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**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah. Ubuntu is so complex, and the community has changed so much. At some point, I wasn't happy with some choices that Canonical made, and it was just so top-down, and the community didn't get much of a choice. And the more I read about Debian and now it works, that it's not controlled by any one ... |
Debian just keeps getting better and better at it. There's a definite arrow of improvement if you look at Debian over time. And this is because technical people get to make the decisions; not the salespeople, not \[unintelligible 00:11:06.26\] squeeze more money out of this quarter. It's really a project by the users, ... |
I firstly switched over to using Debian, and then switched to Debian at work, and gradually started contributing more... We organized a conference for Debian in Cape Town in 2016. That was a lot of work and lots of fun... And in 2017, I became a Debian developer. So I'm actually quite a young Debian developer for being... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[12:08\] Okay. So you mentioned the organization, some of the simplicity, the structure, the way it works... To me, that is kind of the most interesting part about Debian. Because as far as a Linux distribution, it's kind of boring insofar as it's not going to have the latest stuff, unless you're on S... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, I'm still amazed and surprised that it does work. If you imagine -- I mean, Ian Murdock was 20 years old when he came up with this manifesto of what Debian should be. If he came out and said that today and Debian didn't exist, people would really just dismiss him and say "This is not possible... |
And yeah, it's a social project and a social experiment. And we're not sure -- I've often asked myself what would Debian look like in 20 years? Will it still exist in 20 years? What's the potential paths of failure that could exist that could cause it to crash and burn, and what can we do to avoid that? It's a bit like... |
**Jerod Santo:** So in the detailed history, which - this is very cool; there's like an entire darn near book written by you all... All about the history of the Debian project, and all the releases, and how it got started... And it says that "When it began, Debian was the only distribution that was open for every devel... |
So I think when you ask about like how something doesn't crash and burn, usually you start thinking -- I mean, I just go to like "Money." Well, people need to eat food, and do stuff, and so commercialization is sustainability, to a certain extent. And if you go look at the list of users - now, these are just self-repor... |
**Jonathan Carter:** \[15:56\] I'll have to think about that one for a minute. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Okay, we'll come back to it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You don't want to jinx it, Jerod. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right? |
**Jonathan Carter:** No, I think what makes it work is so many companies see the value of their employees contributing to Debian. So people get to contribute to Debian as part of their day job. When I go to Debian, there are many people who are literally rich. They have lots of money, and they do this just because it's... |
Then there's lots of people who are students, who have lots of time to contribute to Debian. Their bills are paid, they don't work yet, they don't have to pay rent yet, but they do have some time to contribute. But then there is this very large amount of people that are professionals, that have day jobs, but either the... |
So we have this huge mix of people, and in terms of being able to contribute - well, almost everyone has their own unique story. We do find that it's a bit difficult increasing our diversity in Debian. We want to bring in more women, we want to bring in more non-white people, but we find the privilege that exists out t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there a particular initiative y'all have to increase the odds, I suppose? ...you mentioned the privilege that's there... Like, to sort of increase the privilege for those that don't have that, like maybe through grants, or maybe there's sponsorship from companies to say "Okay, we'll sponsor someb... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, up until this year we did Google Summer of Code and \[unintelligible 00:18:26.25\] They tended to be very expensive. We had to pay lots of money per person to do that. And our return has been relatively low. So this hasn't been announced yet anyway, and I don't have final details, but we're l... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What is the business of Debian? How is it formalized currently? I know that in your 2022 DPL platform that you mentioned - so you mentioned you established a platform when you wanted to get elected. That 2022 platform mentioned formalizing Debian, formal registration, things like that, that so... |
**Jonathan Carter:** \[20:03\]Great. So that's still on my to-do list from my platform back then. So how we exist at the moment is - it's called an association of volunteers. And that's not even recognized everywhere in the world. So what an association of volunteers is is we get together, we have a meeting, we come up... |
How we work is we have SPI, software in the public interest. It's a nonprofit in the US that was actually initially started as a backing organization for Debian. So this was going to be our Debian organization way back 30 years ago, when I didn't know that Debian existed. But it's grown so much; there's over 100 free s... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. SPI is interesting. So it's software in public interest? Is that what it's called? |
**Jonathan Carter:** Software in the public interest. Yeah, that's correct. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, gotcha. So that's at spi-inc.org, if I got that correctly. |
**Jonathan Carter:** That is correct. Yeah. They're useful because that means we can accept charitable donations in the US. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. You need a fiscal sponsor somewhere, especially when you're a global organization, because you can't -- to be mostly volunteer-ran, I guess in all ways volunteer-ran, you can't expect to be registered everywhere. It's physically impossible to tackle that task. You've got bigger problems, like ... |
**Jonathan Carter:** They also handle accounting and a lot of really boring stuff that no volunteer really wants to do. Even though we do have a treasurer team, we're glad that they mostly take care of the numbers coming in and going out. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So in that same platform that we were just speaking of from 2022 there is a section where you talk about trusted organizations, which you then acronym as TO's, and you speak to relying too much on various TO's, and conflicts, and verbal agreements, and things like that. Formalizing Debian, from an o... |
**Jonathan Carter:** So that's a weak point that I want to address, and it's why it's a part of my platform. So this is a bit of Debian internals that I'm getting into now, but to give you some vague idea, or some idea at least, at one DebConf, which is our annual Debian conference, some handshake agreement was made be... |
\[24:18\] But at the same time, someone else had a handshake agreement with SPI saying that we definitely should pay the 5% on those, because it helps grow SPI, and makes it more sustainable. And this caused huge tension in our DebConf treasurer team, because there was this disagreement. This is just one example, but I... |
So it's one of these niggly admin things that we have to take care of in Debian. We're all technical people, we want to take on technical challenges, but we have all these organizational challenges that we also have to take care of in order to make Debian work. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Are these things that the Linux Foundation -- I mean, obviously, Debian is Linux, so is this something that the Linux Foundation themselves can provide? I know they have a ton of attorneys that are involved, and that sounds like an attorney challenge, really. Attorneys tend to do business or corpora... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Not really. I reached out to them and other organizations like the Software Conservancy and Free Software Foundation Europe, and they're all interested in becoming another TO for Debian. But that still doesn't solve our original problem that we can't actually set up an agreement with them. So I'm v... |
I just want to formalize that completely, because I think it can become a real problem going forward. We had one TO that basically closed down, and we don't know what happened to the money. It was a German trusted organization, and they held some money for Debian. I don't think it was a huge amount of money, but there'... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, if we look at Debian, step back and talk about what makes it so special, and obviously, the volunteer-run aspect of it and the democratic aspect of it is one of the things. And even though myself over here is saying like "How could it continue without commercialization?", but it's like the proof'... |
One of my favorite things back in the early days of Debian - because I was in and around three, four or five; that was my really running a lot of Linux servers timeframe for me - was just the naming of the major releases, all using the Toy Story theme. I always love that. Bookworm I'm not sure. What's Bookworm all abou... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Oh, Bookworm is a Toy Story character. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[28:03\] Oh, okay. Maybe it's like Toy Story 4, or something. Something I haven't seen yet. |
**Jonathan Carter:** I think it was actually earlier. I've only seen Toy Story 4 recently... But yeah, they keep making movies, so hopefully by the time we run out of Toy Story characters, there will be more. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say they make their movies... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Forky, which is -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh yeah, Forky is a good one. |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, Forky is Debian 14. So 13 will be Trixie, 14 will be Forky. Forky was from Toy Story 4. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes. |
**Jonathan Carter:** It was like a discarded plastic fork that someone made into a toy. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. Is it the spoon fork? Like it's a spork, isn't it? Or was it just a regular fork? |
**Jonathan Carter:** Yeah, I think it's a spork. |
**Jerod Santo:** I was in and around like the Wheezy, Jessie era of Debian. And I remember, of course, Sid. So Sid is, for those who are uninitiated, that's the experimental, dangerous branch of Debian. This is like if you want to go on unstable. Sid - I think you guys back-road into that. It's like something in develo... |
**Jonathan Carter:** Exactly. And Sid was, of course, also the unstable kid in Toy Story, that used to torture the toys. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, exactly. The perfect name. |
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