[Video] A Debian Project Leader Needs to Also be a Technical Project Leader
Video download link | md5sum 6a2e4a673f6e4fa369e819b684439ca7
Debian is a Technical Project
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THIS past winter we covered increasingly troubling things in Fedora's leadership. Some superb people had been fired (IBM priorities) and some of those promoted lacked technical background. You can't expect geeks to take instructions from people like these.
Now there's a change of leadership in Debian because DPL Carter decided to pass the baton [1, 2] and one candidate stands out as conspicuously nontechnical (yes, that's a word). I've decided to cover the issue in video/audio as this way it's harder to take people's words out of context or 'mis-comprehend' (misinterpret maliciously or not) people's tone/intention/motivation. I'm typically sincere in my writings; I don't self-censor or mince words, but in videos it's generally harder to distort what people say (or said). The licence can hopefully prevent people 'clipping' things out of context (not that's I'd bother with legal enforcement, it's more like a "gentleman's agreement").
There's still a voting process taking place (the only "media" coverage we've found about it says "Two developers in running for post of Debian project leader").
We do not vouch for one (or none) horse in this race; the video does not even name the candidates, but we insist that there's a needs for diversity, specifically init diversity, just like some distros let people choose between Wayland and XOrg or between various renders. Monoculture is a bad thing in nature; the same is true in computing. Software diversity is important because it makes us robust to situations like dead developers or fatigue/neglect in some projects. We saw that in xz recently. █