If you would like to contribute to a session while watching the live
stream, please join the respective IRC channels. These are:
#debconf-auditorium and #debconf-roundroom on irc.debian.org. The
Web 2.0 thingyat http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml will be updated soonish.
Sorry for the late notification about the video streams. We ve been rather
busy down here. However, DebianDay is about to start, and it looks, like
it will turn out to be a great event!
The Video Setup is finished, too. The easiest way to watch the streams and
to participate via irc is by using the Web 2.0thingy at http://debconf11.debconf.org/watch.xhtml. You can also point your preferred video player at http://video.debconf.org:8000/Roundroom.ogv for the smaller round room, or http://video.debconf.org:8000/Auditorium.ogv for the larger auditorium, where DebianDay will take place. The full schedule for the entire conference is available at http://penta.debconf.org/dc11_schedule/index.en.html. As usual we ll make the videos available for download later.
A lot of online magazines are currently reporting about Debian, its port
to the Hurd kernel and plans for the next release. However, there seem to
be quite some misunderstandings. One online magazine took the cake by
titling Debian 7.0 Wheezy: Erste Pl ne f r Hurd statt Linux-Kernel(rough translation:
Debian 7.0 Wheezy: First plans for Hurd instead of Linux kernel), and a colleague already asked me, if we are really going to drop the Linux kernel. So let's clarify one thing: The Debian Project does not plan to drop its port to the Linux kernel (nor its two ports to the FreeBSD kernel for what it's worth). Apparently it all started with a short status report and if you read it, you'll just read that some people are trying and planing to get Debian 7 (aka wheezy) to be released with an additional port to the Hurd. It is not yet clear if they will achieve their goal, nor did anyone ever mention anything about replacing the Linux or the FreeBSD kernel. So, calm down, nothing changed, just someone talking about the possibility of adding yet another port to the next release. Please note the adding.
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the
story of a great surprise and a big moment for me.
All this started when my wife
Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for
my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early
March or something (I don't yet have all the details).
Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again
into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday
wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many
languages as possible.
Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up
the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work
with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some
in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking
dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday.
Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with
many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible,
poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting
things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in
the Perrier's genes!
And they were doing all this without me noticing.
As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly
turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be
possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost
Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift.
Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of
Christian" album?
But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that
features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book?
But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil,
then Joey doing on the following pages?
And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often
bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards
(one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro
representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all
around the world. All this in a wonderful album.
I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and
emotion was really really intense.
Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what
you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the
investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into
this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they
really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual
family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated
and some were indeed much much much appreciated.
Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the
result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you
were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that
includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!).
Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin
Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto,
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina
Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution
received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall,
Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil
McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema
Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl,
Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and
Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux'
Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in
September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu),
Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and
God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi,
Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets
bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach,
Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE
Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx
cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs
(finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak
Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition"
Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza,
Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam
D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes
the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor"
Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer"
Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli
Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i ,
Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n
Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans
Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is
as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier,
Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by
nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky"
Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su,
Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous
for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe
Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero,
Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi
Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent,
Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam
Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be
REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello.
Let's say it gain:
Just stumbled over Debian beamer themes by
Richard Darst. Very cool and exactly what I needed! Thanks!
By the way: For DebConf attendees from Germany (or passing through Germany)
might be interesting, that you can currently book the night train from Munich to Zagreb
with a special price (called Spar Nightor something like that); quite cheap: It's cheaper for Meike and me in a double cabin of that train, than to fly for one of us. As far as I know it is a limited offer, to book fast while you can! Apparently you can't book that train via the web interface, but you can buy it in their offices and via phone. Oh, an it seems that the train on the 22nd of July there and on the 31st back might become a
Debian train. Seems there are already five of us taking that one ;) Update: Fixed a typo: DebConf is taking place in July, not in June.
Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk.
She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike.
Who are you?
My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work
as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably
best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in
Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I
moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural
identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a
number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle
) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third
wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time
is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my
hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment.
My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my
age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t
have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in
2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the
University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of
those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different
distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in
2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly
this day (Apr 18th) three years ago.
You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased.
The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge.
Here s a quick example why:
When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers
eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4,
debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month,
there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13
of them were women.
You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more
than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it
will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to
an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the
average ratio of women in Free Software.
So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a
significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has
achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time.
There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project
has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its
existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active
and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much
more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a
rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original
members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for
myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness.
On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This
development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t
misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last
three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After
the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to
see!
That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women
maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one
woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very
much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering
from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview
might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into
action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its
initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take
initiative.
What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough.
If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question
First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously!
Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a
much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and
newcomers.
Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get
more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free
Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people:
Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it
still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is
still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive
research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free
Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very
good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different
aspects of that question and all of them have very good points.
I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not
to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question
a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of
women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more
women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society
and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost
any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women
back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple
lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our
spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably
less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it
is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and
child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their
leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women.
That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind
of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and
women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer
Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear
most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one
or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills,
sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say
these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already
active in Free Software.
So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and
friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this
will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a
whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long
time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are
just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by
uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is
culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame.
So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a
cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation
not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The
other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as
possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as
possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see
these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a
few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what
I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting
measures.
You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? 
We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth
shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the
debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our
relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our
initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5
and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift
he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I
still have one of them today. ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon
2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for
pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at
Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving
talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship
stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a
stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later
we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a
veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook
including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world.
By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we
don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to.
Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite
practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way,
Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost
the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are
most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have
kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of
many of our contacts.
You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain?
Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated
point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The
press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of
course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events
and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they
deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is
free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or
prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but
also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media.
They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at
appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of
the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using
IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project
News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work
is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for
non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists
a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams,
we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to
introduce interested newcomers to our work.
What s the biggest problem of Debian?
In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a
lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more
contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get
more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since
we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely
technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the
current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find
ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort
of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts.
This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us
quite a bunch of very capable people.
Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy?
My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently
very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more
importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes
even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will
appreciate that more again in the future.
Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?
Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community,
some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out
individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I
am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of
commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in
line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope
I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.
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The Background
If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the various community distribution websites. The main pages of them got replaced by a placeholder announcing the birth of The Canterbury Project. People started to wonder whether it is an April fool's prank or for real. This blog post is meant to shine a bit more light on it and address one comment received about it.
If you go to the news item on the Debian site you'll get your answer about that it indeed was an April fool's prank. The idea for doing something in coordination with other distributions came to me when I thought about last year's (or was it already two year's ago?) prank that the various web cartoon sites pulled: they replaced their main page with the page of another cartoonist. My original idea was actually along that lines. So I started to dig up website contacts from different distributions, I was aiming at the big names in the community distribution sector.
Given that my time is pretty limited these days with renovating the house we plan to live in soonish I knew I had to let in others in within Debian. I though didn't want to involve too many people, for several reasons: it should be a surprise to as many as possible, but more importantly, I didn't want to shy away other distributions by an overwhelming Debian involvement. That's also part of the reason why I didn't contact many Debian based distributions.
So first contacts where made, a dedicated IRC channel used for coordination, and people involved joined in. Then the thing happened which the Free Software community is so well known for: additional ideas came in, two people independently addressed me whether it wouldn't be better that instead of a circle replacement of the frontpage, why not display the same page on all of them. And one of them added that a corresponding news item might make sense.
So there we were, having to think about text to put into two things: the news item and the replacement page itself. At this stage Alexander threw in a project name with a background that was adopted. Francesca started with an idea for the news item, I started to put quotes in and asked for ones from the other involved people that fit their distribution well. Klaas came up with a template for the replacement page that we tweaked. Fortunately we ended up being five distributions and the colors of the banner did match the distribution ones rather well (except for one, we had to tweak the color of one banner).
The Credits
We were all set, and actually everything went fine. And it definitely caught the attention. This blog post goes out in thanks to the following people:
Collaboration Across Bordersactually is possible. And the background information put into the news section of the replacement site is real. Also, my personal quote in the news item was meant dead honest. I do believe that DEX has a limited point of view and only tackles part of the problem. Unfortunately, for such efforts to really come to life it takes people with a really long breath and dedication to it. Efforts like the VCS-PKG and the Freedesktop Games effort are more or less stalled. Even though a lot of people do believe in stronger collaboration to be a good thing, the basis is not working out too well. I'm in the fortunate position that for some of the packages I maintain there is exchange between packagers from different distributions to avoid common troubles. If it can't be done in the big it should at least be tried in the small. I want to specifically highlight again one part of the updates in the replacement page: the CrossDistro track at this year's FOSDEM. This one was more than fruitful, on several levels. From what I've heard a lot of discussion happened besides the talks too, and connections got established. It doesn't sound unlikely like this might be done again next year. So again, thanks for enjoying this April fool's prank, thanks to everyone who helped to deliver it, and especially a lot of thanks to the people who this might have got thinking of possibilities to improve on the collaboration front!
I'm sure you already heard the news about the new
joined
Canterbury
Distribution,
and are eager about details.
While our teams are struggling to integrate all the existing
infrastructure, it's my pleasure to announce that the first pieces of the
collaboration are already available for our users.
As a first measurement, a common Canterbury Package Manager, called
cant will be made available in all distributions. It is already
available for the distribution formerly known as Archlinux, and
with the next mirror push will also be available for those used to run
Debian.
You'll be pleased to know, that the command line syntax isn't much of a
change, you can still run cant search, cant install or
cant remove, but future version will also introduce all the
features known from the other distributions.
Stay tuned for further updates of Canterbury Linux!
If you are wondering, how we will manage to have the DebCamp preceding
DebConf 11 in 2009, it's quite easy: Each attendee will find a time
machine in his conference back.
By the way: To make that happen, the DebConf orga team is
looking
for help in fund raising. Please consider helping us, or we will have
to cancel the time machines and fall back to the boring DebCamp directly preceding DebConfsolution.
I've just been told, that the video of the Linux New Media Award Ceremony
(you might remember that Debian won in two
categories) is now available
online.
Update: To watch that video without a proprietary plugin, you can
download the
video and watch with xine or some other free media player. Thanks to
Rhonda for the hint!
My
(German) interview with RadioTux is also available online.
Someone asked me during CeBIT for official packages of mendeley. I didn't
knew much about it at that time, but mentioned it in my report on the
debian-project mailing list.
It appears, that mendeley won't be packaged anytime soon, however
Charles
Plessy and others commented on that and mentioned some similar
tools.
As I don't have any contact data for the visitor, who asked me about
it, the best thing I can do for now is mention it here, so he might notice
it and read the comments on the list.
Those who followed the live stream or read our News already knew it:
Debian has been honored with the Linux New Media Award in the Categories
"Best Open Source Server Distribution" and Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software. Especially the second one, considered to be the "kings class" of the LNM awards, is a great honour. While it is called the
Linux New Mediaaward, the decision of whom to honor with them isn't done by the company themselves, but by a bigger jury, consisting of over 300 representative community members, developers, journalists and companies. Deciding in a secret vote1. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing similar. So one can truly say, we weren't awarded by a company, but by the entire Free Software community! Congratulations to everyone involved! For our
Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Softwareaward, we also had the special pleasure, to receive our presentation speech from Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, who found words, I can hardly explain myself. As it might take some time for the video of the award ceremony to be published and several people already asked for it, you'll find the text of the speech below. Still, you might want to watch the video for a special surprise by Karsten:
I'm here to congratulate the Debian project. Debian has recently taken a nearly unprecedented step, one that many people thought would never come to pass: The project has updated its website design. Today, Debian receives the Linux New Media Award for its outstanding contribution to Free Software. I could hardly think of a more fitting recipient for such an award. Debian is coming of age, literally. In August, the distribution will turn 18. Debian offers great technology. It's stable. Really stable. It's highly flexible, and performs well in lots of different roles. IT supports more different architectures than almost anything else out there. It runs on pretty much anything. The package management is great. It makes a highly complex system of almost 30,000 packages extremely simple to configure and use. Debian started out as a true pioneer. When the project was created in 1993, the whole concept of a distribution wasn't too well established. Ian Murdock announced the project thus:1: I forgot to mention one small, but important detail: The voting period for the jury ended on December 23, 2010, so long before"Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution. Rather than being developed by one isolated individual or group, as other distributions of Linux have been developed in the past, Debian is being developed openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU. [...] Debian is being carefully and conscientiously put together and will be maintained and supported with similar care." At a recent conference, the current Debian project lead, Stefano Zacchiroli, gave a talk titled Who the bloody hell cares about Debian? Turns out that many people do indeed. Debian is the GNU/Linux distribution that has the most derivatives based on it currently 128, if Distrowatch.com is to be believed: Ubuntu, Knoppix, gNewSense, and many more. And those distributions again have their own derivatives. None of these could function without Debian. Lots of people rely on Debian. That makes it all the more important that Debian is so reliable. The Debian project gives us Free Software that is both rock-solid and exciting. But the greatest thing about Debian is not the fact that it delivers great software. Other distributions do that, too. The big thing about Debian is the *idea* of Debian: The idea that a massive Free Software project can be totally independent. Debian shows how it's possible to build a highly reliable operating system without a formal body. The project has created some pretty complex structures to run itself, as a do-ocracy, based on consensus and running code. This is important. We are currently debating how Free Software projects can best be governed in the long run. How do we make sure that a project's users can always enjoy the freedom they deserve? How can we structure a project in a way that makes it immune to a hostile takeover? Oracle's acquisition of Sun has shown that these are important question. A Free Software license, preferably one like the GPL that protects freedom in the long run, is an important first step. But a Free Software project consists of much more than code. While uncounted people and companies are earning good money with Debian, the Debian project itself can't be bought simply because there is noone you could buy it from. Debian has been doing vendor independence long before it was cool. What I love most about Debian is that like few other big projects, Debian has the idea of freedom at its core. Debian's Free Software guidelines are a central manifesto for software freedom. The Debian Social Contract does not mention a single package or program. But it is without a doubt one of Debian's most important pieces of documentation. In Debian, quality is the focus of everyone's attention. But those who work on the Debian system know that great software is worth nothing without Freedom. With the release of Squeeze, the latest stable version, in February, Debian has taken the important step of offering a completely free kernel, with no binary blobs. This is a first for a major distribution in recent times. Debian is giving its users Freedom by default. And this Freedom for users and developers on a massive scale truly is Debian's outstanding contribution, not just to Free Software, but to the information society. On behalf of the Free Software Foundation Europe, I would like to thank everyone in Debian for their work, and congratulate them on this award. It's well deserved. Keep up the good work!
Squeezewas released. So we can be quite sure, that the Jury didn't followed the Squeeze-Hype with their decision, but really thinks, we did something great :)
The taz(short for
die tageszeitung) is one of the major German daily newspapers. And they currently feature the Squeeze release on their frontpage! The article is very good (and well investigated), managing to explain some technical details quite well, and...
der Standardhas also an article about the Squeeze release!
Wow, that was a night. I'm still quite tired from the weekend. Someone
told me, that ~ 1 000 people subscribed to our live denting via
identi.ca, and about 12 000 via twitter. And that does not even include
those, who followed us via the respective web interfaces!
While it was quite exhausting (we tried to watch about 7 irc channels
for the important stuff, I partly had ~80 windows in my irssi (which is
especially bad, since I only have keyboard shortcuts for the first 40) and
there whas also a constant need to watch for mails and due to
translations also our spamfilters), it was also very nice to think that
somewhere there are release parties going on with people looking at our
dents, maybe even having them running on a big monitor or projector ;)
One thing that remains to be done, are the left-over dents we prepared as time killers: Since the release process went quite smoothly (and we didn't have the time to check all our dents for the limit of 140 chars ;) we still have some of them left. Since some of them where requested (and I poked other people to get me the numbers) here are the remaining dents:
Lennygot released on the 14th of February 2009, the first website was translated into Vietnamese.
All the funny stuff regarding Debianis only read by 946 persons. It is very low traffic.
... and look, what has just been brought to us, by some friends and Debian
users:
A surprise Debian Squeeze release cake! Many thanks, it was delicious!
Could some please put a picture of one of the new spacefun
themed T-Shirts somewhere? I really want to see them...
Update: Christoph Kluenter was so nice to upload some
pictures.
Next.
