To: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
From: Thaddeus H. Black
Re: Debian

I have read with interest your several recent remarks on Debian.

The Debian Project is not always easy to understand, as seen from the outside, but the Project will be all right. Could you attend Debconf7 in Edinburgh this summer, meeting the body of Debian Developers in person and attending their meetings, sessions and hacklabs, I think that you would come away with a rather different view of Debian's long-term prospects. Several points follow for your consideration; make of them what you will.

1. Debian's main, high-volume mailing lists necessarily give a distorted view of Debian Development culture. A relative handful of disgruntled people, not all of whom are even Debian Developers, account for a surprisingly large fraction of the volume on the lists, and for an even larger fraction of the heat there.

Debian Developers learn over time who the persistent hotheads are, typically configuring their email filters quietly to catch and trash the hotheads' mail. A visitor from the outside reads a lot of ranting in the list archives, but the typical Developer probably ignores most of the rants, never even opening the emails.

In this sense, most of the rants, never read by the body of Developers, really are not even part of the Debian process. My own email filter is configured to catch and trash emails from the dozen or so worst offenders; so, from my perspective, Debian Project discourse is actually pretty civil. I can certainly understand how it would appear otherwise from your perspective! The appearance, however, is mostly an illusion in my view.

2. There is a longstanding disagreement within the Project over the role of a certain small platoon of Debian old-guardsmen. That platoon fundamentally objects to the Project's democratic process, and begrudge the authority of the elected Project Leader.

This, however, is not such a crisis as it might seem. One needs to understand how fundamentally a volunteer project like Debian differs from a corporation. No one can make a volunteer do anything. This is important, because a member of the old-guard platoon who loves Debian usually does more good for Debian, despite opposing the democratic process, than does a Debian volunteer who simply stops working and disappears. Yet of course the latter happens all the time, every month. The old-guard dispute is not simple -- -surely it does fuel a certain low level of simmering dissent -- -but it is a colorful thread in the complex fabric of Debian Project life. It's all right.

3. On the Firefox trademark issue: if you will permit me to say it, then I think that you have misread the situation.

Debian's core purpose, its reason for being, is to produce a free computer operating system. The word "free" is essential to Debian, in a fundamental way which differs from Ubuntu, Red Hat or SUSE.

It is no part of Debian's purpose, plan, wish, desire or mission to provide or support non-free software. Now, this does not necessarily make all non-free software bad, exactly; it merely makes it not part of Debian. As well to complain to the police department that the school bus comes late, as well to complain to the electrician that the cabinets are badly installed, as to complain to Debian that Firefox is not called by the name the public expects. To do so simply is not in Debian's brief, nor ever has been, nor ever will be. If Red Hat or whoever calls it Firefox, that's fine; but calling free software by non-free names just isn't Debian's job.

Regarding the analogy between the Debian and Firefox trademarks, consider: Debian asks that people who wish to use the Debian trademark not use it to mark things which are not Debian. This is the normal, ordinary use of a trademark, and if someone is unhappy with it, then they merely are asked not to use the mark (they can use all Debian software however they please; without fee, only they may not use the mark).

Mozilla asks that people who wish to use the Firefox trademark agree to follow certain rules which are not usual in the free-software world; if someone is unhappy with this, then again they are asked not to use the mark. So, Debian is not using the mark, exactly per the mark holder's request. There is no scandal here. The Debian Project is simply acceding to the stipulation of an important upstream developer of software Debian distributes.

I think that some open-source users who like Debian will nevertheless always be dissatisfied with Debian because Debian fundamentally is not what they want it to be. Some are dissatisfied with Debian's slow release cycle. Others are dissatisfied with Debian's refusal to distribute non-free firmware. Yet others are dissatisfied because, when they want a new feature, they may be asked to implement it themselves and then submit their implementation as a patch to Debian's bug-tracking system. You may be dissatisfied with Debian's naming of software which commercially is called by another name!

It seems to me that all of these dissatisfactions somehow descend from a fundamental misconception of Debian's nature, purpose and mission. Debian cannot be something which it fundamentally is not. Debian would be foolish to try.

Thanks for your interesting editorials. Continued good luck with Linux Watch.