Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> writes: > Debian is very large and diverse, and I know that any generalization > will underrepresent people. Maybe this would mostly apply to > long-standing DDs, or whatever. That said, I feel many areas of Debian > consist of people quite similar to myself -- Fully employed > professionals who can _spare some cycles_ for the aspects they can > contribute to the project.
> In my case, fortunately my livelihood is guaranteed, and depending on > many things, I will have more or less time available for the projects in > Debian I most care about... Adding money offers to the mix won't change > the results. The unpleasant realization that I came to a while back is that the free software world has fundamentally changed in large part due to our success, but in a way that is quite challenging for volunteer projects. Free software won, in the sense that many (all?) of the largest corporations in the world are now based heavily on free software. Many well-funded corporations have embraced this fact and started investing in free software development. As a result, the pace of change in the free software world has increased dramatically, both in terms of rate of change in specific pieces of software and in terms of the quantity of new useful software that is being generated. Debian has invested a lot of effort into improving our infrastructure and tooling so that we can scale sublinearly with the amount of software that we package and the amount of churn in the software that we do package. We have been largely successful! But sublinear does not mean zero, and I'm not sure the slope of increased effort over increased churn is that much less than 1. As a result, this dramatic increase in the pace of software development requires a similarly (if slightly lesser) increase in the pace of Debian development. However, this is where we encounter the fundamental economic problem: the pace of change in free software in general has occurred because of a dramatic increase in the number of people who are paid to develop free software as a substantial portion of their job. This unlocked significant additional resources in the form of paid work hours for free software. This is great for free software as a whole (overall; it causes problems as well, but I won't get into that here). But Debian is not structured (nor do I think we want it to be structured) in such a way as to get a similar significant infusion of resources. Some project members have always been able to work on Debian during paid work time, and that hasn't changed, and possibly has increased slightly as a second-order effect from the growing commerical acceptance of free software, but the change is nowhere near as dramatic as the acceleration of development from, e.g., Facebook, Google, and Intel paying significant number of engineers to do full-time free software devleopment. This is a deep structural problem that we're going to struggle to solve with modest changes such as increased efficiency to try to make our scaling more sublinear, or increased recruitment (of still primarily unpaid volunteers). There is more happening than before, and we're struggling to keep up, let alone get out in front and lead. This is due, fundamentally, to a lack of resources, and it's hard for me to see how we can close that resource gap while still being a volunteer project (nor do I want us to stop being a volunteer project). For example, one obvious way to get a similar scaling of resources would be to change from being a volunteer project to being an industry consortium with paid staff so that we can be the recipient of that increased corporate spending. But I highly doubt most Debian Developers (myself included) have any appetite for that. The obvious alternative is to scale back our aspirations and find a narrower niche in which we can find the resources to scale to keep up with that niche. It's unsatisfying, but to some extent it's already happening; for example, despite heroic efforts packaging individual applications, it's not really feasible to do Node development purely using software packaged in Debian the way that is to do Python or Perl development. And this is not new; doing Java development using only software packaged by Debian has been similarly iffy for a while. We just don't have the raw resources required to keep up with packaging the entirety of complex and extremely fast-moving ecosystems, and to some extent have acknowledged that and put our attention elsewhere. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
