 Hello, I'm Enrico Vini, Debian developer, and since this is Debian Day, this morning we have seen a bit of what Debian is and some theory behind it, and I want to try to show you what's the everyday life, kind of give you an idea of, well, the life of Debian developers, what people do, what people think or feel inside in the project. So BDL has been talking about this this morning, that's like from Debian.org, the Debian project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. Who are those individuals? So, to be speaking, some are left-wing activists, many are not. Some could be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Taoist, Discordians, Pasterferians, many are none of that or something else or they just don't care. Some have children, some have grandchildren, some have children, who are Debian developers? Some are married, some are not, some married after meeting at a Debian event, and some went to a Debian conference for their honeymoon. So socially, you shouldn't give much for granted. If they tell you Debian is made by, I don't know, university student, nothing like that. In terms of profession, some are students, some are professors, scientists, admins, programmers, okay, you would expect that. We have monks, dentists, surgeons, firefighters, some work on a company because their company asked them to work on Debian. Some work on Debian because the company asked them to work on Debian. We have a few over here, but not just over here. Some own companies, some own companies that ask their employers to work on Debian. Some people package video games where you believe you are in space, and some people design satellites and then send them to spaces their hobby. Some people go to space on holidays. So professionally, again, it's very diverse, and you can't take much for granted. Some quotations from Debian developers about answers to the question, how did you start with Debian? So I maintained geology software that I was using, it's one answer, or another one package PHP apps, but didn't dare upload them because I thought it wasn't a good idea. Then you said the first thing I did was to use it, which makes a lot of sense. Maintain local packages for Red Hat servers and realize they would save time if they got those in the distribution, but not Red Hat, but Debian. Save more time if they actually switched to Debian. I was working in Perl, found challenges in Debian to practice my Perl skills. I ended up capable for operating system as a platform to develop software for an amateur satellite payload for the hobby. Some started maintaining because they wanted to prevent their favorite package from leaving Debian because nobody cared. Managing the internal infrastructure for a small office, stuffing Debian boots, helping running Debian boot at the conference, or it's so long I cannot remember anymore. So what can you do with Debian? I personally use it on my computer, on my laptop, on my server, on my mobile phone. My parents use it and my partner uses it. My internet provider uses it, he's the chief of my internet provider, and my accountant uses it, and he's my accountant. My former high school uses it, my university uses it, well, my former university, because I don't work at a university, but when I was at the university, they used it. I've seen it used to drive industrial machinery, which is nice, being paid to help them to do so, which is also nice. I've seen it used to drive amateur telescopes, please raise your hand. If you have questions, find him. I've seen it used in weather forecast agencies, well, weather forecast. I maintain some weather forecast stuff, because, well, I contact for them as well. I've spoken with people who maintain it for governments, and, well, Rhonda is going to talk about it later on this afternoon, so, yeah, well, you can see them too. Some people use Debian to test compilers, because it's got gigabytes of source code, so sometimes the GCC people ask us, can you please try to rebuild all of Debian with a new version to see if it explodes? And yeah, well, it's like one of the hugest bodies of source code you can ever find, and Lukas, who should be here, maintains a whole infrastructure to rebuild the whole of Debian in eight hours on a cluster or something. And so, yeah, sure, we have capability to do that. A friend of mine uses Debian to control the light effects of the theater play, and he sits in the audience controlling the light effects with an EEPC, and he's got the computer behind the stage that does everything. And so, people say, how the hell can you control all the lights by sitting in the audience, and he says magic. Other questions, besides my personal experience, people answer to that question by saying, I use Debian to find friends, run computers, play games, or use Debian to make the Austrian healthcare system work. It's good use. Half of my wardrobe consists of Debian clothing, which was an excellent answer. I use Debian to get my daily work done. I use Debian for everything, says Bdale. All of personal use, and I also use Debian to offer Clamavi Ubuntu Mirro. So, the Ubuntu Mirro for Clamavi runs on Debian. So, I use Debian to keep the Department of Physics of ETH Zurich working. I use it for everything, says René Magyarga, and I use it for everything, says Wouter, indeed. Well, most people would actually answer, yes, I use it for everything. So, you should not give much for granted about the limits of what you can do with Debian. It's been on space, it's been everywhere. So, common ways of earning a living with Debian. So, you can do, you want to make money with Debian, right? And you know Debian, and so, okay, you can do a system administration. And somebody asks, can you install, maintain, upgrade, monitor, fix my Debian setup for me? And you say, well, yes, I'm one of the developers, sure, I can do it, right? Easy. Some people may say, but I cannot install Debian in my very important corporate agency because Debian doesn't have a phone number that I can call in case something goes wrong. That's quite useful, people say, oh, I want to put other stuff because they have a phone number that I can shout to if something goes wrong. And well, it doesn't have a phone number, it has many. One of them is mine, and I have a price list. So, that's another way to make a living with Debian is to offer support and people do that, or you can offer customization. People can say, I understand that Debian does everything. But I don't need everything, I only need to do one thing. And I want it to work, fine. No problem, Debian can be customized. Many people are adapting Debian to all sorts of specifications. There's Debian for schools, for industries, for kiosks, for whatever. Here's my business card, it can be done, call me for a quote. Other way people make money with Debian. Debian does not come with a purpose. That's why people find it hard to make sense of what can be done with Debian. The only purpose of Debian is to be the best free operating system, obviously. But nothing more specific than that. We don't need to be more specific than that, that's kind of the thing. But you can give it your purpose with some work, obviously. That's very important. Everything you do in Debian is about work. If you enter Debian to talk, talk, talk, you go nowhere and people hate you. They don't want to see you around anymore. It's all about work, it's all about having a purpose, or wanting to do something with it, or wanting to fix things you don't like and just do it. No point in asking, oh, what if I fix this, you just go and fix it and say, I fixed it, do you like it? And people say, yeah, I don't, but I don't have the time, so I'll take your fix and Debian moves on. So I've asked people what is your best Debian work and answers were, well, running Debian for five years, which, yes, definitely worth an applause, because it's a lot of work to run Debian. And thanks to all the volunteers, not just Gunnar who, year after year, and keep this on, which is really cool. Or, well, people have done their own technical, specific things like new metadata in packages. The answer was, there's no my best Debian work because in Debian there's always space for improvement, which is very true. Some can be proud of the fact that it's mostly because of their effort that a choice of 70 languages appears when you install Debian. Or some are proud of over the years having brought loads of people to Debian. Again, all sorts of technical changes. Pushing the use of Debian in specific fields. Debian is the operating system of choice for neurological research. And that couldn't have happened unless we had neurologists who liked Debian and went to conferences and tried to make sure it would be useful for them. And, you know, they used it, they packaged stuff for software that they needed, and it was missing in Debian and they created documentation and they actually made it happen. In the main worldwide neuroscience convention of everything, Debian had a booth and it was like, yeah, we are here to stay and we are cool and people were into it. So, people are proud of being the bridge between software developers and the distribution. Software developers like to develop software, but they are not usually aware of what happens when their software is actually used in all sorts of different places. And that is the task of Debian developers. Debian developers make sure that that software works in all sorts of different places and then they can link back to the software developer and say, well, people reported that this could be improved or there's a new practice for integrating your software with other things, and so there's a lot about, you know, working with users and working with developers. We are in the middle and we have a very important task. Help Debian scale by building infrastructure, being an auto builder administrator for over 10 years now. That question? No, okay. So, what keeps all Debian developers together? It's tricky because, well, the only vision we have is to make the best free operating system, but then there are so many, like, what's the best free operating system for a dentist is different than the best free operating system for a space engineer. So, the thing that keep us all together are the Debian social contract, which basically everybody agrees that for their work in Debian, they'll do according to those five points. It's a kind of simple point. It's a bottom line. If you want to package non-free, well, if you want Debian to be all about proprietary software, then you're not welcome as a Debian developer because that's the first point of Debian social contract. If you are happy with the fact that you contribute to something that will remain 100% free, then, yeah, we understand each other. We understand each other that we all wish to give back to the free software community. All the work we do, we won't keep it secret and say, oh, I have this really cool piece of free software that I'm not giving to you. That's not what we do in Debian. So it's like we can assume that if we ask a Debian developer, oh, you've done that really cool thing for Debian. Can I see the source code? They'll say, yeah, sure. Usually, you need to ask, where did you put the source code? You don't need to ask, can I see it? If you ask some Debian developer, can I see the source code? They'll say, yeah, of course. Why do you ask? We will not hide problems. We do all our best not to have like a secret thingy of secret issues that Debian has and nobody must know about. We do have a few, but we try to keep them to a minimum. Is that some security problems cannot be disclosed until all the other distributors agree to it, and so we have to keep a few of them. But it's like every problem is in the open, except a few very recent security issues that we can't do otherwise, but we'd like to. Our priorities are our users and free software. So we usually fight about the order of those. But generally, we agree that those are both priorities. Some people say, yes, we need to have free software, even if it's unusable. Some people need to say, no, we need usable software, even if it's not completely free, but generally we reach a compromise at some point. And about works that do not meet our free software standards, we understand that some people may want to run on free software, and although it's not part of Debian, we sort of... Let's say we won't help you run non-free software, but the idea is that we won't kind of put you in a condition not to be able to. Let's say, if you need to run something non-free, we'll try to do our best so you can, although we won't package it for you. The idea is that we won't put a system in Debian that if you're running something which is not free software, we'll format your hard drive or something. That won't happen. Well, it will be considered a bug if you can't run something. Maybe it's a bug that we can't easily fix or won't be the top of our priorities, but we won't put... Let's say we won't boycott it because people may have a need, unfortunately for them, to run software which is not free. And then what is free software? That's defined by the Debian free software guidelines, which, as BDEL was saying this morning, have been used as the basis for the open source definition. And it's basically 10 points of what is considered free software and it's generally reasonable. You can have a look. I'm not going to explain it to you, but it's... Well, yeah, quickly. You can give it away without restrictions or you can get the source code, you can change the source code, give away the change side. Then there's some other details, but you can't discriminate against persons or groups. Like if a software says this is free software, but if you are... I don't know, if you are a criminal, you can't use it, then that's not free software for us. It's not that we care about criminals, but that's a slippery slope. And some people say if you are a criminal, and some people say if you are not a Christian, you can't use it, and some people say if you talk badly about that company, you can't use it. And so there must be no discrimination, no matter what. A license must not be like, oh, this is free software if it's in Debian, but otherwise it's not free software. This is a very important point. The license must not be specific to Debian, because Debian is something that anybody can take and customize and build something else. You know, people may want to, you know, take Debian every six months and tweak it a bit and then call it to Ubuntu and make a living out of it. And why not? We like it, it's that way. That's a very strong point of Debian. It's the basis from which people can build other very successful distribution. And therefore license must not be specific to Debian, otherwise this cannot happen. The fact that that point was written like 10 years before Ubuntu is great, right? That makes a lot of sense, and 10 years later you see why. License must not contaminate other software, so you can't say this is GPL and any other software on the same CD is also GPL, because otherwise we couldn't make a CD of Debian, because there's so many free software licenses. Okay, and then in the definition, there's a few example licenses just to give examples about what we mean. And then when people become official members of Debian, there's a sort of oath they need to swear, which is they need to sign a mail in which they say that, yes, I agree with those points and all my work in Debian will be guided by those points. And so one is, do you agree to uphold the social contract and the Debian free software guideline in your Debian work? You know, what we said before. And the second point, have you had the Debian machine usage policy? Do you accept them? The second policy basically says that you cannot use Debian infrastructure for your own stuff when you use a Debian infrastructure, you need to use it for Debian, and that kind of makes sense. And it's the sort of thing you will usually have to sign when you're using some corporate network or when you make a contract with your internet provider, they'll tell you, you know, you shouldn't... Something like that, and Debian has that. And that is the only thing that you can give for granted that people kind of swear they will comply to in Debian. Everything else, you cannot give it for granted. Nobody says that in order to be in Debian, you need to be nice, although it's appreciated, but nobody says that you need to be altruistic. Nobody gives any sort of restrictions on what you are, what you do, what you like to be, what you like to have, except those, which explains why Debian can expand in so many directions. The way we coordinate, so we have a Debian project leader with no power whatsoever, which can say, please, pretty please, to people and hope that things get done. But the point of a Debian project leader is to sort of know what's going on in Debian and refer people to other people that are doing similar things, keep track of focus of the distribution, join a discussion and say, you're talking about nothing, let's be focused on something, a sort of facilitator for the distribution. Well, he actually has a few powers, but in fact, it's as if... The main thing that Debian project leader does is talking people and keeping them focused in some direction that generally people agree to have. We have a technical committee. It's a number of people that, in case a number of developers argue about something and can't find a common solution for a problem, then instead of arguing forever, we have a technical committee that will say, okay, let's do it this way. It doesn't get invoked often, hopefully, luckily, but we do have it to ensure like every kind of argument ends up somewhere. And finally, when we need to have elections or when we need to agree on something fundamental, we have general resolutions. And we use a voting system, which is mathematically guaranteed to find the best compromise. It's very cool. And as far as I know, where Debian was... Even Bidale mentioned it this morning, Debian was essentially the first group to actually adopt this kind of voting system. And the main governing body of Debian is the work of people. Those few principles we said before do not change, but everything else in Debian does not change with work. Recently, we created a new word, which is duocracy. It's basically, in order to have change, you just do it. And that's it. It's very simple or very complex, depending on how you're used to work. But definitely Debian does not work by committee. If you want to usefully join a discussion in Debian, it matches. You bring examples of code, of website layouts, examples of translations and so on, and so forth. That's how you change things in Debian. And I'd like to finish with three quotations of people who, to the best of my understanding, are not Debian developers, who were apparently talking about Debian, but they didn't know it. So this person in 1994 said that if we cannot by reason, by influence, or by example, or by strenuous effort, or personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. And this summarizes the way decisions are taken inside Debian. We don't have a steering committee that forces decisions on people. Either things make sense and then people will be happy to join them, or people just won't. This one is definitely about Debian. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good, rather than on time. Which recently it became, we released when it's ready. And finally we carry a new word here in our hearts and that word is going in this minute. We make it, it's our personal vision that defines the way we work and it's our work that defines where Debian is going and nothing else. And that is generally, I hope, gives an idea of life in Debian. Questions? I've seen a hand over there. I don't see it anymore. Do you have questions? Raise your hand. Do you have a question? No. So you've got quotes from a number of other people saying how they got into Debian. How did you get into Debian? Right. It was 2001. I was using it. I've been using it since a few years already. And I wanted to package something that wasn't in Debian for my own use. And so I said, well, how do I package things? Well, the manual is called Debian Policy that explains how you package things. And I've read the thing from top to bottom and I've read the developer reference and I was like, oh yes, sure, now I can package stuff. But I went through all that effort and why don't I do it for everybody? And so I decided to join. And I started to use it because I was whinging at people because in DOS I couldn't allocate more than 64 kilobytes of RAM and somebody came and gave me a floppy and said, run this. And the first thing I did was compile something that allocated four megabytes, which was like all my RAM. And it worked. It didn't return null. And I was like, yes, that's my system. And then I had been learning later that it was like free software and yeah. Very happy ever since. More questions? If not, then thank you, Enrico. You're welcome.