Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project.
The fact that Debian is a relatively slow-acting, complex democracy is probably why it has survived for so long, and why it’s become the bedrock for so many derivative distributions.
From the linked blog post…
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The historic background for [Debian’s democratic structure] is that the first Debian project leaders were implicitly all-powerful dictators until they chose to step down. Then one project leader went too far, and a revolt threw them out, and democracy was introduced. As part of this, the project got a formal constitution, which defines rules for the project.
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This seemed spicy, so I researched a little to get more a more detailed background, and I didn’t see anything in Debian’s history around the 1998-1999 time frame (which is when the first Debian constitution came to be) about a revolt or a project leader being thrown out. Bruce Perens was the DPL directly before the first constitution, and while he might have been considered somewhat controversial, I don’t see any indication that he was “thrown out.”
Anyone have more information on what situation the author is referring to? My best guess is that they mistakenly intermingled the systemd fiasco (2014ish) since Ian Jackson resigned as a result of it, but he happened to be the DPL at the time the first Debian constitution was ratified in late 1998.
I`m also interested in it. However I can`t find anything at Google about it.