Benjamin Mako Hill comments on, among other things, my recent post on the advent of Ubuntu.
For the record, he gets my intent exactly right. I do not consider “fork” or “outside-ness” to be perjorative in any way, or any kind of excuse to avoid cooperating. So the sense in which he disagrees about Ubuntu being a fork–the sense which sees Ubuntu as dissociating from Debian–is certainly not the sense of “fork” I intended.
Mako also brings up a good point. What does it mean to “be” Debian? And how can we avoid making existential questions like this into excuses not to cooperate?
At a fundamental level, Debian is about an engineering philosophy: the process that creates such great individual pieces of free software as Linux and Apache can also create an integrated system built entirely out of those pieces. This was the motivation behind Debian’s founding, at least. Since then, it seems to me that Debian has also encompassed the importance of community, as well as a more decentralized cooperative model (as opposed to the more command-hierarchy-based model most companies use) which tends to emphasizes consensus and best practices instead of expediency.
I would submit that “outside” projects and organizations can participate in this as well as anyone else, as long as they agree to the ground rules. This would, perhaps, distinguish between companies like Progeny and companies like Corel used to be: do they really believe in the essence of what makes Debian great, or do they merely see Debian’s product as a nice basis for their own efforts? Further, I see a bigger divide between these two groups than I see between “inside” groups (like CDD, Debian-Jr, etc.) and “outside” groups (like Progeny and Ubuntu) who all embrace the former philosophy.
And if that’s so, I think it’s entirely appropriate. There’s nothing wrong with using Debian to meet your own goals, but it is a little odd to respect Debian the product without respecting the process that created it. And to the extent that projects participate in the process, they become more a part of the community. That, I think, is what should determine the “Debian-ness” of a particular project: to what extent that project acts in the Debian spirit, which includes cooperating without regard to affiliations that might be divisive.
(Alas, Mako also reminds me of promises unfulfilled. I really need to get my lazy butt over to CDD and participate.)
Thanks Jeff. Very excellent response!
I like the idea of defining Debian as an engineering philosophy. I think Biella Coleman (and myself) would even hestitantly took it beyond a philosophy one degree to an engineering “ethic.”
In any case, in as useful as distinguishing between the Debianness of differen organizations is, I think your model is a good one. I think its usefulness may lie in providing a framework in which being a community player (being “Debianny”) is a seen as a good thing and becomes a force by which companies and projects are encouraged to work together.
I’m looking forward to working together and I’d love it if the CDD project could become a place where we work on collaborating with each other and on developing some of the tools that I honestly believe have a chance to redefine the way that people and projects interact with Debian in a way that I think may be the foundation of Debian’s next major evolution.