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Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook?

September 9, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Facebook is not very popular among free software hackers. When I announced my Facebook page on identi.ca (see here) I got a few replies suggesting it was odd for me to use Facebook.

Indeed there are many good reasons why Facebook should be avoided: it is a centralized and proprietary service that is not very privacy-friendly. But the truth is that lots of people are using it (even Debian developers, can you recognize them on the picture?) and some are using their Facebook news feed as their main source of news.

You might wonder how many persons that represents, so here are the figures: the Debian Facebook page has 48,361 fans and the Ubuntu one has 247,932 fans. That’s right, an announce put on the Debian facebook page would reach more persons than the most popular announce list that Debian is currently running (debian-announce@lists.debian.org has about 29,000 subscribers). Unfortunately that Debian Facebook page is empty and I don’t even know who the administrator is. The Ubuntu page on the contrary is properly configured to relay news from The Fridge and Jono Bacon is posting some custom updates from time to time.

Debian contributors regularly mention “world domination” as the ultimate goal of the universal operating system (I even feature this in my blog header banner! :-)). But working towards world domination means — in my opinion — that we should communicate our ideals of freedom to as many people as possible, even if they are using a service that we don’t want to promote.

The Debian social contract acknowledges that some users have to use non-free software and we provide the non-free section for them. In the same spirit, I believe we must have a presence on Facebook. That does not mean that we endorse Facebook, and we should surely promote Joindiaspora once it’s usable. But in the mean time we should reach out to Facebook users and allow them to follow us with the platform of their choice.

That’s the choice I recently made when I decided to setup a public facebook page featuring my free software work, my blog and my book. So if you are a Facebook user, click here to visit my page and click on “Like” if you want to follow this blog in your Facebook news feed. I also share interesting Debian or Ubuntu related articles that I discover while reading my RSS subscriptions.

Below are the usual facebook widgets for the 3 pages quoted in this article (they might not show up if you read this article through an RSS feed):

About the Debian Community Poll

June 11, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

While I find the idea interesting, several of the questions can’t be correctly answered because the proposed choices are not realistic or too limited.

On the question of the usage of money, I believe we should spend money to fund important projects but I don’t want to fund “people having important positions in Debian and doing important work”. What should I reply? (Granted, there’s the other item but that doesn’t help getting a clear picture of the answers)

On the question “Do you prefer time based releases instead of the «it’s ready when it’s ready» releases?”, it is putting two concepts in opposition when the release managers recently proposed a third way that combines both: “time based freezes and release when it’s ready”. This is what I want and I can’t adequately express it either in the current poll.

Open money and Debian

May 17, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

I recently read an introductory article in an IT magazine on the increased usage of new currencies. It briefly mentioned the work of a researcher called Arthur Brock in using those currencies within open source communities. While I did not find more details on the research, it led me to think again about Debian’s relation with money.

The reason why we have troubles using money to pay the time spent by our developers is that money is scarce and it’s thus next to impossible to be fair in the way money is spent among us. So why not invent a new currency that is not scarce and that would encourage the kind of work that we really value? Apparently there is free software out there to build new currencies: see metacurrency.org or openmoney.org. Let’s call the new currency “swirly/swirlies” for the sake of the examples below.

There are then multiple ways to create a small economy within the community and/or even create bridges with the national currencies:

we could have auctions (priced in swirlies) to redistribute goods among us (say I have this unused laptop and I want to give it away to someone who could make use of it within Debian)
Debian sponsors/partners could offer discounts codes on their products and Debian would exchange them against the Debian-specific currency (inspired by community way);
swirlies could be used to get funding to attend debconf and/or other meetings;
we could donate our swirlies as bounties on important projects that we want to see implemented, we could even grant swirlies to release managers to help them drive the project towards a release (they would not end up in their accounts but they could use them to motivate people to work on release blockers);

I’m sure we can come up with many similar ideas. Feel free to share yours in the comments.

Debian related goals for 2010

January 9, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Here’s stuff that I’d like to do this year, more or less by decreasing order of importance:

translate my Debian book into English and get it published;
finish the cleanup of the perl API in dpkg-dev in order to create libdpkg-perl;
create dpkg-buildflags to export default build flags that packages should use (and get rid of the code setting those environment variables in dpkg-buildpackage), needed to properly fix #489771;
ensure the new source formats continue to gain acceptance by improving whatever is needed;
design a generic vcs-buildpackage infrastructure to be integrated in dpkg-dev. This design will probably happen through a DEP (Debian Enhancement Proposal) to ensure we have had proper discussion before someone gets to the implementation;
continue fixing dpkg bugs faster than they are reported;
enhance our infrastructure to ease interaction between contributors and to have a better view of how each package is maintained (see my last blog entry on this topic);
update the developers-reference where needed and fix some of the numerous wishlist bugs;
rewrite in C the last perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package (update-alternatives/mksplit mainly, for dpkg-divert there’s a preliminary patch available already) so that it’s easier to build a minimal system without perl-base;
integrate the 3-way merge tool for Debian changelogs in dpkg-dev;

All of this probably doesn’t fit in my free time (being a father since last month does not help increasing my free time :-)), so if you’re interested in seeing one or more of those projects completed, and if you know some person/company that could sponsor them, get in touch with me!

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