Svante Signell <svante.sign...@gmail.com> writes: > No you are not. Debian following the commercial vendor track will make > them extinguished. Technically there are no real advantages of the new > (in many youngsters mind revolutionary) ideas. The idea of a Debian > Universal Operating System, supporting Free Software (not Open Source > Software), is dead.
What will kill Debian faster than anything else is to have every idea for changing something large, interesting, or possibly revolutionary in Debian be met with anger, derision, and attacks. The process of proposing doing interesting things inside Debian is already so miserable that it surprises me people are willing to attempt it. Those ideas are always met with furious pushback from at least a few people who don't want anything to ever change in that particular area of the distribution. That this is often different people for each change doesn't really help. If it's not possible to do interesting things and it's not possible to try to improve Debian, maintaining Debian becomes a job rather than something one does for fun, which in turn will mean that Debian will become stale and stagnant and lose contributors. Then *everyone* loses, since even those who would be happy to see absolutely nothing about the distribution change expect incorporation of new software and support for new platforms and new hardware. If you want people to do maintenance work without getting to do anything creative, interesting, or exciting, you had better have some method for paying them, because that's a job, not something people do for the love of it. That doesn't mean we need to break things. Ideally, we don't. But if the entire burden of making everything work exactly the way it always has is put solely on the people who are trying to do something that excites them, the stability that we will get will be the stability of death. I do not believe people working on Debian want to break other people's use cases for the fun of it. However, enthusiasm is fragile. Please, try to engage with people, find creative solutions, and try to preserve the things they're excited about in their projects, rather than muffling them in layers of obstructionism. We need excited people and enthusiastic people to make Debian something we can all be proud of. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>