Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In January, 48 work hours have been equally split among 4 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings
• Holger Levsen
• Raphaël Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation

During the last month, the number of paid work hours has made a noticeable jump: we’re now at 58 hours per month. At this rate, we would need 3 more months to reach our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. Unfortunately, the number of new sponsors actually in the process is not likely to be enough to have a similar raise next month.

So, as usual, we are looking for more sponsors.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation looks a bit worse than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 37 packages awaiting an update (7 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 63 affected packages in total (7 more than last month).

The increase is not too worrying, but the waiting time before an issue is dealt with is sometimes more problematic. To be able to deal with all incoming issues in a timely manner, the LTS team needs more resources: some months will have more issues than usual, some issues will be longer to handle than others, etc.

Thanks to our sponsors

The new sponsors of the month are in bold.

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Gandi SAS
• Trollweb Solutions
• Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Bitfolk LTD
• Daevel SARL
• FOSSter
• Freeside Internet Service
• Gree, Inc.
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH
• MyTux
• NUMLOG
• Nantes Métropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In December 46 work hours have been equally split among 4 paid contributors (note that Thorsten and Raphaël have actually spent more hours because they took over some hours that Holger did not do over the former months). Their reports are available:

• Ben Hutchings (for his first month!).
• Holger Levsen
• Raphaël Hertzog
• Thorsten Alteholz

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, the number of paid work hours has almost not increased (we are at 48 hours per month). We still have a couple of new sponsors in the pipe but with the new year they did not complete the process yet. Hopefully next month will see a noticeable increase.

As usual, we are looking for more sponsors to reach our our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. Those of you who are struggling to spend money in the last quarter due to budget overrun, now is a good time to see if you want to include Debian LTS support in your 2015 budget!

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation looks similar to last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 30 packages awaiting an update (3 more than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 56 affected packages in total. We do not manage to clear the backlog but it’s not getting significantly worse either.

Thanks to our sponsors

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Bitfolk LTD
• Daevel SARL
• FOSSter
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes Métropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In November 42.5 work hours have been equally split among 3 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Thorsten Alteholz did his share as usual.
• Raphaël Hertzog worked 18 hours (catching up the remaining 4 hours of October).
• Holger Levsen did his share but did not manage to catch up with the backlog of the previous months. As such, those unused work hours have been redispatched among other contributors for the month of December.

New paid contributors

Last month we mentioned the possibility to recruit more paid contributors to better share the work load and this has already happened: Ben Hutchings and Mike Gabriel join the list of paid contributors.

Ben, as a kernel maintainer, will obviously take care of releasing Linux security updates. We are glad to have him on board because backporting kernel fixes really need some skills that nobody else had within the team of paid contributors.

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, the number of paid work hours has almost not increased (we are at 45.7 hours per month) but we are in the process of adding a few more sponsors: Roche Diagnostics International AG, Misal-System, Bitfolk LTD. And we are still in contact with a couple of other companies which have announced their willingness to contribute but which are waiting the new fiscal year.

But even with those new sponsors, we still have some way to go to reach our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position. So consider asking your company representative to join this project!

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation looks better than last month: the dla-needed.txt file lists 27 packages awaiting an update (6 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 58 affected packages in total. Like last month, we’re a bit behind in terms of CVE triaging and there are still many packages using SSLv3 where we have no clear plan (in response to the POODLE issues).

The good side is that even though the kernel update spent a large chunk of time to Holger and Raphaël, we still managed to further reduce the backlog of security issues.

Thanks to our sponsors

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Daevel SARL
• FOSSter
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes Métropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.

Like last month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

Individual reports

In October 2014, we affected 13.75h works hours to 3 contributors:

• Thorsten Alteholz
• Raphaël Hertzog worked only 10 hours. The remaining hours will be done over November.
• Holger Levsen did nothing (for unexpected personal reasons), he will catch up in November.

Obviously, only the hours done have been paid. Should the backlog grow further, we will seek for more paid contributors (to share the workload) and to make it easier to redispatch work hours once a contributor knows that he won’t be able to handle the hours that were affected to him/her.

Evolution of the situation

Compared to last month, we gained two new sponsors (Daevel and FOSSter, thanks to them!) and we have now 45.5 hours of paid LTS work to “spend” each month. That’s great but we are still far from our minimal goal of funding the equivalent of a half-time position.

In terms of security updates waiting to be handled, the situation is a bit worse than last month: while the dla-needed.txt file only lists 33 packages awaiting an update (6 less than last month), the list of open vulnerabilities in Squeeze shows about 60 affected packages in total. This differences has two explanations: CVE triaging for squeeze has not been done in the last days, and the POODLE issue(s) with SSLv3 affects a very large number of packages where it’s not always clear what the proper action is.

In any case, it’s never too late to join the growing list of sponsors and help us do a better job, please check with your company managers. If not possible for this year, consider including it in the budget for next year.

Thanks to our sponsors

Let me thank our main sponsors:

• Gold sponsors:
• The Positive Internet
• Silver sponsors:
• AD&D – David Ayers – IntarS Austria
• Blablacar
• Domeneshop AS
• Evolix
• Trollweb Solutions
• Université Lille 3
• Bronze sponsors:
• Daevel SARL
• FOSSter
• Freeside Internet Service
• Intevation GmbH
• Linuxhotel GmbH
• MyTux
• Nantes Métropole
• Offensive Security
• Seznam.cz, a.s.