Debian is Dying for Some of the Same Reasons IBM's Fedora is Rapidly Dying
Prioritising CoC censorship, not communities
Techrights will have network-related maintenance tomorrow night. Not unexpected, in fact this was properly scheduled well in advance.
Techrights runs on Debian. My laptops run Debian. My wife's laptop runs Debian. It's all Debian, everywhere (almost).
But seeing some recent articles, it seems like Debian mediocrity is metastasising.
We wrote about it yesterday and mentioned Arch, as it's generally perceived to be independent from Debian (unlike Ubuntu and its derivatives) and also independent from IBM.
In practice, however, it's not independent, just more independent (all things are relative).
Debian will survive or thrive based on its actions and decisions. The policy of several consecutive DPLs - the campaign to spend lots of money silencing/demonising/censoring critics - is coming home to roost. As it stands at the moment, nobody wants to become a DPL or lead a project that's widely adopted/deployed. Even some past DPLs are "hunted down" [1, 2]. It's starting to look a lot less like science (where scientific principles and rigor command) and more like a religious cult.
Debian isn't "new" to controversy/scandals, but this time it may be fatal as they run out of (or low on) active contributors and many packages are left orphaned. We saw the same several years ago in Fedora after IBM had intentionally sabotaged packaging efforts by "reassigning" staff. Later on it laid off some of the most important people in Fedora while "reassigning" (to non-Fedora things) the remainder. Who's running Fedora now? People who cannot code or package anything but are slop fans (and IBM staff who work for IBM's masters "100% of the time").
If Debian drops the ball, some other people (or more legitimate communities) will pick it up. █
Says his own spouse!
Image source: The Little Book of Love