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A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
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A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 16, 2007 21:38 UTC (Mon) by tuxchick (guest, #42009) [Link]
And that is a weakness of the Debian project- that they take no actionagainst trolls and troublemakers. It's a disservice to the courteous,
productive people who participate in the Debian project to give free rein
to so many useless asshats. "Filter out the idiots" is not a solution- why
give them a forum for their bile at all? Let 'em go host their spew
somewhere else. It's a shame, because a lot of good people find more
civilized FOSS projects to devote their talents to.
It is good that Mr. Black addressed the Firefox trademark issue, because
SJVN was completely wrong on that.
A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 16, 2007 22:01 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
I believe that may be a symptom of the problem that Ian Murdock recently highlighted:
"""
The problem with too much process is you get into design by committee - you get into a situation where without strong leadership no one feels empowered to make decisions.
"""
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/murdockint.html
In my opinion, if most of the devs have silently put certain people in their kill files, it would really have been more honest and forthright for Debian to have banned them, outright, from the mailing lists. If you're going to censor someone, and have good reasons for doing it, then by the gods, be up front about it.
A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 17, 2007 0:41 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
And the recent Gentoo community problems are just the same.Many years ago, Gentoo was known for the great helping community it had. Time passes, trolls arrive, no strong leader to take the responsibility of banning them (or simply shut them up) and the "good guys" in the community are lost in the noise of the flame wars.
A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 17, 2007 6:48 UTC (Tue) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]
It used to be one of the great strenghts of Debian that productive but strong-headed developers, who would elsewhere be labeled "trolls and troublemakers", could join and contribute as long as they adhered to policy.
"Filter out the idiots", has been a perfectly good solution so far. With most communication done over the internet a kill-file and /ignore will limit communication to just about everyone you choose to listen to.
It hasn't been for all that long that debian drifted towards the opinion that it must appear to the outside as one big happy family (and enforce that by adopting procedures to remove "unwanted elements"), instead of a collection of volunteers that happen to work together, each one for their own private motives, on building a technical excellent distribution.
A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 17, 2007 8:52 UTC (Tue) by lool (subscriber, #36299) [Link]
> It is good that Mr. Black addressed the Firefox trademark issue, because> SJVN was completely wrong on that.
He did not mention what I understood were more important problems with Firefox:
- the logo at some time (didn't check again) was non-free, as in completely purely non-free, all rights reserved
- removing the logo alone meant that Firefox wouldn't look nicely like Firefox anymore, and hence Mozilla didn't want to let Debian distribute a version of Firefox with the logos stripped
- security support of older releases was not allowed (but I understand this has relaxed): Mozilla wanted Debian to upgrade the major version of Firefox and/or review all security patches to allow Debian to keep using the name "Firefox"
I think the above were fair points of non-freeness, and the issue was not /only/ about trademarks which are problematic in Debian as well. Trademarks were used as a lever to remove distribution rights though, and LWN wrote a nice and interesting article on this part of the problem:
http://lwn.net/Articles/118268/
And trademark is of course not only a Debian versus Mozilla problem:
http://lwn.net/Articles/216049/
A Debian developer's thoughts on the state of Debian (Linux-Watch)
Posted Apr 17, 2007 19:43 UTC (Tue) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
SJVN has been spreading FUD against Debian for some time - that Debian is dying, that nobody uses Debian, etc. I hope that he is doing it simply because he is misinformed - not because he has an agenda.
People who don't use Debian directly and really don't know much about it, believe such articles, especially when the same opinion is repeated in several different ones. I have friends which who fall in this category, sending me links to Linux-Watch, and I have had significant trouble explaining that things are not quite as bad as portrayed.
It is good that there has been a response.