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Okay, and now for the last talk in the morning session,

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Joey Hess will talk about Debian Cosmology

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[applause]

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Well, thanks, good morning everybody, I hope you had a good night's sleep.

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I enjoyed sleeping out in the tent, in the middle of Switzerland

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looking out over the lake

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this is kinda the first Debconf where I've kinda had a problem

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If I just look over there I'll probably just lose focus for a bit, it's so gorgeous.

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I thought this would be a good place to get up on a mountaintop, as it were

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and think about the bigger picture

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and try to think about some of the big questions, the big vague things we wonder about

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but don't really, sometimes, talk about

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maybe in public in front of a live streaming audience, I don't know.

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I have this crazy Debian Cosmology idea.

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And, let's look at Debian, let's look at the Universal operating system

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and think about thinking back 20 years back

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to when Debian was founded, up to the present

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and where it's going to go from here.

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Back in the beginning, there was kinda this void.

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and there was a gap [applause]

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and Ian Murdock saw this, and he said, well...

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let's make a new Linux distribution to replace SLS

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It'll be great; I'll get it done in a couple of weeks.

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[laughter]

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And this was back in 1993.

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And just as with the big bang

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you have the laws of nature somehow forming out of the void

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we developed these standard principles of Debian

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that have pretty much stood the test of time

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although some of them like the one package, one maintainer thing have changed over time.

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But this is all the stuff that we think of as the core principles of Debian today, probably.

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And this was in the period '94 to '98

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this early period where there weren't very many people involved in Debian

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and things got done fairly quickly.

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I have down here one of the initial threads for the Debian Constitution.

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This is where Ian Jackson said

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I think we'll use this constitution proposal to bootstrap the constitution

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so we'll vote on the constitution using the principles of the constitution.

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That could be a kind of controversial things to say, actually

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because it's a bootstrapping problem.

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But the thread actually wasn't that long

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by today's standards [laughter]

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for something that important.

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So, this was, as I said, the early period

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and then in the late 90s and early 2000s

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we went through this inflation period, just like the universe blew up

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got bigger and bigger

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we have the nice up-and-to-the-right graph

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which is the number of maintainers over time

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and I don't think that this data is very good

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but I'm kinda happy to see that it's started going up again in the most recent election

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although that's probably also just because Zack wasn't running [laughter]

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So during this inflation period we had things happen

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like adding ports to Debian.

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One port in '98, two ports in '99

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two ports in 2000; that's two ports a year.

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It's a crazy rate of change.

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And then we had... all these derivatives started popping up.

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We'd had Debian for Hams for a while

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but we got these derivatives that you don't think of much any more

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like Corel Linux, Stormix, Progeny

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These are names we haven't mentioned in a while

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but they were the early corporate entities saying, well,

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we're going to try and do something here with Debian

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and modify it

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and of course many more came from there.

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And another big event in this period was that apt started out.

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This is one of the early threads about apt

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This is about a year after it started being developed.

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Everybody started trying it

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and realized: oh, it actually doesn't work on my system

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because I have these packages that are half-configured

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I have a few broken dependencies because I just forced something at some point

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And everybody tried apt, and they're like, gosh, it says my system's inconsistent

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and it doesn't have apt-get -f yet

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so it doesn't work.

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So I thought this was an amusing thread.

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It's also not really too long a thread

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but here's an introductory representative message

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I don't know if you can read it back there

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but it's just what I said, apt-get dosn't seem to work

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it says my system lacks integrity

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and then Jason Gunthorpe, who wrote apt, said

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I don't think I've actually seen a Debian system that has a perfect dependency setup

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so that apt can actually work on it.

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If you think about introducing some big new change like apt

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and it doesn't work at all

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and this was in April of 1998

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If we then move forward one month to May of 1998.

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here's somebody saying

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"This makes makes me wonder if we should think about dropping this autoup script..."

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"...that we're using for upgrades" (some kind of a shell script or something)

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"...and switch to apt."

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"autoup seems to work and maybe we shouldn't postpone Debian 2.0 for apt..."

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"but autoup's a hack, and apt lets you do an entire bo to hamm upgrade in dselect."

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Wow. I was kinda of surprised to see this: it turns out that I wrote that.

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I had no idea that I proposed converting Debian to apt for 2.0.

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It didn't actually happen in May of 1998

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we had to wait a whole year until March of '99 when 2.1 came out

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and this is a quote from debian-history

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about apt, which I thought was a great quote:

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"It established a new paradigm for package acquisition and installation"

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and it really did.

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If you look now at things that are basically command-line compatible with apt

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or more or less command line compatible

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maybe they didn't quite understand the difference between upgrade and update

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There's so many of them! It's crazy.

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And one of the interesting things about this list

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is that if you look and see which ones of these actually do it securely

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it's a really small subset.

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Maybe some of them use HTTPS in some way

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and have a little bit of security there, I don't know.

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I didn't check them all in detail.

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Of course back then apt didn't have any security either.

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It was just pulling stuff via HTTP off the web

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and hey, it'd be the right thing, because why wouldn't it be?

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So soon after apt came out... this is a screenshot from 2002

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but it was around earlier

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We got apt-get.org

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which was all these third-party apt repositories.

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And this was kinda interesting, there were hundreds of different repositories.

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You could go off, edit your sources.list, get your packages

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and we kinda started thinking, wow maybe we're gonna change how Debian works in some way.

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Maybe we'll have some kind of a central core

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and everything else will just be pulling from other repositories somewhere.

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And we kinda went off on a divergent path.

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We kinda went down a wormhole to some distributed apt, or app store model

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where there's Debian and all this stuff you pull in from here and there

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and if somebody wants to make a package they do

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and this kind of is what happened today too.

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You can pull, you know, signed packages from Google

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and from debian-multimedia, deb-multimedia, that kind of thing

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But we didn't really go down that path.

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We're still very much a centralized distribution.

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I kinda think it's interesting to think about what could have happened if we'd branched off in a different way there

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But there were good reasons to keep it centralized, such as security.

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And if you now fast-forward to the present

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here's apt-get.org from 2011

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it's been broken, we can't check if these repositories work any more

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we're not accepting new submissions

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and this is what happened to debian-multimedia.org, which is a pity.

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It's a Russian domain about motorcycles or something, I don't know.

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So that's kinda the inflation period of Debian.

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And then we can move forward again into the modern era.

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This might be where my cosmology analogy gets a little bit strained

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but we'll see.

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I've picked out two things about the modern era of Debian

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this past 10 years, or 15 years.

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So, one of them: just as in the Universe, you have large scale structures forming,

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galaxies, and larger structures.

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In Debian we've kind of developed all kinds of structures

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on top of the "one maintainer, one package" model

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and extending it, and going beyond it.

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So a few of these, such as teams...

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Lucas showed us the graph of team maintenance increasing over the past ten years or so.

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We've just developed all these structures

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Custom Debian distributions

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stuff like d-i, different projects within Debian.

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So it gets pretty complicated.

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It's not a heterogeneous thing - a homogenous thing

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It's all clumped around in different places.

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If you also look at where people are using Debian

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that's differentiated a lot too.

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It's not just... we are the Universal operating system, we say

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but a lot of people are using Debian on servers

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and a few are on laptops

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and basically nobody is on a mobile phone

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except for a few people who are lucky enough to still have an Openmoko, or something like that.

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So, we've really differentiated Debian a lot.

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So that's the large scale structure thing.

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I think it's interesting to think about it

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because it kinda makes you think about how Debian's evolving.

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Now this is where it really gets strained.

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Red shift. Okay.

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[laughter]

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How do we have red shift in Debian?

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I don't see any red when I look out

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unless I've stepped into the middle of a flame war, or something.

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Here's kind of an amusing paper

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which I don't think has been peer-reviewed yet.

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It says, what if the universe, rather than actually expanding right now

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like we think it is because of red shift

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what if the mass of everything is increasing at once?

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And it says, well, everything would work pretty much like it does now

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we wouldn't even be able to test this theory.

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And while I don't know if the mass of the universe is increasing

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exponentially over time, like this paper says it is

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it seems a little unlikely.

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Debian's mass has definitely increased.

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We have an enormous mass, and an enormous momentum.

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We're moving in a certain direction

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and it's really hard to move Debian into a different direction now.

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So, one really easy example of this

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systemd.

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Think of how many threads we've had about systemd lately

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and, yeah.

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And this isn't replacing dpkg with apt

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and breaking all of our dependencies, and having to change everything.

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This is changing how systems boot

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which you do once a week, or once a month, or once a year.

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It's a minor change as things go, right?

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And yet it's an enormous controversy inside the project.

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So I think we have to think about this momentum, this mass

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how do we manage it, how can we make Debian nimble

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on top of all this momentum.

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So I think that's probably the largest problem that Debian is facing right now

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and will face in the next however far out you want to look.

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It's kinda hard to give a talk about Debian cosmology

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because what is a long time scale in Debian?

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We have twenty years of history to look back on.

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Can people think in their head, wow, will Debian be around in twenty years?

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I don't know.

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Pick a timescale that seems to make sense to you for the rest of this talk.

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I'm not going to try and force some kind of a timescale on you.

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If you want to think a hundred years ahead, great.

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If you want to think ten years ahead, okay.

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But I'm going to try to think about moving forward

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but first I have a little digression, which I forgot about.

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So, one of the examples of a way that the momentum in Debian can be a problem.

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I mentioned apt.

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Well there's this interesting thing being developed right now

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called functional package management.

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It started out with nixos

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and now the GNU project has gotten involved with its...

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Guix? I don't know how to say it.

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The idea is that it somehow takes ideas from functional programming

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and applies them to package management

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so it's bread and butter for me.

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I'm really interested in it being a Haskell guy now.

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Being in a functional program

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you're like, wow, there's some interesting ways to use these ideas.

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It's not really functional, but it's a neat terminology to hook on it.

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And what this lets you do, it's kind of a source based system, in a way

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I don't know. Has anybody used any of these systems in the audience?

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I'm just curious. You have, Zack?

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I'd love to chat with you about it and get a broader idea.

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The idea is kind of that you never make a destructive change to the system.

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Every package change is atomic.

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and if you have dependencies

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you might have multiple versions of a package installed at a time.

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and it's completely different than the dpkg model in every way.

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And it's kind of inconceivable to think that Debian would switch to something like this model now.

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It would just be so incredibly hard.

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You know, switching to apt would be just nothing in comparison

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and it's much later in our evolution

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we have a lot more structure built up around our current system

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than we did back then, even.

248
00:14:29,970 --> 00:14:33,000
This is an example of something that...

249
00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:35,490
The universe is coming up with neat new things

250
00:14:35,560 --> 00:14:37,170
How do we possibly put them into Debian?

251
00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:40,260
We can obviously package up these package managers

252
00:14:40,330 --> 00:14:44,160
and make it easy enough for people to use them as a third party thing

253
00:14:44,230 --> 00:14:47,260
You can install stuff in your home directory with functional package management

254
00:14:47,490 --> 00:14:50,550
and just have a system on top of Debian, and that kind of thing.

255
00:14:50,550 --> 00:14:53,380
But how do you integrate this kind of thing

256
00:14:53,510 --> 00:14:55,930
or ideas from this kind of thing into Debian?

257
00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:02,360
I think the closest we're coming is the switch to more declarative systems for Debian packages

258
00:15:02,460 --> 00:15:05,350
so that rather than maintainer scripts, we have triggers, and stuff like that.

259
00:15:05,420 --> 00:15:07,500
But this is just taking it to a whole new level.

260
00:15:07,630 --> 00:15:11,260
And there's a lot to learn from stuff like this.

261
00:15:11,260 --> 00:15:15,840
So that's my kinda quick look at the modern era of Debian.

262
00:15:15,840 --> 00:15:18,900
Let's move into the futures that I was talking about.

263
00:15:18,900 --> 00:15:25,590
So just like in cosmology... I think you all probably know where this is going to go.

264
00:15:25,590 --> 00:15:28,010
You know, one of the models for the future is

265
00:15:28,110 --> 00:15:30,840
that Debian is in some way going to continue to expand and grow

266
00:15:30,840 --> 00:15:35,070
for however long you want to think ahead.

267
00:15:35,070 --> 00:15:38,270
And there's two ways that I think this could happen.

268
00:15:38,440 --> 00:15:44,890
It could be a targeted growth where we pick a direction we want Debian to move in

269
00:15:44,960 --> 00:15:46,980
and we just put everything behind that

270
00:15:47,110 --> 00:15:52,090
and we have enough momentum going that we can continue to maintain growth as time goes on

271
00:15:52,090 --> 00:15:55,990
and meet the needs of that one area.

272
00:15:56,050 --> 00:15:59,080
So we could pick, say, the server market

273
00:15:59,150 --> 00:16:00,900
and say okay, we're doing all this Debian cloud stuff.

274
00:16:00,960 --> 00:16:04,120
People talked about all the talks that are going to be here at Debconf about that.

275
00:16:04,430 --> 00:16:07,320
There's a lot of that going on.

276
00:16:07,320 --> 00:16:10,750
If you go off to any virtual VPS provider

277
00:16:10,750 --> 00:16:14,110
you can pick a Debian image, pretty much on every single one of them.

278
00:16:14,110 --> 00:16:16,700
It's big in that area, obviously.

279
00:16:16,700 --> 00:16:23,660
Or we could say well, we're going to try to also handle desktop, or mobile, or something.

280
00:16:23,660 --> 00:16:27,830
Something a little bit more targeted might be a good idea then just something that broad.

281
00:16:27,830 --> 00:16:33,310
But you know, maybe if we decide, well, we just want to do this, and this

282
00:16:33,310 --> 00:16:34,990
then that would help us grow.

283
00:16:35,060 --> 00:16:37,880
I don't know, it's just one model.

284
00:16:38,020 --> 00:16:41,820
If you look at mobile, though, and you look at where Debian is right now...

285
00:16:41,820 --> 00:16:46,020
This is a screenshot of Lil' Debi, which is an Android app

286
00:16:46,020 --> 00:16:50,260
that basically debootstraps Debian, that's what it's doing there in the screenshot

287
00:16:50,260 --> 00:16:55,270
and this is kinda of the current state of the art of Debian on all the mobile devices

288
00:16:55,270 --> 00:16:57,820
that every single person out there has in their pocket, I'm assuming

289
00:16:57,860 --> 00:17:00,240
that aren't running Debian, probably?

290
00:17:00,240 --> 00:17:01,720
You know, it's pretty basic,

291
00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:06,030
it really doesn't give you a system that can do a lot of wonderful things,

292
00:17:06,099 --> 00:17:08,920
unless you're wanting to do wonderful things at the command line

293
00:17:08,920 --> 00:17:12,990
with a virtual keyboard, which isn't much fun.

294
00:17:12,990 --> 00:17:17,260
You know, you can think about what we can do to expand this.

295
00:17:17,290 --> 00:17:20,050
Can we, say, add Android support into Debian in some way

296
00:17:20,119 --> 00:17:22,670
so that you can install Android apps and run them.

297
00:17:22,740 --> 00:17:28,089
Can we have some way of getting a... you know, installing something in a chroot of this type

298
00:17:28,089 --> 00:17:32,290
and then displaying it on the normal Android display

299
00:17:32,290 --> 00:17:35,650
and having a full interactive application, that kind of thing.

300
00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:40,660
So that's kind of an example of how we could go into one area and try to expand

301
00:17:40,760 --> 00:17:43,220
to get Debian growing in that area.

302
00:17:43,220 --> 00:17:48,400
The other major way that I think we could grow Debian

303
00:17:48,500 --> 00:17:50,310
or that Debian could continue growing

304
00:17:50,410 --> 00:17:53,810
is this more community-driven model.

305
00:17:53,880 --> 00:17:58,180
This is kind of where you have different projects doing their own thing

306
00:17:58,280 --> 00:18:02,520
and Debian can somehow come in and help them out.

307
00:18:02,520 --> 00:18:09,210
You know, we have some good examples, like Freedombox, and TAILS, and stuff like that

308
00:18:09,340 --> 00:18:13,580
that are using Debian in great ways, and doing wonderful stuff.

309
00:18:13,580 --> 00:18:16,410
Hopefully they're getting a lot of developers, I hope.

310
00:18:16,410 --> 00:18:19,950
I don't know if that's the case.

311
00:18:19,950 --> 00:18:22,120
But there are community-driven things.

312
00:18:22,190 --> 00:18:26,160
There are ways that Debian can expand out into an area without having to move the whole project there.

313
00:18:26,190 --> 00:18:30,290
You can just say, it's a custom Debian distribution, it's a blend, whatever

314
00:18:30,390 --> 00:18:32,480
and we're still... it's still contributing back.

315
00:18:32,550 --> 00:18:35,640
It's a wonderful ecosystem going on there.

316
00:18:35,770 --> 00:18:38,870
Now, if you look at something like the Raspberry Pi

317
00:18:39,000 --> 00:18:42,900
I think we kinda made a mistake with the Raspberry Pi

318
00:18:43,070 --> 00:18:49,090
because we said we're not going to support the specific arm instruction set that they want to use

319
00:18:49,120 --> 00:18:51,580
because it's five percent faster, or something

320
00:18:51,710 --> 00:18:56,640
and so they went off and built Raspbian, and that's fine, you know

321
00:18:56,640 --> 00:19:02,670
but we've kind, I think, possibly, lost a little bit of the mindshare in the Raspberry Pi community

322
00:19:02,740 --> 00:19:06,570
because everybody's like, "well, okay, we've got this Raspbian thing, it's not Debian, right?"

323
00:19:06,610 --> 00:19:10,540
Of course it is in pretty much every important way.

324
00:19:10,540 --> 00:19:14,040
And maybe if we had been a little bit more open to this project

325
00:19:14,110 --> 00:19:19,080
coming and saying, we would like to build everything for armv5, or whatever it was

326
00:19:19,150 --> 00:19:24,530
maybe we would have had a bit more opportunity for growth and expansion, there.

327
00:19:24,530 --> 00:19:29,980
And then, if you look at just Debian developer communities in general

328
00:19:29,980 --> 00:19:35,630
there's always opportunities which we sometimes don't take advantage of

329
00:19:35,690 --> 00:19:41,380
to have really good relationships with various interesting projects

330
00:19:41,580 --> 00:19:44,030
that might end up using Debian in some way

331
00:19:44,100 --> 00:19:46,920
or might end up contributing back, or becoming part of it, even.

332
00:19:47,020 --> 00:19:52,940
And so I think... I really feel pretty bullish about this community-driven thing

333
00:19:53,040 --> 00:19:55,950
I think it's kinda how Debian has always worked.

334
00:19:55,950 --> 00:20:01,650
I don't know if... you know, it's hard to look out and say

335
00:20:01,720 --> 00:20:04,580
in ten years Debian will be an attractive target for people doing

336
00:20:04,710 --> 00:20:07,500
whatever the equivalent to Raspberry Pi is in ten years

337
00:20:07,500 --> 00:20:10,530
but I hope so.

338
00:20:10,530 --> 00:20:12,530
So that's the one model.

339
00:20:12,530 --> 00:20:14,900
Whoa, what happened to the other model?

340
00:20:14,970 --> 00:20:17,350
Ah, okay, so steady state.

341
00:20:17,490 --> 00:20:22,200
It's another cosmological model, obviously.

342
00:20:22,200 --> 00:20:27,580
I think we could just continue sort of coasting along indefinitely

343
00:20:27,580 --> 00:20:30,300
without really saying, oh, we're going to make big changes

344
00:20:30,370 --> 00:20:32,720
we're going to do this, we're going to do that, we can just keep doing our thing

345
00:20:32,860 --> 00:20:37,290
and be completely happy for as long as you want to look out.

346
00:20:37,360 --> 00:20:39,110
We've got a lot of momentum, we can keep going.

347
00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:42,940
Even if we all stop doing much today, I think Debian will keep going for years and years

348
00:20:43,080 --> 00:20:45,500
quite happily

349
00:20:45,570 --> 00:20:51,250
and you know, after a while, you start having to think about generational things.

350
00:20:51,480 --> 00:20:57,570
When most of our generation, or generations, got involved with Debian

351
00:20:57,810 --> 00:21:00,900
we kind of had some infrastructure that we just kind of thought was there

352
00:21:00,900 --> 00:21:03,790
Maybe it was a kernel, or a C compiler

353
00:21:03,860 --> 00:21:04,800
or something like that.

354
00:21:04,870 --> 00:21:07,420
We didn't really think about it, maybe we occasionally ran into a bug in it

355
00:21:07,520 --> 00:21:08,530
and we reported the bug

356
00:21:08,530 --> 00:21:12,400
but it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our minds

357
00:21:12,470 --> 00:21:15,020
as something new and exciting, necessarily.

358
00:21:15,160 --> 00:21:16,970
And maybe that's where Debian's going

359
00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:21,010
Maybe Debian becomes an infrastructure that thing get built on top of over time

360
00:21:21,070 --> 00:21:24,670
and there's enough people to keep it going

361
00:21:24,810 --> 00:21:29,820
because if nothing else, companies like Google, as long they continue using Debian

362
00:21:29,880 --> 00:21:34,690
are going to want to employ tons of Debian developers, just to keep it going.

363
00:21:36,520 --> 00:21:43,600
So this is definitely I think a likely possible future at some point

364
00:21:43,670 --> 00:21:48,280
is that Debian becomes an infrastructure, and that's fine

365
00:21:48,280 --> 00:21:51,810
and if you continue looking forward does it continue being infrastructure

366
00:21:51,840 --> 00:21:52,950
or at some point does it get replaced

367
00:21:53,050 --> 00:21:57,930
and does it even matter if it gets replaced in X years? I don't know.

368
00:21:57,930 --> 00:22:04,180
But you know, I think this is another likely possibility... we'll see.

369
00:22:04,180 --> 00:22:08,220
And then of course we have this final, fun possibility that you get

370
00:22:08,220 --> 00:22:11,440
and I would probably have put some bullet points up here

371
00:22:11,510 --> 00:22:16,420
but I had an unexpected root canal and stuff, so I kind of ran out of slides at this point.

372
00:22:16,490 --> 00:22:17,900
[laughter]

373
00:22:17,900 --> 00:22:20,720
You know, you can have a big crunch.

374
00:22:20,790 --> 00:22:24,710
and this is always my favorite possibility for the universe as a whole.

375
00:22:24,710 --> 00:22:28,050
I don't know about for Debian.

376
00:22:28,390 --> 00:22:32,730
What would happen if Debian just petered and just somehow died and fell off a cliff

377
00:22:32,760 --> 00:22:34,070
and everything started going down

378
00:22:34,170 --> 00:22:37,270
and everybody switched to Android on their servers or who knows what.

379
00:22:37,340 --> 00:22:40,560
I mean, what are they going to replace us with? I can't possibly think.

380
00:22:40,630 --> 00:22:43,220
There's got to be something out there, right?

381
00:22:43,220 --> 00:22:45,220
Maybe it's all Fedora in the future, I don't know.

382
00:22:45,220 --> 00:22:49,370
Hi Fedora folks.

383
00:22:49,370 --> 00:22:53,000
This is definitely a possibility that we have to keep in mind

384
00:22:53,070 --> 00:22:55,290
and it's not like the end of the world, right?

385
00:22:55,360 --> 00:22:59,120
It would only be the end of Debian, and even if that happened

386
00:22:59,120 --> 00:23:04,940
think back to that earlier slide about apt establishing a new paradigm in package management.

387
00:23:05,080 --> 00:23:11,060
Even if Debian stopped being actively used and developed

388
00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:14,150
at some far future point that I don't want to imagine

389
00:23:14,150 --> 00:23:17,480
it would still have influenced things in a great many ways

390
00:23:17,550 --> 00:23:21,220
and I think we could all be quite pleased with the work that we had done on it.

391
00:23:21,380 --> 00:23:24,410
Of course we all hope that it will continue to be used

392
00:23:24,510 --> 00:23:26,430
for as long as long as we're involved in the project

393
00:23:26,500 --> 00:23:30,460
or maybe ten years longer so we can keep using Debian systems after we retire.

394
00:23:30,700 --> 00:23:35,940
So, I kind of thought that I would take a little poll of the audience.

395
00:23:35,980 --> 00:23:39,070
Who thinks that we're going to somehow continue to expand

396
00:23:39,340 --> 00:23:43,110
for however long you want to imagine is a long time?

397
00:23:43,240 --> 00:23:48,590
Hands? Continued expansion? I would say maybe ten percent of the room.

398
00:23:48,650 --> 00:23:51,950
Okay, so who's for steady state?

399
00:23:51,950 --> 00:23:57,600
Slightly fewer than for expansion. Okay, big crunchers?

400
00:23:57,600 --> 00:24:04,830
[laughter, applause]

401
00:24:04,890 --> 00:24:10,430
Okay, well, I think we're for expansion.

402
00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:21,370
So that's really all that I came here to say

403
00:24:21,440 --> 00:24:24,830
It's a fairly fluff talk, I know. I hope that you've enjoyed it.

404
00:24:24,940 --> 00:24:31,880
Maybe some people have some other cosmological models that they'd like to suggest?

405
00:24:37,950 --> 00:24:44,540
[Audience]: Sort of relevant to the big crunch scenario

406
00:24:44,670 --> 00:24:48,470
Andrew on IRC asks

407
00:24:48,610 --> 00:24:52,310
I'm watching other community distributions fragment and lose focus.

408
00:24:52,310 --> 00:24:57,590
Fedora, openSUSE are killing themselves right now.

409
00:24:57,590 --> 00:24:59,590
Are we doing the same?

410
00:24:59,590 --> 00:25:04,440
[Joey]: I don't think that we're fragmenting as such.

411
00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:08,650
We've already kind of fragmented already. There was the whole Ubuntu thing

412
00:25:08,680 --> 00:25:12,990
which I think is the first time I've said that word in this talk.

413
00:25:13,150 --> 00:25:18,750
I don't know if we lose focus as such.

414
00:25:18,750 --> 00:25:20,550
We've never really had focus, have we?

415
00:25:20,620 --> 00:25:22,700
We've all just done our own thing and...

416
00:25:22,770 --> 00:25:28,620
[laughter, applause]

417
00:25:28,620 --> 00:25:30,170
[Audience]: I was just saying to somebody over here

418
00:25:30,170 --> 00:25:32,860
that one of the differences is that

419
00:25:32,930 --> 00:25:38,840
those distros are actually more tightly tied to something else that matters

420
00:25:38,840 --> 00:25:45,470
whether it's the commercial distribution organization that they were sort of spawned out of, or whatever.

421
00:25:45,470 --> 00:25:51,790
They've had a less completely community-driven reason to exist

422
00:25:51,890 --> 00:25:53,370
and to continue to exist than Debian has

423
00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:58,280
so I would not be surprised if we don't end up having an entirely different life-cycle

424
00:25:58,350 --> 00:26:01,070
than something like Fedora or openSUSE.

425
00:26:01,070 --> 00:26:03,320
The question I was going to to pose:

426
00:26:03,320 --> 00:26:08,500
I've noticed as you have, and you made a couple of references to this

427
00:26:08,600 --> 00:26:14,150
the average length of thread about almost anything has gotten a lot larger.

428
00:26:14,150 --> 00:26:17,240
One of the things that I observed a while back, though

429
00:26:17,310 --> 00:26:21,950
is that the average number of participants per thread had not actually increased all that much.

430
00:26:22,020 --> 00:26:28,040
It was certainly for any given thread a much smaller percentage of the people currently active in the project

431
00:26:28,040 --> 00:26:33,250
than used to be the case when there were thirty of us and five of us were screaming at each other.

432
00:26:33,250 --> 00:26:38,560
I'm wondering if there's... I don't know exactly what to take from that

433
00:26:38,630 --> 00:26:42,950
But the notion that a similar number of people can just scream at each other for a whole lot longer

434
00:26:42,950 --> 00:26:44,950
and still not come to a conclusion.

435
00:26:44,950 --> 00:26:49,390
I don't know if there's anything to take from that, or learn from it, or not.

436
00:26:49,420 --> 00:26:55,100
[Joey]: Yeah, I don't know, I'd actually meant to say I was going to put the systemd thread on here

437
00:26:55,170 --> 00:27:02,970
but despite this being a pretty zoomy thing, there are limits to floating point resolution

438
00:27:03,070 --> 00:27:06,170
and eventually you can't actually represent the whole thread in Iceweasel

439
00:27:06,200 --> 00:27:10,020
or whatever I'm running here.

440
00:27:10,020 --> 00:27:15,820
Maybe what's happened is that we have either...

441
00:27:15,880 --> 00:27:21,260
we just have more people and so the number of people who feel strongly about something

442
00:27:21,330 --> 00:27:23,080
they feel much more strongly about it.

443
00:27:23,150 --> 00:27:27,080
You have a small subset, who all feel that they have to win.

444
00:27:27,180 --> 00:27:31,350
And so they just keep talking about this and they don't come to a consensus.

445
00:27:31,490 --> 00:27:33,240
Do you have a thought?

446
00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,460
[Audience]: It's really interesting because as a project

447
00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:42,580
I think we have this sense about ourselves that we're all about freedom and so forth

448
00:27:42,680 --> 00:27:46,690
and somewhere along the way freedom got translated into

449
00:27:46,790 --> 00:27:49,210
"we should all be able to have our own way"

450
00:27:49,210 --> 00:27:55,830
and that was really not part of the freedom that we cared about when this project was young.

451
00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:03,700
Even when there were strong debates, they were debates about technical details

452
00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,690
or when the constitution was being drafted

453
00:28:06,790 --> 00:28:10,290
there were a few big questions about how should this should be structured

454
00:28:10,360 --> 00:28:14,060
and then a draft got generated, a lot of folks looked at it

455
00:28:14,120 --> 00:28:18,160
and went, yeah, that's close enough, and off we ran.

456
00:28:18,230 --> 00:28:23,290
And the amount of bikeshedding that goes on these days just scares me a little bit

457
00:28:23,290 --> 00:28:27,610
because it seems like taking that word freedom, and translating it way too much

458
00:28:27,740 --> 00:28:34,430
into not needing to collaborate, or not needing to come to agreement and consensus.

459
00:28:34,430 --> 00:28:36,430
Now, I don't know how we change that, or fix it.

460
00:28:36,430 --> 00:28:42,640
But it bothers me sometimes when I see people take the things that I thought of

461
00:28:42,670 --> 00:28:45,390
when I first joined the project in 1994

462
00:28:45,460 --> 00:28:47,550
as being fundamental tenets of the project

463
00:28:47,550 --> 00:28:51,330
and they use the same words, but they mean something very different.

464
00:28:51,330 --> 00:28:56,760
and it causes their behaviors to be very different from what I would like to see.

465
00:28:56,760 --> 00:29:02,140
[Joey]: When the constitution was originally proposed, I was kinda against it.

466
00:29:02,210 --> 00:29:06,380
And I thought, well, this seems like a lot of faff around for something that shouldn't matter.

467
00:29:06,410 --> 00:29:10,880
I didn't even bother to vote on it.

468
00:29:10,980 --> 00:29:14,560
I was like, if Ian wants to do this, great! Ian can do this, you know? He'll take care of it.

469
00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:16,560
If it breaks, he'll fix it.

470
00:29:16,560 --> 00:29:19,490
And I think we've kinda...

471
00:29:19,690 --> 00:29:23,320
Maybe it's just that we have a lot of people now who...

472
00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:28,640
Debian is an important part of their life, maybe professionally, or personally, much more important.

473
00:29:28,700 --> 00:29:34,120
How many people here in the room have their livelihood in some way connected to Debian?

474
00:29:34,120 --> 00:29:39,330
So probably about as many as want Debian to continue growing.

475
00:29:42,690 --> 00:29:47,900
[Audience]: One thing I just wanted to add to what Bdale was saying about the bikeshedding and stuff

476
00:29:47,900 --> 00:29:54,390
I'm in preparation for my BoF later this week about the code of conduct.

477
00:29:54,460 --> 00:29:56,810
I've actually been reading a lot of other codes of conduct

478
00:29:56,920 --> 00:29:59,300
on a page prepared by Zack, thanks for that

479
00:29:59,570 --> 00:30:03,510
and one item that I saw coming back a few times

480
00:30:03,610 --> 00:30:08,110
and which I've also taken into my proposed code of conduct that we'll be discussing

481
00:30:08,180 --> 00:30:12,420
is about: be collaborative.

482
00:30:12,420 --> 00:30:14,420
Try to work with other people.

483
00:30:14,420 --> 00:30:19,170
And I think that it could help to put something like that there.

484
00:30:19,170 --> 00:30:22,400
It's just a proposal, and we still have to discuss it.

485
00:30:23,980 --> 00:30:29,360
[Audience]: So let me as a dark and destructive person

486
00:30:29,430 --> 00:30:32,730
focus on the big crunch model for a moment.

487
00:30:32,730 --> 00:30:37,160
The question is: what would happen?

488
00:30:37,230 --> 00:30:43,690
What would we be able to do in Debian if we would be in this big crunch situation?

489
00:30:43,820 --> 00:30:47,660
Because, okay, now we are big.

490
00:30:47,720 --> 00:30:54,720
We are very important, and we are quite central to the Free software world

491
00:30:54,750 --> 00:30:57,410
in a number of ways.

492
00:30:57,410 --> 00:31:03,020
What happens if this world in some ways disintegrates?

493
00:31:03,020 --> 00:31:09,010
Obviously there must be a replacement.

494
00:31:09,010 --> 00:31:18,990
We should be open to change and re-evolve in a way that makes the world go on

495
00:31:19,090 --> 00:31:25,850
even if we in the way we are now fundamentally change.

496
00:31:25,850 --> 00:31:32,070
[Joey]: You know, I didn't really think about the big crunch as affecting the Free software community as a whole.

497
00:31:32,070 --> 00:31:36,080
I just assumed that was some background noise which kept everything going

498
00:31:36,080 --> 00:31:38,160
even if Debian went away.

499
00:31:38,290 --> 00:31:41,250
I mean, yeah, it seems to me that Debian can definitely go away

500
00:31:41,250 --> 00:31:44,550
without the Free software community fragmenting or imploding

501
00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:48,250
or whatever, or turning to BSD licenses

502
00:31:48,350 --> 00:31:50,800
vanishing down the Apple rabbit-hole, or whatever.

503
00:31:50,970 --> 00:31:54,670
[Audience]: That's not what I was about here.

504
00:31:54,670 --> 00:32:03,550
It's more, we have one model of working in our Free software ecosystem

505
00:32:03,550 --> 00:32:09,460
that maybe this model at some point in time is not relevant any more.

506
00:32:09,460 --> 00:32:18,240
It's like, maybe some of you know this model of evolving systems.

507
00:32:18,310 --> 00:32:21,470
There is a first system which is a big hack

508
00:32:21,540 --> 00:32:26,110
the second system is built by a community and great and does everything

509
00:32:26,210 --> 00:32:30,550
but at some point in time this second system becomes irrelevant

510
00:32:30,550 --> 00:32:33,780
fundamental ideas will be changed

511
00:32:33,910 --> 00:32:40,570
and a third system or third systems will evolve

512
00:32:40,700 --> 00:32:43,660
on the remains of the second system.

513
00:32:43,760 --> 00:32:47,560
That's just what's happening now, slowly, with X for example.

514
00:32:47,700 --> 00:32:52,980
X will not be completely disintegrating

515
00:32:53,080 --> 00:32:55,090
but people will evolve on it

516
00:32:55,230 --> 00:33:02,420
and I think we should have some thoughts about the same ideas in Debian

517
00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:06,390
and we should prepare

518
00:33:06,390 --> 00:33:12,340
what might happen if this case starts growing on us.

519
00:33:12,340 --> 00:33:18,700
[Joey]: Thank you for that; you're thinking further ahead than I am and that's great.

520
00:33:18,700 --> 00:33:23,680
Anybody else with a question, I'm not sure how we are on time.

521
00:33:23,680 --> 00:33:28,650
[Audience]: I think the disintegrating is not really an interesting point

522
00:33:28,650 --> 00:33:33,830
Debian is, I think, there to... itch our scratch

523
00:33:33,830 --> 00:33:38,770
if we don't have the scratch left, there's no reason to itch

524
00:33:38,770 --> 00:33:42,300
as long as we are community-driven

525
00:33:42,510 --> 00:33:48,570
as long there will be a scratch, we will continue to itch.

526
00:33:48,570 --> 00:33:50,410
[Joey]: Or the other way round, but I take your point.

527
00:33:50,510 --> 00:33:54,240
[Audience]: And to the mailing list problem

528
00:33:54,340 --> 00:34:03,290
I think I see a tendency on mailing lists that we have something like

529
00:34:03,450 --> 00:34:11,120
this anti-politician and anti-intellectual point.

530
00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:19,260
It's too often everything that's on a mailing list that's bikeshedding

531
00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:23,780
if you give a point against something

532
00:34:23,780 --> 00:34:28,840
if it's not the opinion that you are, it's bikeshedding, it's not a technical argument

533
00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:30,840
you are against progress

534
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:38,290
and I think we need to be a bit more collaborative at this point.

535
00:34:38,420 --> 00:34:43,770
To more listen to each other, and not to dismiss everything

536
00:34:43,770 --> 00:34:48,710
as everything you don't understand doesn't make sense.

537
00:34:48,780 --> 00:34:53,760
It's only people that want their old stuff keeping there.

538
00:34:53,920 --> 00:35:03,470
It's, I think, the reason some flames go up very much is that it's important to people

539
00:35:03,610 --> 00:35:06,370
and then it's important to listen to them

540
00:35:06,370 --> 00:35:12,250
and not just tell them, oh, old fart, we don't care.

541
00:35:12,250 --> 00:35:19,950
[Joey]: I think if you go back and look at older threads in Debian like I did for this talk

542
00:35:20,020 --> 00:35:25,060
or if you go whereever stuff's getting done, and look at what a thread looks like

543
00:35:25,060 --> 00:35:28,890
when stuff is getting done and people are busy making things happen

544
00:35:28,890 --> 00:35:32,390
versus when people are busy complaining about other people making things happen, or whatever

545
00:35:32,460 --> 00:35:36,430
there's a really different tone there. I think you could learn to recognise that tone

546
00:35:36,490 --> 00:35:40,760
I don't know if you could teach people who are part of the problem

547
00:35:40,870 --> 00:35:42,610
which we all probably are from time to time

548
00:35:42,750 --> 00:35:46,110
to squelch that down, or, not.

549
00:35:46,180 --> 00:35:50,210
I think it's something we need... yeah. Enrico?

550
00:35:55,660 --> 00:36:00,000
It's right there, go up to the stand.

551
00:36:10,290 --> 00:36:16,040
[Audience]: On that point, it's interesting that you made that point

552
00:36:16,100 --> 00:36:21,350
I found myself, after some frustrating discussion I was having

553
00:36:21,380 --> 00:36:26,760
asking people to please... real life discussion, about something completely different

554
00:36:26,760 --> 00:36:33,490
asking people... telling people, can you please stick to...

555
00:36:33,620 --> 00:36:37,090
I'm more interesting in hearing your personal story.

556
00:36:37,190 --> 00:36:40,650
I'm more interested in hearing your experience in what you have done.

557
00:36:40,780 --> 00:36:48,380
Please don't... I'm less interested in hearing what you wish would happen.

558
00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:52,590
I'm less interested in what you wish I would do.

559
00:36:52,590 --> 00:36:57,090
Please let me choose what I would do, and I'm happy to hear your experience.

560
00:36:57,090 --> 00:37:04,930
And I think that is a pattern that also matches very well what you mentioned.

561
00:37:05,030 --> 00:37:08,930
When people are getting things done, they are not discussing about

562
00:37:08,930 --> 00:37:11,520
the way they wish everybody else would believe

563
00:37:11,620 --> 00:37:16,160
or the way they wish everybody else would have done something

564
00:37:16,330 --> 00:37:18,780
but they bring in their experience:

565
00:37:18,850 --> 00:37:24,300
When I did this last time I did it this way, and it didn't work. Let's try another way.

566
00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:27,740
But when it comes from personal experience

567
00:37:27,740 --> 00:37:32,430
it is more about getting things done

568
00:37:32,430 --> 00:37:38,150
than about seeing who has the better ideas, or something

569
00:37:38,250 --> 00:37:40,840
which is rather pointless.

570
00:37:41,040 --> 00:37:46,020
So yeah, I wish on mailing lists to see people bringing in their experience

571
00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:52,740
their stories at work, the way they fixed a problem like that before and how

572
00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:55,570
rather than: "people should do this".

573
00:37:55,700 --> 00:38:00,110
"People should do this" is possibly something I don't want to see on a mailing list any more.

574
00:38:01,270 --> 00:38:06,090
[applause]

575
00:38:06,190 --> 00:38:11,400
[Joey]: I think we have to somehow learn to be more accepting

576
00:38:11,570 --> 00:38:15,610
of just doing something, and if it's a mistake, reverting it.

577
00:38:15,670 --> 00:38:18,300
It would be great if we had more technology around this

578
00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:21,990
but just socially, deciding, if somebody wants to go off and do something

579
00:38:21,990 --> 00:38:23,990
then let them

580
00:38:23,990 --> 00:38:27,440
and if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can undo it later.

581
00:38:27,440 --> 00:38:33,900
I think if you look at where we're really good in Debian at making things happen

582
00:38:33,930 --> 00:38:36,890
it is stuff like the one maintainer per package model

583
00:38:36,890 --> 00:38:39,880
where people are given the power to go off and do something

584
00:38:40,020 --> 00:38:44,170
and it's their responsibility, and if you have a flamewar about it

585
00:38:44,170 --> 00:38:46,710
well we have processes but we don't use them very often

586
00:38:46,710 --> 00:38:52,390
and it would be great if we could find more ways to expand that kind of way of doing things

587
00:38:52,390 --> 00:38:54,810
off to the things which don't just touch one package.

588
00:38:54,950 --> 00:38:58,680
I think that's what's broken down as it were.

589
00:38:58,680 --> 00:39:02,550
We're building this bigger stuff on top of individual packages

590
00:39:02,650 --> 00:39:04,970
and we don't have a way to go off and say

591
00:39:05,100 --> 00:39:07,520
this guy is going to handle the systemd transition

592
00:39:07,520 --> 00:39:09,610
with this group of people he's got together, or something.

593
00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:14,740
Maybe that doesn't work, Bdale looks unhappy with it, so it's a bad idea

594
00:39:14,740 --> 00:39:16,740
but there must be a way to make it happen.

595
00:39:16,740 --> 00:39:18,740
Anybody else?

596
00:39:18,740 --> 00:39:26,090
[Audience]: I used to expect that at some point sooner or later Debian would effectively just split

597
00:39:26,120 --> 00:39:28,100
into multiple groups which competed with each other.

598
00:39:28,100 --> 00:39:32,310
I mean I know some people talk about Ubuntu as a fork of Debian, but it's kind of a different thing

599
00:39:32,410 --> 00:39:35,600
I really thought that some time there would just be a discussion

600
00:39:35,770 --> 00:39:38,730
where the two sides just disagreed so badly about some issue

601
00:39:38,860 --> 00:39:43,270
that you would end up with two things, basically both of which claim to be the true Debian

602
00:39:43,270 --> 00:39:46,530
obviously one would probably own the trademark, but yeah, I mean

603
00:39:46,530 --> 00:39:50,930
both of them would just think that they were the true continuation and hate each other forever.

604
00:39:50,930 --> 00:39:53,590
That seems to have become less likely now

605
00:39:53,590 --> 00:39:57,360
and it seems to me that most of the times we have big discussions

606
00:39:57,560 --> 00:40:01,110
it just ends up with not much happening

607
00:40:01,110 --> 00:40:03,610
rather than something happening that really annoys people.

608
00:40:03,610 --> 00:40:06,300
I mean in some ways that's better and some ways that's worse.

609
00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:08,720
[Joey]: That's a fascinating comment.

610
00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:12,690
That doesn't fit into any of my three models, the forking off thing.

611
00:40:12,690 --> 00:40:18,100
It's multiple universes, it fits into the cosmological model

612
00:40:18,100 --> 00:40:23,790
Yeah, that's fascinating, why is that less likely now than it used to be?

613
00:40:23,850 --> 00:40:27,350
Is there less excitement and energy around Debian or is it something else?

614
00:40:27,420 --> 00:40:33,070
[Audience]: Now I would worry more that, again, if it gets harder to push new ideas

615
00:40:33,200 --> 00:40:36,290
and you end up... well, we are still getting new people

616
00:40:36,500 --> 00:40:43,420
but if you look at the official members of Debian, we're basically only at a replacement rate

617
00:40:43,560 --> 00:40:52,330
I have to say, looking around the room, that we're definitely an aging population too.

618
00:40:52,570 --> 00:40:58,150
So although that's still fine for a few decades, yeah

619
00:40:58,220 --> 00:41:04,140
if we want to continue in the long term of Debian having a good future and still being relevant

620
00:41:04,140 --> 00:41:10,660
then, again on your graph, how do we get back into really growing,

621
00:41:10,760 --> 00:41:16,240
not just the community round the edges, helpers and contributors and so on

622
00:41:16,240 --> 00:41:20,610
but people who are members of Debian should also be growing

623
00:41:20,610 --> 00:41:23,640
and taking new ideas.

624
00:41:24,040 --> 00:41:32,750
[Audience]: Sort of replying to that: if we go a bit smaller than cosmological, and go to galactic, say

625
00:41:32,750 --> 00:41:42,000
I think Debian could be looked at as if it started out being a star nursery

626
00:41:42,130 --> 00:41:45,700
and then we turned into a galaxy

627
00:41:45,760 --> 00:41:49,700
and we're now at a stage where we need to find a way of maintaining the black hole

628
00:41:49,700 --> 00:41:55,380
because otherwise, if people aren't allowed to work on an alternative black hole

629
00:41:55,450 --> 00:42:01,840
then the arms will fly off, as... yeah, we need to suck more.

630
00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:05,540
[laughter, applause]

631
00:42:05,600 --> 00:42:10,860
So the black hole is the sort of boring, central packages

632
00:42:10,860 --> 00:42:14,210
which you're not allowed to touch, because if you do that everything will break

633
00:42:14,210 --> 00:42:18,110
and we need a way of instantiating a new galaxy next door

634
00:42:18,250 --> 00:42:20,940
and just replacing the black hole, and as you say if it doesn't work

635
00:42:21,070 --> 00:42:22,680
you can git revert.

636
00:42:22,750 --> 00:42:26,250
So, and the other thing is, if you look at the mailing lists

637
00:42:26,250 --> 00:42:28,330
you get the impression that there's a war going on

638
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,900
where there is going to be a schism.

639
00:42:31,900 --> 00:42:34,920
Half the people will go off and maintain their servers

640
00:42:34,960 --> 00:42:39,500
and the other half will go off with their tablets, or whatever, and sort them out.

641
00:42:39,700 --> 00:42:43,800
But actually, the people in those discussions aren't going to build either of those things

642
00:42:43,870 --> 00:42:46,020
and the rest of Debian is just getting on with it.

643
00:42:46,090 --> 00:42:49,050
So, that's why I think Debian doesn't fragment

644
00:42:49,110 --> 00:42:51,950
because the vocal people aren't necessarily the people doing the job.

645
00:42:52,580 --> 00:42:55,430
[Audience]: I think there's another possibility

646
00:42:55,430 --> 00:42:59,100
and that is that when I think about Moray's question

647
00:42:59,130 --> 00:43:03,870
There are more derivatives of Debian than any other core distribution

648
00:43:03,870 --> 00:43:07,270
so there are certainly lots of people out there who have decided

649
00:43:07,410 --> 00:43:10,160
that the thing they wanted to to differently, or cared about

650
00:43:10,230 --> 00:43:14,110
was worth going, creating a CDD, or a fork, or whatever.

651
00:43:14,110 --> 00:43:21,090
So that's happened, it just hasn't dragged the trademark into... or the name into some kind of a pit

652
00:43:21,190 --> 00:43:23,010
which I would hate to see happen.

653
00:43:23,070 --> 00:43:28,320
But I have this sense that maybe the other thing about it is that Debian has become large enough

654
00:43:28,390 --> 00:43:30,740
and means enough things to enough people

655
00:43:30,810 --> 00:43:35,080
that the vast majority of us in the project who don't give a flying you-know-what

656
00:43:35,110 --> 00:43:37,730
about whether it's upstart or systemd

657
00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:43,920
That's an impassioned important discussion for the people for whom how the system boots

658
00:43:44,020 --> 00:43:46,810
is the thing they care about in Debian.

659
00:43:46,880 --> 00:43:49,440
But for the vast majority of us it's like, as you say

660
00:43:49,500 --> 00:43:53,270
I do that once per kernel update cycle, a reboot

661
00:43:53,340 --> 00:43:57,100
and the rest of the time I just don't care

662
00:43:57,170 --> 00:44:01,880
and so the idea that the distribution would fracture

663
00:44:02,010 --> 00:44:06,690
or somehow Debian wouldn't be Debian any more because there's a fracturous discussion

664
00:44:06,750 --> 00:44:10,820
going on in a particular sub-project or sub-part of the distribution

665
00:44:10,890 --> 00:44:12,910
is just hard for me to wrap my brain around.

666
00:44:12,970 --> 00:44:16,920
[Joey]: It seems like it would have to be something that isn't technological based.

667
00:44:16,920 --> 00:44:19,160
Some kind of, you know, we want to change the social contract

668
00:44:19,230 --> 00:44:21,850
or maybe want to change what free software is

669
00:44:22,090 --> 00:44:25,780
and that would fracture Debian.

670
00:44:29,650 --> 00:44:33,350
[Audience]: So, on the lines of what Bdale just said

671
00:44:33,420 --> 00:44:39,270
this way that we are becoming almost a preferred choice to be upstream

672
00:44:39,470 --> 00:44:42,230
is a very good thing

673
00:44:42,290 --> 00:44:45,390
and that enables our work to scale much better

674
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:47,410
than if we try to grow the project

675
00:44:47,470 --> 00:44:50,970
and I think the reason why we aren't growing in terms of number of people

676
00:44:51,040 --> 00:44:54,740
is that we're already at some kind of limits of scaling

677
00:44:54,800 --> 00:44:57,430
We're having... a lot of things we're talking about

678
00:44:57,490 --> 00:45:01,190
are difficulties to do with coordinating and communicating between this number of people

679
00:45:01,330 --> 00:45:07,880
and allowing, and becoming upstream for people is a way for us to scale that a lot better

680
00:45:08,020 --> 00:45:12,360
and one of the things that we should be trying to do is to look outward

681
00:45:12,360 --> 00:45:14,360
rather than inward

682
00:45:14,360 --> 00:45:17,600
and to try to think of ways in which we can be a better upstream for people

683
00:45:17,740 --> 00:45:22,110
to make it easier for people to derive, so that fewer people have to do their work within Debian

684
00:45:22,110 --> 00:45:25,940
and that they're easier to do it outside Debian.

685
00:45:26,010 --> 00:45:32,330
Because after all, software freedom is about freedom to make the change yourself to the software you're using

686
00:45:32,430 --> 00:45:35,760
and that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have a huge, kind of

687
00:45:35,890 --> 00:45:39,490
get involved with a huge complicated upstream who have processes

688
00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:40,870
and decide to do things a particular way.

689
00:45:40,940 --> 00:45:42,280
No, you should just be able to it.

690
00:45:42,350 --> 00:45:48,270
At the moment if you want to do that it's quite hard, and we should make it easier.

691
00:45:48,670 --> 00:45:53,450
[Joey]: Yeah, you know, when you think about that

692
00:45:53,580 --> 00:46:00,940
maybe it's kind of what's happening now, but you have to wonder

693
00:46:01,110 --> 00:46:04,470
your scenario, you can go either one of two ways.

694
00:46:04,470 --> 00:46:08,640
You can have a lot of custom Debian distributions, and things based on Debian

695
00:46:08,640 --> 00:46:11,740
and Debian can just become a background infrastructure

696
00:46:11,800 --> 00:46:15,350
and then who wants to work on it when it's some thing that's down there in the depths

697
00:46:15,350 --> 00:46:18,700
that other exciting things are being built on top of

698
00:46:18,700 --> 00:46:22,230
You know, maybe you contribute patches back when it makes your life easier

699
00:46:22,430 --> 00:46:28,550
but do we get a sustaining model that way, or maybe we don't.

700
00:46:28,550 --> 00:46:31,850
I kind of used to have this argument with Manoj.

701
00:46:31,910 --> 00:46:34,430
I thought that Debian had to expand or we were just going to die

702
00:46:34,600 --> 00:46:38,400
and Manoj was like no, Debian is just about what I need for my system

703
00:46:38,400 --> 00:46:40,400
and what my friends need for their systems.

704
00:46:40,400 --> 00:46:44,760
I'm only interested in it in that way.

705
00:46:44,760 --> 00:46:46,760
And I don't know, maybe Manoj was right.

706
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:52,290
I think that I was definitely wrong.

707
00:46:52,290 --> 00:46:58,850
The best arguments are always that way, right?

708
00:46:58,850 --> 00:47:04,530
[Introducer]: Okay, the time is over, so we have to take this as the closing comment

709
00:47:04,530 --> 00:47:08,900
and, yeah, you have to move it to lunch to discuss over that.

710
00:47:08,900 --> 00:47:10,900
[Joey]: Okay, thanks everybody.

711
00:47:10,900 --> 00:47:15,830
[applause]