 Okay, can everyone hear me? My name is Joel Derbias. I'm a Hindu priest, a contract programmer, and assistant min, most various things that I do, and I live in the USA with my wife and two children, and I recently, in January, celebrated my eighth anniversary as a Debian developer, and I got involved with Debian and Linux way back in the very early days of the commercial internet when I worked for one of the first internet providers in the USA, the first one that would provide service to the general public, and I became interested in how the internet worked, and it was pretty much everything in those days ran on Unix, but Unix meant a big, expensive box from like some, or digital, you know, some companies, something that I, you know, as a struggling, lowly tech couldn't afford, but then I heard from one of my colleagues that there was this new operating system that worked just like Unix, called Linux, and if you had three or four boxes of floppy disks, you could download it, you could install it on your PC, and make as many copies of it as you want, and it had all the source code, so you could tinker with it as much as you liked, and so that's something that would seem very appealing to me, so I started playing around with Linux, the first variety of Linux I used was Slackware, which was working for me for a while until one day when in the course of a major upgrade that was going on at the time, I managed to completely render my system non-functioning, so at that time I started thinking that, well, seeing as I have to reinstall anyway, let me see what else is out there, and by that time Red Hat was in existence, it was in its fledgling stages, there were a couple of other distributions around, but there's one that intrigued me, to be honest, more for the name than anything else, because it sounded very science fiction-y to me for some reason, called Debian, so I decided to install that, but things weren't quite working the way I wanted them to, and at one point I was on the Debian user's mailing list, I was complaining about something or the other, and the Debian project leader at the time, Bruce Parents, said to me that instead of just whining, why don't you try and fix it, and I said that, you know, okay, so I'll try that, and the reason I'm telling you this story is to illustrate what I call the three pillars of Debian, community, technical excellence, and freedom, and the community aspect is that Debian is not something which is just given to you from on high, it's something you're expected to get involved with, which you can change to your heart's content, if you like it exactly the way it is, that's fine too, but if there's things that you don't like, you don't have to wait for anyone's permission, or you don't have to, you know, go through any complicated bureaucratic procedure in order to start changing things, you can, you know, do whatever you like, and then when, you know, if it's something that other people might be interested in, you can also contribute it back into the system, and the technical aspect is, you know, Debian is very interested in being the best operating system there is, and we won't stand on ceremony, we won't have that not invented here kind of attitude that some people have. If there's a good idea, if there's, you know, some kind of new feature that, you know, would be a good addition to the system, and that, you know, people might be interested in, we'd be glad to include it in the system, and the third pillar is freedom. Debian was, for me, this was a very, you know, normal experience to have such a powerful, you know, server class operating system which you could do anything you like with, and like I said, I was interested in figuring out how the internet worked, and, you know, in those days we had, you know, not even 56k, it was like 28.8 modems that people had, and so it was very difficult to be able to set up your own little network and test things out that way, and even the networks that were there were, you know, mostly used by businesses and so on, or they were, you know, very costly because the internet providers were charged by the hour, so they were not really in the kind of environment where, you know, you could just mess about with things, but thanks to Debian and thanks to Linux, you know, I had, you know, full access to everything, so that's what impressed me, and that's what convinced me that I should continue, you know, exploring the system and contributing back to the system, so like I said, now it's been eight years I've been using and contributing to, and advocating Debian, and I honestly, at this point, can't think of anything else I'd rather use. So how did Debian come about? Well, this part I'm sure everyone knows, local boy, Linus Torvald, decides to do the same kind of tinkering, but on an even more basic level, and he, you know, builds an operating system kernel, which at that time, most people regarded as something that could only be done by experts and with a whole lot of time and money and manpower, but he did it, and he made two crucial decisions which really caused his, first it was a toy, but it caused his toy to become, you know, a powerful force in the computing world, and the first one of those was, he decided to make his work available over the internet so that people, you know, outside of Finland, you know, outside of his small circle of friends could also contribute and could also make their own changes and make things work the way they wanted, and that caused a tremendous explosion of interest very early on, and so he got a lot of very good help from other experienced people as well, but that made the progress of Linux accelerate much faster, and the second crucial decision he made, and maybe at that time, even he may not have realized the consequences of it, but I think, you know, the world should be glad that he did, was he decided to put his invention under the new public license that ensured that not only would it, but would the version that he actually wrote be free, but it would remain free for all time, and, you know, there were no worries that it could be co-opted by, you know, some company online, Linux could decide that well, I'm not interested anymore and just, you know, decide to just end the project and bury it. So, very soon, other people started playing around with this new operating system. They combined it with other utilities that had been developed by the GNU project. Richard Stallman was a computer scientist at MIT in the U.S., and he was very concerned about the way the computing industry was going. It seemed that it was becoming more and more commercialized, and that in itself would not have been bad, but the companies who were, you know, making all these commercial products were not interested in sharing information amongst each other. And I think the last straw came for him when he had a, in those days, very expensive and very brand-new laser printers, and he was trying to get it to work, but the driver for the laser printer provided by the manufacturer was really working very well, and they wouldn't tell him, you know, what he needed to know to be able to fix it, and even then he managed to get it fixed, but then they wouldn't let him share his changes with other people who had the same problem. So he started the Free Software Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation was dedicated to promoting the cause of software freedom, but one of the ways they were going to do that is to make a free operating system, and so they made all the components that were needed for a Unix-type operating system. Usually Unix programs are created in the C programming language, so they wrote a C compiler, and they wrote a text editor, and they wrote some games, and all the basic things you would expect in an operating system, but one thing that they didn't have was the kernel, which is the actual heart of the operating system that controls everything else. So when Linux came along, and it was also under the GNU license, it made a good fit, so many people started combining new utilities and the Linux kernel and made, you know, what I refer to as distributions, so instead of having to gather all the bits yourself, you could go to one central place and get everything, like I said, first it was on floppy disks or magnetic tapes, and now it's CDs and DVDs and so on. So the first distros, as they were called, appeared on the scene, but they had one thing in common, as far as some people would consider them, that they were all not very good. So another student, this time from Indiana in the US, called Ian Murdock, decided that I can do better than this. So he decided to start his own distribution, and he gave it the name Debian, which comes from, his wife's name was Deborah, so Deb Ian, so it has actually no science fiction kind of connotations whatsoever. This is from the name of his wife. But from the very beginning, he decided to stress community, technical excellence and freedom. Because other distributions that were arriving on the scene at that time were, like for instance, Slackware was very popular, and it still has its fans today, but it's basically the work of one man. I think he has a couple of people helping him, but it's basically a one-man show. And other distributions like Red Hat, or Susan, were run as commercial companies, meaning that they used the same basic, you know, code as other Linux distributions. They did make it available freely, but they also charged money for certain products that they made. But Ian decided that his project would be a volunteer affair, and it would involve anyone who was interested in joining, and it would try and keep to, you know, the ideals of the free software movement and to the early days of Linux. So that's why I refer to Demian as Linux in its purest form. So now from that very humble beginning, there are close to a thousand Demian developers, possibly even more, if you count other contributors who are not fully-fledged developers. And as Brandon said, they come from every continent, except I'm tactically, every religion and political and philosophical point of view you can think of. Some are students. Some are professionally employed as programmers. A new and welcome development is increasingly some of them are being paid to work on Demian-related projects. But it's a wide range of different ways of life that they come from. And some of them are even female, which is actually kind of a novelty in the IT world these days. Many people are concerned about, you know, IT being a very male-dominated field, but there's a soft project going on within Demian called Demian Women, which is just, you know, people trying to encourage girls and women who might be interested in this kind of thing, but maybe dissuaded by, you know, the whole, you know, laddish atmosphere that you often get to participate. And their numbers are slowly growing as well. So, you know, that's one of the efforts that's going on. Currently, most of the developers are concentrated in the industrialized nations, but we're also starting to see more developers coming up from, you know, the third world from Africa and South Asia and Middle East. They face a lot of problems though, because they tend to be isolated. They tend to have not as good, you know, communications facilities like broadband is very spotty in most places, unless you happen to live in a big city. So they have a lot of obstacles, but, you know, an operating system like Linux makes a lot of sense for, you know, countries where, you know, they have to economize and they can't necessarily, you know, be enthralled to some, you know, big corporation and work on their schedule. So there are also initiatives on the way to, you know, spread Debian into those areas as well. And the other part of the community, just as important as the developers are the users. And the users are also very diverse. Debian is used in major corporations. I think later today you'll be hearing from a representative of Hewlett Packard who'll be talking a bit about Debian in the corporate world. It's used by universities, of course, because it's very good for educational purposes. Many developers are, you know, students or professors. Governments are adopting Debian quite a bit in Brazil, as Brandon mentioned. I think Vienna was recently a city that committed to transferring all of its IT infrastructure from Windows to Linux and specifically to the Debian variety of things. And ordinary citizens. I've been doing talks like this for a while and it's amazing the range of people who are now, you know, using Linux. It used to be just a very hardcore hacker types, you know, the people who are very into computers and always on the bleeding edge of everything. But I've heard from housewives and, you know, grandfathers and it's basically people from all walks of life. And users, you know, they're not just consumers. They don't just take the Debian that's given to them and, you know, say thank you. They can also contribute in their own way. A big part of the contribution a humble user can make is by reporting bugs, giving feedback on packages. As Brandon mentioned, we try to do everything out in the open. So, you know, if you're interested in some aspects of where Debian is going, and you have something you'd like to say about it, we won't just, you know, reject you as not being one of the anointed elite or anything like that. You know, everyone gets to participate. And bug reporting is a very, it may seem like a very trivial thing, but it's a very good way of, you know, doing quality assurance on software. And I think that's why we have such a reputation for high quality is because we make it easy for people to report problems and, you know, we react to them and fix them very quickly. And they also do things like writing documentation or helping other users by, you know, internet chat or mailing lists. We have a very busy mailing list for users. And in fact, some people will find it too busy because it gets like a couple of hundred messages a day. But if you have a question, if you have a problem, you can often get an answer within a few minutes. And even though, you know, other, you know, commercial operations are like paid tech support or, you know, things of that nature, we often provide, you know, just as high level of, high quality level of support, you know, strictly by volunteers, by users working with other users. And because of the users and because of their advocacy, we have a very good reputation. And in fact, Debian is considered the second or third most popular Linux distribution, depending on who you ask. One problem that we have is that usually the kind of people who collect these statistics do things like they count shipments of boxes to, you know, electronic stores or whatever. And because Debian doesn't really have any, you know, formal, there's no Debian box set, even the CDs that we do provide are done by third parties. We make the CD image available, but we don't really sell the CDs or, you know, there's no, you know, central like store or something where you can buy Debian. So it's very hard to gauge the actual number of Debian users out there. But most people who study these things would say that we're probably, you know, even number two or number three. And the second pillar I mentioned was technical excellence. And usually, you know, when people think of Debian and when they think of its technical merits, the first thing they point to is the packaging system. From the beginning, the source code to Linux programs has been made available for anyone who can get it. But not everyone has the skill to, or the time or the inclination to get, you know, random programs from various places on the Internet and build them themselves. So what we do is we do all the process of building programs. And we make them into software packages that you can easily add or remove or get information about. And a package can either be a whole, an entire program, or in some cases where it's a very big program or there are parts which are optional, it will be split up into smaller packages so you can install it partially instead of having to have everything. And along with the packages, we have a policy manual which specifies how the packages are to be built and how they are to interact with other packages. So a Debian system is very well integrated together and everything, you know, basically just works. Like if you install a web server, you install it and it will just start working. Of course, you may need to do further configuration later on to have it work exactly the way that you want it. But there's not too much, you know, you can get, basically I'm trying to say that you can get started very easily, you know, at least on a basic level with most Debian packages. And again, users who are not, you know, that technically inclined or are busy with other tasks, you know, they really appreciate that. Also, what helps there is the volunteer nature of Debian because we don't have the commercial pressure to have, you know, everything out in time for Christmas or something like that. We can take the time to solve a problem properly rather than coming up with a partial solution. And currently, there are more than 10,000 packages in the Debian distribution. So the entire distribution takes up two DVDs now or about, I think it's like 17 CDs. It's huge and has practically any kind of Linux software that you could possibly want, as well as the standard Unix type utilities like, you know, X Windows or, you know, the C compiler and so on. There's specialized packages for mapping or for sequencing genes or for playing games of different languages. You know, so that also helps users because they don't have to, you know, keep searching everywhere or compile the software themselves. And we actually improved that even one step further by a program called Act. And what that is, is a layer on top of the packaging system that installs packages for you from the Internet and make sure that you have all the extra dependent packages needed to make it work so that you only have to type one command to get a particular package and everything you need to get it running will be installed for you. And now the other distributions are catching up to us but we were the first to have that capability and I think we're still the most highly regarded in that way. At any given time, there are actually three debut distributions. When a developer such as myself makes a package it goes into what's called our unstable distribution. Now unstable is kind of a scary word because, you know, that kind of conveys, you know, that everything is going to, you know, blow up any minute or, you know, something like that. So unstable just means constantly changing. Every day new packages are added as new versions come out or as bugs are fixed. And so the unstable distribution is very dynamic. And some people like that. Some people like to be on the bleeding edge and get the very latest of everything. So those are the kinds of users that tend to run the unstable distribution. And the opposite of that is the stable distribution. And the goal for the stable distribution is to be rock solid. So once we declare a distribution stable we don't add any code to it after that except for security fixes that may come up. And as a result a new stable debit distribution only comes out every two or three years. So there's some talk about maybe reducing that to about 18 to 24 months or so or at least making the cycle more predictable. But currently it's about two to three years. And as a result the software in the stable distribution isn't always the latest version. So the thrill seekers the ones who like to have the latest of everything they would find the stable distribution very boring. But there are many kinds of tasks where boring is what you want. Because if you're running a hospital let's say medical equipment you just want it to keep working and keep working and keep working and there'll be no strange surprises no unexpected changes in the system. So for environments like that or for a server let's say the stable distribution is a good choice. And in between that there is what's called the testing distribution. What we do is we take packages from the unstable distribution that are in a good state that haven't had any bugs reported any major bugs reported in the next time lately. And we move them into this testing distribution and it's the testing distribution when that's bug free to us at this action and is in a good state overall that becomes the new stable distribution. But many people also use it for if they're kind of middle of the road types they don't want absolutely new stuff but they don't want very old stuff either. So it makes a good medium kind of range between unstable and stable. Now these three distributions are also known by code names unstable is known as SID testing is currently known as Edge and stable is currently known as Sarge and these are all characters from the Pixar film Toy Story because one of the early Devin project leaders was worked on that film. So slightly odd names that people find kind of novel at first but many people know the Devin distributions by that name. In fact just earlier this year we released Sarge as our stable distribution. John, can I add? Sure. You might mention that one of the advantages of testing is that it's supposed to enable us to more easily actually do a stable release. Yes, that is one of the goals and that's why it's called testing. No, I hate it because I'm sure one of the goals of the testing distribution why it's called testing is that by having these packages which are relatively bug free being a relatively usable situation we can release a new stable distribution much faster because we already have it 90% in place and then we can just have a short period to work out the last bugs from the system and then release it like that because that's been one of the criticisms of Devin in the past is the long waits between stable releases so hopefully now that we have this testing framework as well we can work towards making more regular and faster stable releases. So then these three distributions are also duplicated about 12 times in what are called ports because Devin is not just for PCs Devin works on all kinds of computer architectures all the way from big IBM mainframes down to handheld palm top type computers and some people question the wisdom of that that what's the point of having a current operating system that works on say an Amiga or a 15 year old Macintosh or something like that but apart from the value to the people doing it just for the technical challenge of doing it it also has a good effect that different computer architectures have slightly different ways of organizing programs so they're often subtle bugs which would not be revealed if we just did everything on PCs but which come out when we try and compile the software on these other architectures and it's also very useful for our users who have old legacy equipment where the original manufacturer is not really doing much support or it may be out of business altogether but you still have a working computer so you can install Devin on it and get a fairly modern and supported operating system so if you were to put all the software Devin provides you would need a whole shelf of DVDs so that's my conclusion is that Devin is really big that's what you should get from the last few minutes of what I just said and because of that size because of that good reputation and because we're free we absolutely have no problems with people changing things to their liking Devin has also become the base for other distributions there are some people who may feel that Devin as it is doesn't fulfill a particular task so what they can do is they can make their own variant of Devin which is specialized to that particular focus that they have and examples of this that you may have heard of are Knapex, Lindos, Progeny, Ubuntu and Xandros which are all fairly popular and well-known Linux distributions in their own right but they're based on the good foundation that Devin provides and there's some cooperation and back and forth between the projects as well and there should be more and that's one of the things that we're working on but a lot of these distributions also contribute fixes or other technical aspects back into the base Devin so everyone can use it the third pillar and probably the most important one I would say given how vital the importance of computers and computing devices has become in our lives is freedom freedom is a philosophical concept so there are many different views on exactly what is meant by the term English is very bad that way that we have this word free which could mean you know, even no cost or very cheap or it could mean free in the sense of no restrictions and other languages and I think Finnish is one are very lucky that way but they separate out these two concepts but in English it could be a bit confusing so what Devin has done is codified its views on freedom in two documents one is called the Devin social contract the concept of a social contract comes from philosophers such as Rousseau or Locke but we've applied that to a computer and based on the social contract we have also developed the Devin free software guidelines which basically say that well this is our definition of freedom and that doesn't necessarily mean that nobody else is allowed to have a different definition of freedom but as far as the Devin project is concerned these are the criteria that we are going to use and I think we've done such a good job of it that the Devin free software definition and ideology has spread beyond into the wider free software community in fact the open source definition which has influenced by companies like Netscape to release their browser is based on the Devin free software guidelines and the social contract you can get the full text for both of these documents on our website www.devin.org and I encourage you to read the whole thing but I'm just going to go over briefly the most salient points of it therein the social contract says first of all that Devin will remain 100% free software so a person who uses Devin doesn't have to worry that one day we will decide to turn evil and start charging money and suing people and paying payments on things and all the other nasty stuff that is unfortunately going on in the rest of the computing industry we are guaranteeing to you that we will remain 100% free software and again free software we've also defined exactly what that means so you may agree with us or you may not but at least at all times you'll know exactly where we stand on the issues of free software the second point is that we will give back to the free software community Devin is not just about taking software from other places and you know making it into an operating system we also have ideas of our own that we contribute back and what we do we're going to make sure that they're done in a way that all supporters of free software could use we're not going to have any exclusive Devin only features the third point is that we will not hide problems there has been an influential essay on styles of software development called the cathedral and the desire and what that suggests is that some software projects are run the way a medieval cathedral would have been built that somebody, some bishop or duke or whoever decides there's going to be a cathedral and you know all the peasants get pressed to work and all the people in charge have the plans and everyone just does as they're told and you know builds up the cathedral and it looks very nice at the end but you know otherwise during the process you don't really know much of what's going on and the other way is like a bizarre as you still find to this day in India or other Asian countries where it's just a big mess with people everywhere hawking their products and trying to bargain with you and there's all kinds of stuff available and much of it is junk but if you spend a lot of time and if you really you know look closely you could find some good bargains so those are two basic styles and we're leaning more towards the bizarre in the sense that we want everything to be out in the open and again this is not always something that makes us look good if you read the deviant mailing lists sometimes you might think it's a big bunch of children a lot of fighting and flaming and all kinds of things but the same thing goes on in every software company it's just in most cases you don't know about it so if you're trying to make a rational decision about whether or not to use deviant or how you're going to use deviant at least you know where you stand because it's all out in the open and we have the bug tracking system so if there's problems you can you know report them you can see what problems have already been reported and again you can make your own decisions as to whether this is something that's appropriate for you or if you're going to look elsewhere but at least you won't be tricked into using deviant and the fourth point of the social contract is our priorities are our users and free software so you know we're just stating that up front that we're interested in free software and we're interested in making a good operating system for our users so you know this is not just a little hobby that some people are doing we want something that's good and that's something that's going to be used and the last point is we will support programs that don't meet our standards of free software unfortunately not all software is free there are commercial programs that people want to use we don't particularly like it but we're not going to obstruct you from using those programs because we think freedom is something that people will appreciate it's not something that you have to beat people over the head with you just have to calmly explain the benefits and you know if people think about it they're better off with freedom than with slavery so I'm just going to very quickly as I'm running out of time now go over some of the main points of the Devin free software guidelines the first one is that it should allow a piece of software that is to be considered free by Devin should allow free redistribution because it's no good if you have a soft piece of software if you want to give it to somebody else but you can't because there's some kind of artificial barrier that's stopping you a program must include source code again if you want to change you know change the Firefox web browser so that all text is purple or something like that that might be bizarre I think to do but you have the right to do that and in order to exercise that right you need to have the code now the code is not always very useful because if you're not a programmer it would make no sense to you but in that case if you have the code at least you can hire someone to make the changes that you want for you whereas if you didn't have the source code you'd be completely out of luck you must allow derivation which is kind of a follow on to that if somebody wants to take the software that we consider free and change it in any way they like they should have the right to do so and the license of the software should not prevent that it must not discriminate against persons or groups obviously we cannot consider software free if it says that only people over six foot tall are allowed to use the software or something like that so that would instantly make it not free in our eyes and a slightly related thing to that is it must not discriminate against fields of endeavor and that's a slightly more subtle point because you might think that what's wrong with the license that says this program may not be used for nuclear weapons testing because that's something that a lot of people think should be happening it's a moral thing to think it's a moral stance to take but if we allow some restrictions on freedom in that way over time they'll just start ballooning and getting more and more onerous and they'll be more and more often and eventually freedom will die by a thousand cuts so we consider those kinds of restrictions to be against the spirit of freedom too even if the license is hard isn't the right place that's still not really contributing to the cause of freedom again freedom should be something that you explain to people not just force upon them so I just want to wrap things up now and say that Debian is not just an experiment in software development but it's an experiment in a new way of social organization as well and so as with any experiment experiments mistakes get made along the way and we're trying to fix them then we may make more in the future but I think we're slowly learning good ways to organize the development of a free operating system and I think a lot of the lessons of Debian can also be applied to other areas and I think there's a movement going on the Creative Commons movement to extend some of the ideas of free software into the arts and into the sciences and so on and so I'm proud as a contributor to Debian to have partially responsible so I think Debian has a great future ahead of it and won't you please be a part of it