Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 25th Oct 2003 05:13 UTC, submitted by Charles Krohn
Today, Ian Murdock described his recent work on APT to the Debian community. This announcement has far-ranging implications for the future of Fedora and Debian projects. Ars Technica has the details.
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"If the work you intend to do related to open source software disagrees with Debian philosophy"
I suppose this might hypothetically be possible, but... Can you please come up with a plausible example of how promising to follow the spirit of the Free Software Guidelines and Social contract in one's official capacity as a Debian developer would create a real conflict of interest with regards to Open Source software development? I'm finding it hard to think of one, but perhaps someone else can.
Of course, Debian's Social Contract is with the Free Software (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines) not Open Source (http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) community anyway, if you want to be pedantic about it. While there's a lot of overlap, the two organisations do judge licenses by different criteria.
"Simply put, a community which refuses acceptance of those who disagree with its philosophy is a closed community, not an open one."
Despite its stated goal of creating a 100% Free Software distribution, the project provides a tree for Non-Free software. I'd be hard pressed to think of a greater concession to those that think Non-Free software has its place in the software ecosystem, so I don't think your point is valid.
"unless Debian is "the central place for all open source development in the community"."
The person you're quoting immediately chastised himself for exaggerating ("OK, I think I went a little far with that one), so I don't think it's fair to take that literally anyway.
"So, I hope Debian stays where it is, in the periphery"
It's hardly in the periphery. Whilst it is of course absurd to suggest that Debian *is* the Free Software community, it is undeniably one of the major players within it, and one of the largest embodiments of the community spirit. Above all, it's a wonderful example of how community self-governance can be effective. It also serves as one enormous testbed (and therefore, development platform) for the packaged software within the archive, thanks to the maintainers' close liason with the upstream developers. In addition, the fact that there is no comparably successful community-developed distribution speaks volumes in itself.