevant?

I am saying that if you have an outlet where your posts are getting 10 to 20 thousand impressions, the most impressions out of any other channel of communication you should not abandon it.

Being on social media is very relevant due to both content discovery algorithms being able to connect people who may be interested in the project with the project itself and because social media sites can have things go viral outside of your own personal reach. Your post can reposted or spread by other accounts easier if its originating from the platform itself instead of hopping someone sees it and copies onto the platform.

Mindshare matters, too. A big reason why small distros manage to get a foothold is because they're highly visible in places that get traffic (which then kicks off a virtuous cycle further increasing visibility). When existing Linux users get an itch to try a different distro, the ones that will come to mind to try are those they saw on reddit/youtube/xitter/etc, and Linux newbies are also going to be inclined towards these high visibility distros.

Holing up in mailing lists definitely isn't going to help with pulling in users or devs.

Speaking from personal experience which is admittedly quite old at this point, but it used to be the case that Debian definitely didn’t go out of its way to try to pull in devs. When I had a few small open source things myself I packaged them for RedHat (this is pre-fedora when RedHat didn’t have a commercial and free version, they just had “RedHat Linux”) and looked to package them for debian, given I was actually using debian for a few of my personal servers. I made the .deb packages just fine but found the Debian community were definitely not trying to attract devs[1]. I couldn’t get anyone from Debian to sign my gpg keys which if I recall correctly was a necessary part in getting my package upstreamed[2] and in the end I just gave up on it because I’m really not interested in joining a community that is so unwelcoming.

[1] although it was maybe specifically just me they weren’t trying to attract.

[2] to the point where I actually worked with someone in my day job who was a debian dev and he wouldn’t sign my key without me producing physical official ID like a passport or something. Just really bizarre level of paranoia like a government kyc process or something.

[2]: https://www.debian.org/events/keysigning

People should only sign a key under at least two conditions:

The key owner convinces the signer that the identity in the UID is indeed their own identity by whatever evidence the signer is willing to accept as convincing. Usually this means the key owner must present a government issued ID with a picture and information that match up with the key owner. (Some signers know that government issued ID's are easily forged and that the trustability of the issuing authorities is often suspect and so they may require additional and/or alternative evidence of identity).

The key owner verifies that the fingerprint and the length of the key about to be signed is indeed their own.

--

...debian is INDEED old-school and slightly derpy (see their use of the condorcet voting method), but it has boded extremely well for their longevity. Debian exists for its users, and its users are generally developers.