Re: [RFC] Restructuring of the Debian Project

[Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de>]

>>>>> Bruce Perens writes:

> We can comply with them but can probably never be certified. For
> example, POSIX requires many thousands of dollars for one of four
> professional labs in the world to certify each of our releases for
> compliance, or we could operate our own lab, but this would require
> $5000 to $10,000 per year in payment to NIST, and a good deal of
> labor.  X/Open requires at least $60/unit for Unix branding.

Yes you already told me that, and i agree that we, at least at the
moment, can not afford the compliance test and the branding, but that
does not mean that we can not use these standards as guidelines for
our work.

> For this reason I feel that the free software world should
> eventually start developing truly open standards.

I would like to know what you regard as "open standards", if not POSIX
and the XPG standards.  They are published, unlike the new I2O
"standard" which you can only get if you are a company and sign a
non-disclosure agreement, pay a yearly fee and only use proprietary
Operating Systems.

>> All affiliations with "Software in the Public Interest" should be
>> terminated.

> This would adversely affect our tax status. The name of our
> corporation should not be that of a product for technical reasons
> having to do with getting tax-exempt status.

Would you please disclose the details on that particular company?
Maybe put a description, where it is registered, who is on the board
and such things on the web site.  We need transparency in these
matters, at least in my opinion.

>> The Board of Directors should call for a vote by developers and
>> users regarding the proposal of a fee collected from CD
>> manufactures.

> Unfortunately, this has to be a donation, not a fee, or we run into
> tax problems.

Then call it a donation, such things can be arranged.  I proposed this
fee, ah ... donation, even before you did and all we got was lots of
shouting and screaming.  That is not the way such an issue should be
decided.

>> The Board of Directors should select from the active developers a
>> well-skilled group of no more than 15 people to form the "core
>> developers group", which will build and maintain the unified source
>> tree.

> Uh, a closed development model? No thanks. We are doing very well
> with the open one, while the BSD-like developments are not doing
> nearly as well.

No, not a closed development model, but a cooperative. If you count
the developers in the base system, you will get about that number. So
the number of people which "control" the basis of debian will be same,
all that is changed is the distinction of that package belongs to A
and he has to fix it and this belongs to B and he has to fix it.
Instead they would work as a team solving problems when they show up
regardless of which package they belong to.  And then i would like to
see a bit of development on our behalf. For example have so many
developers of different countries and languages that we could easily
localize all the linux specific tools (cfdisk, mount, ...) which lack
this support and provide these enhancements as patches back to the
upstream maintainer.  Right now we are so tangled up in out packaging
interdependencies that we (at least not me) have no time for such
creative work.

And if you look at the seperate proposal of a Quality Assurance Group
isn't that what i am talking about?  Why form a second group to look
after the first? Why not merge them and form a core group?

Thanks for you comments,
  Dominik Kubla
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