Name [LWN.net]

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:51 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

The ironic thing about Debian is that Debby and Ian have been split up for some years now.

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 0:55 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

...and that Ian Murdock left the project well over a
decade ago after disagreeing strongly with its move to
democratic (what he'd call hyper-democratic) structures.

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 14:10 UTC (Tue) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]

My recollection (from conversations with him after the fact at Progeny) is
that he mainly got busy with getting his degree. He appointed Bruce
Perens as his successor in early 1996, give or take (about the same time I
became a Debian user myself).

Which isn't to say that he *didn't* disagree with the "hyper-democratic"
evolution of Debian's organization, but those took place after Ian had
mostly faded from view.

Furthermore, that evolution was driven largely in response to Bruce's
leadership style, not Ian Murdock's.

You could always ask him...

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 17:52 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

Well, when I took on project leadership, control of all core project packages was with the project leader. I gave them away as quickly to multiple people. Nobody really knew at the time if that would work, but I didn't doubt that it would.

Regarding Debian's decision structure, well, Ubuntu is a reaction to that, isn't it.

Name

Posted Oct 21, 2009 16:23 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

Uhh, if you have a few hundred million dollars pocket change and
want to buy adoring masses (so long as they are paid) for your
own vanity distribution you can do it with any of them.
Debian's just the best one to start from. Of course you're trading
short term gain for long-term harm, but when did that ever stop a
capitalist speculator?

Name

Posted Oct 22, 2009 0:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah, 'cos Ubuntu, Ubuntu's *harmful*. Paying Debian developers to hack on
a Debian derivative, that's *evil*. It's like murder, only worse.

(sheesh)

Mark Shutleworth's supposed motives

Posted Oct 22, 2009 10:21 UTC (Thu) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]

That version of history would be almost convincing if it were not for the fact that Mark was a Debian Developer _before_ the dot-com boom took off, as you'll note by grabbing this diff prepared by him in 1996:

http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-1.1/main/so...

As it is, he clearly chose Debian because he liked it enough to work on it anyway, and when he managed (through luck and judgement) to run out of fingers and toes to count his millions, he thought he might know a new way to help out with Debian.

I'm far from being a Shuttleworth fan-boy, I just happen to have been there packaging rsync (among other things) at the time, and can do without people saying that he picked Debian almost at random for nefarious ends when in fact he's been contributing to Debian for almost as long as it's existed.

If I'd managed to make the same sort of money as him, I doubt I'd have managed to do as good a job of injecting new resources into Debian, but I would still have tried, and I'd imagine that some people would hate me for it.