Three candidates vying for Debian project leader

Three candidates have thrown their hat into the ring as candidates for the 2022 Debian project leader (DPL) election. One is Jonathan Carter, who is now in his second term as DPL, while the other two are Felix Lechner and Hideki Yamane. As is the norm, the candidates self-nominated during the nomination period and are now in the campaigning phase until April 1. The vote commences April 2 and runs for two weeks; the results will be announced shortly thereafter and the new DPL term will start on April 21. The candidates have put out platforms and are fielding questions from the voters, Debian developers, thus it seems like a good time to look in on the election.

While the DPL is the titular head of the project, their powers are pretty limited by the Debian Constitution; most of the power in Debian lies collectively and individually with the developers. The DPL is, to a certain extent, an administrative role more than it is an executive one. The intent is also for the DPL to be kind of a thought leader for the project, leading discussions, possibly proposing general resolutions (GRs), and consulting with the developers on how to use project money or other assets; in addition, the DPL is a catch-all for urgent decisions or those for which there is no relevant decision-making entity in the organization.

Platforms

Lechner's platform describes his approach as trying to "elevate the happiness and well-being of all Debianites for the coming year". He would like to teach the project how to "leave aside the cynicism and the anger that take center stage in Debian sometimes". He envisions Debian as a republic, somewhat modeled on his hometown of Fremont, California, which has "has a civic system of boards and commissions that means everyone gets a voice"; he believes this is part of what leads Fremont to be the "happiest community in North America". He described his agenda as well:

As your leader, I will work tirelessly to reduce conflict within the project. Toward the outside world, I will make every effort to help users and specialty communities around the world fall in love with Debian again. We should be the premier development platform for all programming ecosystems.

I furthermore hope to advance on a variety of long-term challenges for the project, such as replenishing an aging membership and dealing with the proliferation of language-specific package managers (aka the "vendoring" problem). With your help, I hope to put Debian on a good course for the next ten or so years. Let's work together!

In his platform, Carter focuses on tasks he would like to work on for his third term:

Last year I learned that it's a lot harder pushing things forward in a release year, than in a non-release year. During freeze, we're squarely focused on remaining issues to get the stable release out, and it's not the best time to have GRs or very involved discussions about project changes.

There are three organizational items he would like to address: looking at formal registration of Debian as its own organization, getting "minimal agreements" on paper with the trusted organizations (which hold assets for the project), and improving accounting with better tracking of the assets. To a certain extent, each of those goals builds on the others. Carter also has a technical goal to try to coordinate changes in handling firmware for Debian:

The methods in which firmware is loaded and distributed has changed significantly over the last decades. Having non-updated firmware and microcode can lead to significant security risks, and many new devices store no permanent embedded copies of firmware, requiring it to be loaded from disk. This has some significant consequences for Debian. Our default free media doesn't ship with important microcode updates, and on our live media we run into problems with both firmware and non-free drivers, causing a large amount of systems to be unusable with those media. I'm not advocating to just include non-free bits on all our media, but I do think there are improvements we can make and actions we can take without compromising our core values. I'd also like to approach both FSF, OSI and LF to see if there's scope for us to work together on firmware problems. Also, we have quite a bit of funds available, we could make some funds available for the development of free firmware in the cases where it's plausible.

Yamane has been active in Debian since 2010, helping out on translating documentation into his native Japanese language, among other activities, as his platform describes. He warned that he will need more support as DPL from Debian contributors than the other candidates because of his English-language skills and a lack of ability to "mediate fighting between our contributors. Be calm, stay cool, stay safe."

The platform also outlines the things Yamane wants to work on as DPL, starting with providing a better experience for both contributors and users of the distribution. Part of that would be hearing what users want, discussing it among the contributors, then trying some things: "More tries, more failures, and get some success during that. We’re in 2020s. Be Agile."

He thinks that the Debian infrastructure ("Web, Wiki, BTS [bug-tracking system], repository, etc.") may need upgrading and expansion as well, with an eye toward what he called a "moonshot": "give a most comfortable environment for developers, more stability and less vulnerabilities for admins, a reasonably fresh desktop environment for average users, more i18ned applications and documentations for non-native English people, etc." Lastly, he wants to work on knowledge transfer from the existing contributors to new ones so that current know-how will be maintained "for the next shiny decades".

Q&A

After the nominations, it is traditional for people to post questions for the candidates to the debian-vote mailing list. Charles Plessy started things off by asking about term limits for those in positions of power within Debian. He noted the change to add term limits for the technical committee and wondered what the candidates thought of that and of applying them more widely in the project.

Lechner is in favor of term limits in general, but wants to set up an "appointments committee" as one of his first orders of business to gather input from contributors and advise the DPL on who might best serve on various committees. If the pool of volunteers for delegations is substantial enough, "a future referendum could then introduce term limits for delegates". Ansgar Burchardt said that the DPL can simply replace delegates, but that there are other areas in the project where there are positions of power:

[...] maintainership over packages as an example. In case of disagreement, the bar to change maintainers is higher than for changing delegates, but the Technical Committee can do so.

Do you think that an Appointments Committee should also handle package maintainership and should we have term limits for how long people can maintain packages, in particular core packages like gcc, libc, dpkg, apt, ...?

Lechner replied that he had only talked about delegates because the limits on the powers of the DPL end there. He was not at all sure that term limits for maintainers made sense, but if Burchardt or other contributors thought so: "Please make your case with the Appointments Committee, or apply to become a member thereof. Then you can use the political weight of your office to initiate a referendum."

Carter had a lengthy response that broke down the different organizations within the project and suggested there might be a place for term limits on some of them. The limits on the members of the technical committee "seems to have worked well so far", but there are other situations where the continuity in knowledge and skills is important so "having a strict term limit might also be a bad idea". There are various mechanisms that can be used to help keep Debian and its organizations running smoothly:

I think expiry is one of the available tools we can use to make teams/delegations better. Voting is another, and tiered memberships yet another. There's probably a lot that we can explore, but I don't think this is best driven by the DPL, it needs to come from the teams and from the project members. Unfortunately, after two terms, I think any prospective DPL who thinks that they'll have time to actively drive all of this by themselves is in for some disappointment.

As might be guessed, based on his platform, Yamane was also concerned about setting hard term limits. "Without succession of knowledge and skill to new people, it just causes a discontinuity."

Handling long-running legal issues

Molly de Blanc asked, in general terms, about a topic that had been raised on the Debian-contributor-only debian-private mailing list about an ongoing legal dispute that the project has been handling. Because that discussion is private, answers about it have to be fairly non-specific, which led to a somewhat tangled—perhaps heated—sub-thread where Lechner tried to answer the question. It is difficult not to guess that it is related to the Daniel Pocock mess that had already been running for a few years when we wrote about it two years ago. Naturally, Pocock himself was unable to resist making a cameo appearance with "questions" for the candidates.

In any case, De Blanc's question was: "How would you transition into taking on this particular responsibility and similar longer running issues should they arise in the future?". Carter said that there was a team working on the problem, with a Git repository "that contains a lot of evidence complete with a timeline that links to all the individual bits". That team would still be available to work on it, as would he, until a new DPL was "comfortable enough for me to move on from there". But he was optimistic that the issue in question would not really need much of a transition: "we've been making some large strides and we are likely to hit a significant milestone even before the DPL elections start, so hopefully by the time the elections are done there won't be too much work left on that."

Yamane said that his general style would be to put together a team of contributors and outside lawyers to try to deal with legal problems. Some separate infrastructure would be set up for the team to use to track the problem. The DPL role would be to coordinate between that team and others that might need to be consulted and to communicate as much as possible monthly to the project.

Lechner began by stepping lightly around the question because of the private nature of the dispute, saying that he has been a negotiator in his day job for many years; "Compromise is my life." In a follow-up, De Blanc asked a "tangential question" about where he draws the line between individual and community-wide issues. She cited two example areas where those lines might blur:

To use an example of copyright claims: Would it be Debian's responsibility if someone raised a copyright claim against an individual for their participation in Debian? Alternatively: If a Debian contributor (maintainer, developer, etc) was being harassed due to their involvement with the project, what responsibilities do you think the project would have to them? Do you think there's a significant difference if the copyright claim (or harassment) is coming from inside the Debian community or outside?

The questions might make one wonder if De Blanc and Lechner have disagreed on these topics in the past, perhaps even on the debian-private thread in question. Lechner said that he plans "to exercise very few of the broad presidential powers available to the project leader under the constitution", instead he would like to see that power distributed to "an open and transparent system of boards and commissions that enjoy broad community support". Richard Laager asked for some specifics about how that would work; the idea has some appeal "but I fear that the idea and the reality may be different".

Lechner outlined some of his ideas; he wants to ensure that his decisions have "some measure of democratic legitimacy". He used monetary disbursements as an example, saying that there would be a committee in charge of that, made up of contributors who represent different views within the organization; the committee's meetings would be open and those who have concerns or complaints could bring them to the committee. That mechanism would have an overall beneficial effect for the project, he said:

For contentious topics, the debate over disbursements would automatically be compartmentalized to your tiny committee without burdening the entire project. There is no need to write to d-devel (or to threaten to do so) unless some outrageous conduct deserves broader attention. Neither would there be a need for a General Resolution, or the all too popular threat of one. The moderating effect grows with the size of your committee.

The overall temperature of the project would also go down. We already do something similar with our technical teams.

Another part of Lechner's response to De Blanc, which seemingly directly referenced part of the debian-private thread, concerned the harassment part of her question:

The harassment case is easily distinguished in that (1) the victim seeks to initiate legal action instead of needing help with a defense, and (2) the project's survival is not at risk—unless the victim sues Debian as well.

For harassment originating inside Debian, the project has (or will soon have) an appropriate disciplinary process. That is the extent of Debian's responsibility.

Steve McIntyre wondered what that meant with regard to harassment victims: "Do you not feel that project should stand with and support contributors facing harassment because of their work in Debian?" Lechner danced around that question some as well, wondering whether said support was "for empathy or for financial assistance", but eventually said that as DPL he would offer whatever kinds of support "the members perceive as proper" to harassed contributors.

Perhaps surprisingly, Carter replied that voting on such things was impractical and that the question was meant to try to get a sense for what a DPL candidate would do, since the form of government Lechner envisions is not likely to cover everything:

Even if you end up setting up that army of committees (I can't imagine all the bureaucracy that will come with), you would still have to make frequent decisions unlikely covered by those committees. So, again, how would you gauge what project members perceive as proper?

Lechner disagreed that his system was overly bureaucratic, but feels that rule by decree is not right for the project. "I believe that a civic system, however simple, approximates the will of the people to a greater degree. No referendums are needed." Meanwhile, another response to De Blanc's questions perhaps gets to the heart of the matter, but was seen as insensitive, at best, by participants in the thread: "Did the project provide assistance to you, and do you worry that the assistance might not continue if I am elected?"

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz replied, calling it "a rhetorical passive-aggressive borderline-bullying response". Gunnar Wolf more or less agreed, with both saying that it made voting for Lechner unlikely. Wolf said: "This year I think I will break my usual practice, and vote a certain DPL candidate below NotA [None of the Above] :-\". Others in that sub-thread, which went further off the rails, concurred with that assessment. Lechner was apologetic to a certain extent, saying that he was somewhat confused in how to interpret De Blanc's and McIntyre's questions, but it would seem that, at least for some, the damage has been done.

A Debian organization?

Another semi-related question for the candidates was asked by Christian Kastner: "What is your position on registering Debian as an organization?" Kastner noted that Carter had specifically mentioned doing so in his platform, so the question was mostly aimed at Lechner and Yamane. Lechner said that he thinks "Debian's governance is presently insufficient to support any kind of incorporation", but that he is in favor of changing that: "I believe Debian should stand on its own. I am ready to put Debian on a short path to incorporation." Yamane said that he currently has a positive outlook on the idea, but would want to put together a special team to outline the pros and cons of doing so.

But Bill Allombert was not sure he understands what is meant by having a separate organization. Lechner replied that his thinking about forming some kind of organization for Debian has evolved over the course of the parallel discussions on the questions asked. As he noted in one of his early replies to De Blanc: "Did Debian survive for so long in part because there was no organization to sue?" He is concerned that having a single overarching organization might lead to real problems down the road:

If the project finances lawsuits, as suggested elsewhere, we may soon have a liability problem. Newton's law also applies in conflict: Exerting force always creates a counter-force. (Many folks in Debian do not understand that basic maxim of diplomacy.) It would only be a matter of time until we have to defend ourselves.

The same thinking has kept me from pushing for lawsuits as your trademark delegate.

Kastner said that he was "less concerned with regards to malicious litigation (although that is a valid concern)", but more with the day-to-day problems with not having a single organization where contributions can go and that can hold assets (e.g. hardware, copyrights) for the project directly. "Currently, the Project has no legal standing of its own, meaning that within any legal context, there is no Project."

Allombert sees that as a feature, however; Debian "is not bound to any particular [jurisdiction], it only exists through consensus of its members". He also pointed out that any kind of organization would need to registered in some particular country and be subject to its laws; "Debian members would be split between those that are in the [jurisdiction] of the foundation and those that are not and the former would be inevitably advantaged." At least so far, proponents of the separate-organization path have not replied to those concerns.

There are, currently, several other questions being discussed, including one on the "Bits from the DPL" reports that used to come out monthly, another on the Code of Conduct, and a third on Debian and people with disabilities. There is still time for more to be added before the voting period starts on April 2. While it is unfortunate that there seems to have been information from the private list that spilled over into the discussions, it seems that the voters are getting a pretty clear view of the candidates from those (and other) questions. We'll have to wait and see how it all comes out on April 16.