The Dunc-Tank project has been the topic of much debate in the Debian community since it was launched in September last year. Aimed at overcoming Debian's notorious delays in meeting its scheduled releases, Dunc-Tank collected donations to test the effect of funding on open-source software development.

It has now been more than a month since the scheduled release of Debian 4.0, codenamed etch. However, even with Dunc-Tank's funding, etch is yet to be seen.

Liz Tay speaks with Debian Project Leader and Dunc-Tank mastermind Anthony Towns to find out what happened.

How did the Dunc-Tank experiment come about?

Dunc-Tank was a project to see if we could put some funding into Debian release management so that it would be more likely to come out on time.

It was originally going to be an internal thing within Debian, but there was a lot of controversy as to whether the release was a suitable thing to be funding alone, or whether it should have been a more general thing, so that anyone could apply for funding.

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