The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Not switching to RPM, don't worry!

From: Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>
> Remember that one of the things debian has is *smooth* upgrades.
> RedHat is taking a beating on 3.x to 4.x upgrades especially

OK. I'm not suggesting we ever even consider switching unless there
is a 1:1 parity in system functionality and you can continue to use
the tools you're used to.

I suspect that given enough time the differences in functionality
between the various package systems may become very small. The fact
that RH watches us so carefully is evidence for this (they seem to
be reading debian-devel every day). We should be ready to stand on
other advantages of Debian when that day comes. So let's consider
the advantages we keep, and the ones we can lose:

	Cooler package system - definitely can lose, others can catch up,
	we can fall behind. Eventually, everyone gets to the same level of
	functionality and the differences become moot.

	Ease of use. Our advantage here seems to be that most stuff works
	out of the box and the system doesn't die when you upgrade. This
	is something else that others will catch up to.

	Open development model - I doubt any of the commercial companies
	would go for this, so we keep this advantage unless we someday
	decide to close. The only reason we'd do that would be if we had
	some horrendous security problem, so let's take steps now to make
	sure that doesn't happen.

	All free software - others sort of try to look like they are all
	free software, but we're the only ones who really do it. We can
	lose this one if we loosen our policies on what we accept, so let's
	not do that.

	Non-profit organization - well, there's always FSF, but we seem to
	be better at producing a product than they are. I doubt any other
	non-profit would try to replace us unless something really bad happened
	to Debian.

Now, let's look at the others, and their exclusive advantages:

	Commercial software - many distributions now come with a commercial
	web browser, commercial X server, etc. If you're not a free-software
	zealot that can be desirable. We can only try to beat this by
	encouraging quality free software.

	Professional customer service - we're about to have that, Dale are
	you coming up to speed? When will you be ready to announce?

	Distribution - they are in the software and book stores more than
	we are. I've been trying to improve on this with the official CD,
	etc.

	Connections - people are publishing books on the commercial systems
	rather than just Linux. So far we don't have that kind of connections.
	This is something we should work on.

Feel free to add to the above.

	Bruce
--
Bruce Perens K6BP   Bruce@Pixar.com   510-215-3502
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