Ian Murdock: Debian "missing a big opportunity"
Ian Murdock founded Debian GNU/Linux nearly fifteen years ago, and today it provides the foundations for many well-known distros such as Ubuntu and Knoppix. LXF caught up with Ian, who currently chairs the Linux Standards base, and asked him about Debian politics, leadership and the rise of Ubuntu...
LXF: How happy are you with how Debian has turned out?
IM: I'm generally pretty happy. Clearly, you can't argue that Debian has done a lot of good things and had a major impact. Certainly, it has exceeded all my expectations going into it. I'm a little dismayed by certain aspects of it. I think in some respects Debian is blowing a pretty big opportunity. If you look at the way Linux is used in big enterprise all the way down to the other end of the spectrum, Debian is one of the three big distributions worldwide; Red Hat and SUSE are the other two. There are just a few little things that hold it back. One big one is the fact that it has never had a predictable release schedule. When is the next version going to come out? "Whenever it's done" doesn't tend to be a very compelling answer for a broad swathe of the market, right?
I said a year and a half ago that Debian had a big opportunity in front of it and that the most important thing they needed to do was to get Etch released on time. So to see how not only that has slipped but the manner in which it has slipped - namely that there is almost a prediction among certain developers that it's never going to work because you've introduced money into the equation with the DuncTank project and that it's doomed to fail, and the passive aggressive actions by those same developers to make sure that their prediction comes true - that sort of exposes the worst part of the open source development process. It allows the people outside the community who don't understand it to misunderstand. Not to mention that they are missing a big opportunity.
LXF: Do you think that's a failure of the process, though, or a particular failing of Debian? None of the other distributions seems to have quite so much internal strife.
I saw my first Sun workstation about 15 years ago, in 1992. Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers. And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive.
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