Distributions

As kind of a follow-up to the basic 'what would you do as DPL that you could not do as DD?' I would like to know more about how you would handle marketing Debian. The very hot topic this week is Dell's move to offer open source alternatives. Buried several clicks away from Dells 'Ideas in Action' page is a vague reference to Debian pertaining to 8G servers. Would you as DPL make it a primary goal to attract as many DD's as you could to work specifically on eliminating the gotchas of installing Debian on Dell Desktops, Laptops and Servers working towards putting Debian at the top of Dells (and maybe others to follow) list of approved and pre-installed OS's?

First of all, I would like to make clear that I do not view marketing as the DPL's primary job. It's one of the DPL's responsibilities to be a central point of contact to non-Debian folks, which does indeed involve marketing, but there are other, more important, jobs the DPL has.

I don't think there's very much a DPL by himself could do to help Dell in this regard. However, I do think Debian as a whole could do much, and someone to guide Dell and its employees in our community, to bring them into contact with the right Debian Developers and/or contributors would most likely be very helpful. This someone could very well be the DPL or one of his delegates.

I would promote more the debian-publicity@lists.debian.org mailing list that we started after the last Debconf.

People started submitting stuff to improve our marketing, now we needs some more volunteers who start playing a more active role and actually organize this group.

The problem is reversed, once Dell understands that people are asking for Linux, they will start checking how they can properly support it and then we need to make sure they understand that Debian is one of the most important distribution out there (given that the Ubuntu distribution that is so popular on www.dellideastorm.com is a Debian derivative) and that they should work with us to ensure their hardware is properly supported.

This is a great question. I've a chapter in my platform that covers the Debian relationship with major hardware vendors and their approach handling server and desktop support. Based on HP results, i'll do my best to push more vendors to support us, even hiring developers to make sure that Debian works well over their hardware.

I also want to push more ideas out of the paper in terms of marketing. There is a chapter on my platform about this too. You will be able to read soon.

No -- I think that's a great thing to do, but it's not something I could work on myself. If someone else were to, I'd be happy to provide support for them to do so -- whether that just be being able to call themself "Debian's representative", or funds to ship donated machines to someone who can work on checking them, or similar.

However I see no reason to make it a primary goal. I have little knowledge of what the gotchas could be, but my feeling is that the major ones are not Debian-specific at all anyway (ACPI woes, 3D drivers, wireless firmware...) and the NM process does not train us into low-level hacking, so I wouldn't see how to attract DDs anyway.

If the DPL approaching Dell as the project representative and asking for specification documents, test laptops or a privileged communication channel with Dell engineers qualifies as "attracting DDs", then I'd happily do that or appoint someone.

I'd prefer a bunch of things to have worked out differently; but I can't say there's much I regretted *doing*. I certainly regret *not* doing more on the "maintainers" thing after debconf, not proposing the constitutional amendment to shorten the DPL nominations/voting period, and not getting anywhere with regular, semi-automatic beta releases of testing.

As far as doing things goes, mostly that ends up being at worst a learning experience, and as far as I can see, you should be spending your time learning from it, not regretting it. So the only thing I can come up with on the regret score is going overboard with John on -legal, but ultimately that's ended up okay anyway.