The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - 30 years of Debian (Interview)

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

This week we're talking with Jonathan Carter who's on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we're talking about 30 years of Debian!

This week on The Change Law, we're talking to Jonathan Carter, who's on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead, DPL. And we're talking about 30 years of Debian. We talked to Jonathan about what it takes to create and lead this massively popular free Linux distro, his path to Debian as a contributor and now as DPL. What exactly is a Linux distro and what's involved? How products like Proxmox have total freedom to build on top of Debian and that's by design. And we even get into the state of the

enterprise Linux standard. Jonathan has opinions. Oh, and for our Plus Plus members, there is a bonus 12 minutes to enjoy, so stick around for that. For those who are not plus plus members yet, check it out at changelog.com slash plus plus 10 bucks a month, a hundred bucks a year, directly support us,

drop the ads, and we give you a bonus content like today, a massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fastly and fly. This podcast got you fast all over the world because Fastly, they're fast globally. Check them out at Fastly.com. And our good friends over at Fly help us put our app in our database close to you wherever you are in the world with no ops. And they'll do it for you too. Check them out at Fly.io. I'm here with Lazar Nikolov developer advocate at Sentry okay let's talk about your live streams

you're constantly building something and live streaming it give us a peek behind the curtain what do you do in your live streams what can we expect if you watch yeah so at Sentry I that's even how I started I started to build a mobile application or tracking expenses in four different frameworks because I wanted to, you know, explore basically the DX of the four most popular frameworks, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, React Native, and Flutter. Then I moved on during October, of course, we did the Oktoberfest where we tried to fix a bug in the React Native SDK. And that was really cool. And what else?

For example, right now I'm streaming on and I'm usually streaming on YouTube. I started building a really cool project that I want to call the Errorpedia. So it's like a Wikipedia of errors. So my idea was to just build a website that enumerates famous frameworks, like used frameworks, and what errors can be encountered within those frameworks with a little bit of explanation why they happen and also how to fix them. I had an interesting choice of technology, so like Astra for the whole website, because of its ability to embed React components or Vue components or solid Svelte components. And these are frameworks that I want to cover the errors from. So like the

whole website, the whole doc site would be just Astra and Markdown. But when the interactive example needs to happen, I'm just going to export that from a package in the monorepo. So that was interesting. And I started building that and it put me into this mode of thinking about errors. And I was like, okay, we can do these errors and we can do these errors. I started to compile a list of errors that we can document. And I started thinking about, you know, what about errors that don't necessarily break the page? I mean, they break the page, but they don't produce errors in the console, right? There could be responsiveness errors, right? Like mobile or tablets, something like that. Something gets pushed off the screen. There's like an overflow hidden on the body. You can't really access that, you know? So it breaks the flow, the operation

flow for the user, but it doesn't produce anything in the logs, right? Maybe there's, maybe we're talking about, I don't know, Firefox or Safari CSS issues. Because we know, especially Safari, when you're building something for Safari, those who do frontend, things usually break. But they don't produce an error. So I was thinking about that. And I was like, okay, we have all the tools in Sendry. So yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm streaming building that widget that lets you, you know, start the recording and send it to Sentry. Okay. If you want to follow along with Lazar, you can follow him at youtube.com slash Nikolav Lazar. I'll put the link in the show notes, but it is youtube.com slash N-I-K-O-L-O-V-L-A-Z-A-R.

Lots of cool live streams, lots of cool videos. Check them out. Again, the link is in the show notes. Also, check out our friends at Sentry, Sentry.io slash changelog. Use our coupon code to get six months of the team plan for free. That's so awesome. Six months free. Use the code changelogmedia. Again, Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y dot I-O. so on august 16th 1993 30 years ago to the day i Ian Murdoch first announced the Debian Project to the world. And today we are joined by the current Debian Project lead, Jonathan Carter.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jonathan. Thank you for having me. 30 years is a long time. That's like three quarters of my life. I'm wondering how old you are, Jonathan. How much of your life is that? That's about three quarters of my life. I'm wondering how old you are, Jonathan. How much of your life is that? That's about three quarters of my life. I was 11 years old when Debian was released. So I'm 41 years old now. Okay.

Back then, I did not know Debian existed even. I was using Windows 3.1 on MS-DOS 6 back then on my little 386. And it was very exciting times. Yeah. At the library once, I found a book on x386 and it was very exciting times yeah at the library once i found a book on x386 and started reading through that i was thoroughly confused because i had no idea what this was talking about but that was my experience of the next back then well here you are today and the current project lead if you go to the website or the Wikipedia list of Debian project leaders, I counted them up. I think you might be the 18th.

And so a long line of people that have taken on this role that you currently hold. Maybe tell us about what it means to be the project lead and how you got to that position with this community. Well, that's a long story. But we have time, right? We have an hour as far as I know. I'll try not to fold a whole hour with this. My first time that I've tried Linux was in 1999. I installed Red Hat Linux that I got from a CD.

I can't remember where it was. It was on a magazine or something like that. And I was thoroughly disappointed at it. I said it was trash. I'm not going to waste any more time on this then i started working at a computer shop and fixed pcs the whole day long it was also horrible mostly mostly removing viruses from windows machines yeah fixing all kinds of windows issues i did not enjoy it and And I said, I'm done with computers. I will find another career. I'll figure something out, even if it means I have to paint or

do tiling or anything else but computers. Then I happened to come across Red Hat 7.2, and it was just a complete different experience than my first experience with Red Hat Linux version 6. Suddenly my modem worked, my display worked, all of these things that was impossible to get working on my computer just suddenly work. And I thought, well, if free software could make this big of an improvement in just a span of two years, what's going to happen over the next five or 10 or 20 years. And I started getting interested in it and learned how to set up basic things like DHCP server and web server and all the typical common use things you'll do with a Linux server back then. And I thought, well, this is great. Maybe I can learn kids how to do this so that when they leave school and they couldn't go to university or did

they want to start working in IT somehow, they can start a career on Linux and they'll have a good basis. And at that point, I messaged the local Linux user group about this. And I got in touch with the Shuttleworth Foundation. That's a local nonprofit-profit funded by mark shuttleworth and he they wanted to start a project to get linux into schools not specifically to get kids uh um leveled up on technical skills but mostly just as a kind of a pilot to show that you can run linux on desktop in schools and kids can do all their learning on there so So I started volunteering for them where we had a bank volunteer group where we went to schools on Saturdays and we installed a lab from scratch in one day.

And we ended up installing 200 of these computer labs. So we would take a bunch of all donated computers from companies and install an LTSP server and set up a thin client lab for the school. So that was very exciting. And I ended up doing contract work for Shuttle Foundation, ended up working there full time. And that's how my career in free software and open source started. And from there, I became an Ubuntu contributor and a very long and winding tale.

I ended up working in Canada for about three years, working on the next deployments in the US in school districts there. Came back here working for university now and doing open source and free software since for the last 20 years or so. Being thoroughly enjoying it, it's fantastic. So from Ubuntu to Debian project lead, close that loop for us in terms of, this is like a thing that you're elected for. Certainly you got involved with Debian and grew into this somehow, right?

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 company that there's more it's more like a democracy but also not quite it's difficult explain. But people with technical skills come together, and the people who actually do the work get to make the decisions,

and it works. 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 a bean counter who wants to squeeze more money out of this quarter. It's really a project by the users for its users. And I got attracted to that and 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 a Debian project leader. But yeah, I started maintaining packages and getting more involved. And I saw some things I wanted to change in Debian project leader. But yeah, I started maintaining packages and getting more involved. And I saw some things I wanted to change in Debian. So I made a platform. That's what you do when it's election time and explain what you'd like to do.

If you become Debian project leader the first time, I didn't win, someone else beat me. But then on the second try, I became Debian project leader. And that was a little bit more than three years ago. 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 like not going to have the latest stuff unless you're on SID. That's the experimental, right? The unstable. But if you're on like mainline Debian, it releases very infrequently, right? Like the major releases are infrequent.

11 so far over the course of the 30 years. The brand new stuff isn't going to be in there. But this is great because it comes with stability. It comes with reliability and somewhat just this tried and true boring thing. But when you look at the being as this group of people around the world and his history, it's now suddenly kind of an interesting thing. It's different. It's amazing that it works. I mean, it's kind of somewhat the ideal of what we think of, of like a open source governance, large collection of people working together, right? Yeah, I'm still amazed and surprised that it does work.

If you imagine, I mean, Ian Murdoch 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. This is much more difficult than you think. Don't waste your time on it. You're not going to do that because it takes a huge amount of effort to create not only a distribution

that anyone can do, but to create something that has stable releases of security updates and all of the kind of enterprising things that we do for free as well, it would seem impossible. And if we didn't do it, I'm not sure if anyone would think that it's even possible. And yeah, it's a social project and a social experiment. And we're not sure where, I often ask myself, what will 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? And it's a bit like flying in the dark at times because there's no playbook for this kind of thing. For many commercial companies, there's lots of rules and best practices. For peer non-profit communities, there's lots of rules and best practices for peer nonprofit communities. There are, you know, for charities, but for a project like Debian, it's so unique that we have to kind of figure it out as we go. So in the detailed history, which this is very cool, there is 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 developer and user to contribute their work. It remains the most significant distributor of Linux that is not a commercial entity. It is the only large project with a constitution, a social contract, and policy documents to organize the project. 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, like people need to eat food and do stuff. And so commercialization is like sustainability to a certain extent. And if you go look at the list of users, now these are just self-reporting organizations.

It's not like you have telemetry on Debian installations. Probably not. But these are people who've come to the website and signed up and said, hey, we use Debian. And you go to that page, and there's thousands of governments, there's nonprofits, there's commercial organizations who have listed themselves as Debian users. So much money, so much value, so many people building on top of this thing.

How does it continue to run on the backs of volunteers? I'll have to think about that one. Okay, we'll come back to it. You don't want to jinx it, Jared. Right? That's why I'm 40. Okay, let's come back to it. You don't want to jinx it, Jared, right? 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.

Like they have lots of money and they do this just because it's their passion. And they don't even have a day job. They just work on Debian all day long because they don't have to do anything else. And they actually just completely love this. 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, they have day jobs, but either their employee wants them to do some work towards Debian as part of the day job, or it's a company that gives them 20% time off to go work on other stuff that might benefit the company, even indirectly. 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 that the privilege that exists out there really makes that difficult because

if you have children to take care of or family to take care of on top of your day job, it makes it more difficult for some people to have more free time to contribute to something like free software. And we find that around Africa, for example, it's really difficult to convince someone that they should be contributing to some project for free. So we find this a lot easier in Europe and the US than in most of the rest of the world. Is there a particular initiative you all have to increase that, the odds, I suppose, that 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, you know, maybe there's sponsorship from companies to say, okay, we'll sponsor somebody to be, you know, maybe they are volunteering, but it's more like, hey, can you give me a $10,000 grant so I can, you know, contribute to Debian for three or six months?

Yeah, up until this year, we did a Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. They tended to be very expensive. We had to pay lots of money to do that. And our return has been relatively low. So this hasn't been announced yet anyway. And I'd like to have final details, but we're looking at starting our own outreach program within Debian. And that way we can have a lot of micro grants. So you can ask for, you'll be able to ask for something like a thousand dollars or $10,000, depending what you need and submit a project idea or what you want to work on. And then there'll be some form of a committee that will decide whose requests get approved because we get lots of money into Debian.

But we're limited in what we can spend it on because we're only allowed to spend money on things that will directly benefit Debian. So we don't give out salaries or anything like that, but we can do outreach. So the idea is that we have all these micro grants that people can apply to and that will help a lot of people to contribute more to Debian and solve a bunch of specific problems. Yeah. What is the business of Debian? How is it formalized currently? mentioned. So you mentioned you established a platform when you want to get elected. That 2022 platform mentioned formalizing Debian, formal registration, things like that, that sort of, I guess, formalize the organization of Debian. Can you speak to the formalization that Debian

currently is and how it takes in money and how it distributes money? Is it a nonprofit? What exactly is Debian as an organization? Great. So that's still on my to-do list from my platform back then. Okay. 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, we get together, we have a meeting, we come up with a constitution, and we define what Debian and its contributors is. And some states in the U.S US recognize this, other states don't. Canada, UK, South Africa recognizes that as an organization.

Other countries just see it as non-existing organization because it's not formally registered at some office. But that hasn't been much of an issue for us because, well, in some ways it has, but I'll get to that later. How we work is we have SBI, 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 yet. But it's grown so much. There's over 100 free software projects hosted with SPI now, and they've grown into such a successful spinoff of their own that they can't really handle all the

edge cases we have in Debian and all the special things that we need from them. They had to cookie cutter their offerings a bit more to be more consistent across all the projects that they host. And while this is actually a good thing, it's not so great for Debian. So when we have legal troubles or things like trademark issues we need to sort out, working through SPI just gets too complicated and long-winded. And for smaller projects, it's fine. For Debian, we've just outgrown it. And we also have Debian France and Debian Switzerland. They are two other organizations that handle Debian money and trademarks. And so we work through these three, what we call trusted organizations,

which are formal organizations that we use as fiscal sponsors in Debian. Interesting. SPI is interesting. So it's software in public interest, is that what it's called? Software in the public interest. Yeah, that's correct.

Okay, gotcha. So that's at spi-inc.org, if I got that correctly. That is correct. Yeah. Very useful because that means we can accept charitable donations in the US.

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 just physically impossible to tackle that task.

You've got bigger problems like distributing Debian and whatnot. They also handle accounting and a lot of really boring stuff that no volunteer really wants to do. Even though we do have a treasury team, we're glad that they mostly take care of the numbers coming in and going out. 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 TOs,

and you speak to relying too much on various TOs and conflicts and verbal agreements and things like that. Formalizing Debian from an organizational standpoint is one thing, but then also formalizing your relationships is another thing. What's the stability of these relationships you have, the verbal agreements and the handshakes and the TOs that you've got in place currently? What's the stability of that? So that's a weak point that I want to address, and it's why it's 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 between a Debian developer and someone at SPI that when we get donations, we won't pay the 5% admin fee when we get in donations for DebConf because these numbers get really huge. So 5% of all these funds end up to a lot of money for just administering a back transfer, essentially. But at the same time, someone else had a handshake agreement of SPI saying that, no, no, 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 want to formalize our relationship between Debian and our TOs, but it turns out we can't even properly do this until Debian is registered as its own organization because between who do you actually make this agreement if Debian isn't recognized in some of these areas

where we actually want agreements like this. 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. 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 a an attorney challenge you know really attorneys tend to do business incorporation legal agreements obviously registration certain places or at least assist in that advice they is that an opportunity for you all to to leverage oh clearly 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 very open to the idea of having a lot, many more TOs for Debian in different countries around the world. But I'd like to have that infrastructure in place so that we can define what the requirements is for a TO. So far, it's just happened organically. And it would be nice to say, this is what we expect from a TO. Here's a contract that we can sign, and then you can keep money or accept donations for Debian. And yeah, 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's nothing we can do about it. We had no contract with this organization and nothing on paper. And that's a risk for everywhere we hold money at the moment, I think. And it would be good to solidify that in a way that we know these trademarks that we hold of these organizations and this money and that

domain names, they all belong to Debian and it's on a public record. Yeah. Well, if we look at Debian and 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's in the pudding. We're it's 30 years later like debian is still around and thriving and people are it's still a community that's continuing to release i misspoke it's not 11 releases i did notice the number 12 book came out here recently one of my favorite things back in the early days of debian because i was in and around 3, 4, 5. Like, 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 about? Is that, have you moved beyond Toy Story at this point right now out of proper nouns? Bookworm is a Toy Story character. Oh, okay. Maybe it's like Toy story 4 or something something

i haven't seen yet i think it was actually earlier yeah i've i've only seen toy story 4 recently um but yeah they keep making movies so hopefully by the time you run out of toy story characters there will be more say they make their movies which is oh yeah forky is a good one yeah forky is debian 14 so 13 will be tricksy 14 will be forky forky was from toy story 4 yes forky was like a discarded plastic fork that someone made into a toy right is it the spoon fork isn't like it's a spork isn't it or was it just a regular fork yeah yeah i think it's a spork i was in and around like the wheezy jesse era of debbian. 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-run it in that. It's like something in development. What's it stand for, Jonathan? Exactly. And Sid was, of course, also the unstable kid in Toy Story that used to torture the toys. Yeah, exactly. Like the perfect kid in Toy Story that used to torture the toys. Yeah, exactly.

Like the perfect name. Yeah, that was great. What I can connect, though, was that Debian was released in 1993. Now, I don't know the history from 93 to 95, but Toy Story was released, Toy Story 1 was released November 22, 1995. So there's like a two-year gap there that i'm not really sure where the names came from like what was the debian one like what was the earliest days of debian before toy story was a thing i think debian one only happened in late 1994 and then it didn't have a release name yet but also debian's history with toy story comes from before the movie was released

um because um bruce berance worked at pixar at the time so debian was actually used for the rendering of toy story and uh for a while the debian lists were even hosted at the pixar domain so it was debian deval at pixar.com for a for a little while until debian got its own domain so debianbian and Pixar goes together for a long time. And it's interesting because Next and Pixar also went hand in hand for a long time. Steve Jobs once said, if it wasn't for Pixar, they wouldn't have been Next. So you have this Apple history going back to the end, this Debian history. And without Pixar, the world would have looked very different right now yeah for sure okay i

looked up bookworm he is a minor antagonist in toy story 3 a green worm with glasses and a sturdy flashlight a genius who loves reading books that particular character did slip my mind i don't remember toy story 3 very well it's the one that i guess falls through the cracks for me i don't remember bookworm but fair enough you guys uh did your homework and i'm excited about forky that's going to be a good name and forky is relevant with all the folks happening right now so you know there's always folks in free software and controversial folks as well so yeah we'll see if there's there's any fun folks around forky right that's released. When will Gabby get a release name? That's what I'm curious about.

Gabby. Gabby? Who's that? Gabby Gabby is in Toy Story 4, and she is the doll that... I'm going to spoil plots here for people who may have not watched it. Don't do it, man. Antagonist character for a bit there. She's a bad doll for a bit until she was good.

It's like perspective with every character you find. You don't like them for a while until you realize why they're the way they are. Then you love them and you cheer for them. So that's Gabby.

Gabby is the doll. I wish they could have taken that name while I was DPL because my one dog's name is Gabby so that would have been perfect. That would have been nice. Gabby Gabby. Gabby Gabby. Gabby Gabby.

What's up, friends? I'm here with Jeremy Tanner, dev bro at Tailscale. And I've been using Tailscale for the past, I want to say the last year. And I consider it critical home lab infrastructure for me. As you may know, I'm a home labber. So that means I take pride in a solid home network, Wi-Fi, services that make the home run, home assistant for automation, lighting. And of course, I run PiHole to block ads at the network level and to protect my family from ad tracking. And PiHole has this web UI that you can access from the land. But for a while there, I just didn't have access to this service or other services

like Portainer or just anything else that had a web UI or something I would access via IP on the local area network. But Jeremy, tell me about a world where via Tailscale, you can access Pihole, Portainer, or any of these other services you might run in your home lab and access it externally from a local area network. Yeah, you hit it when you said anything, anything and from anywhere. And so Pihole being a DNS black hole, if you notice the difference between the comfy experience that you had at home and when you were out of your house, whether it was for work, a coffee shop or even on your mobile devices, the being able to set up a tail scale on your mobile device and have access to the same pie hole and filtering rules that you do at home

wherever you have an internet connection is a thing. Same thing when talking about streaming. Instead of exposing your network storage to the internet and getting that ransomware, keeping that on your private network, but extending the private network to any device that can run the client. And so having anything that can run the client includes your Steam Deck. That's just a Linux box with the controllers grafted onto the sides of it. And so if you're somewhere that has an internet connection and wants to watch some of your video, plug it up to a large TV. And if you're in a hotel room, use that as your media center that's playing the shows

that you're trying to catch up on from home instead of whatever hotel TV has on it. Instead of buying a service or paying a small monthly subscription, you have compute and storage at home. It's just an easy way to get back to those. Instead of usually inventing a bunch of things that you'd love to do, but those sorts of things become accessible to you on your phone while you're outside the house instead of something that's neat to use, but then you miss while you're away. Yeah, for sure. You know, I run Plex, so I'm in big agreement with that, of course. But just being able to do what you can do with Tailscale is so cool without having to learn all the VPN things. It's just such an easy tool to use, easy tool to install on anything, really Linux, Windows,

Mac, so easy to use. Big, big fan of Tailscale. And for my Homelab users out there, you can totally use Tailscale 100% for free. You get three users up to 100 devices, which is like way more devices than I think I would ever need to use tail scale on. The free forever tier is amazing and a great place to start and especially to use it for your home lab needs alone. Check them out at changelog.com slash tail scale. The free forever tier is waiting for you to try it out. Again, changelog.com slash tail scale, and make sure you tell them your friends at Change World sent you. You mentioned the free aspect. And so when I think about what makes Debian special,

I think the completely volunteer-led thing is obviously huge. And I think also the free aspect, because this is 100% free and open source software. And we're talking free as in freedom, right? And also free as in beer. But this is like one of the things Debian does is it won't install or it won't prepackage. Maybe you can help me figure out exactly how it works, Jonathan. I remember having to like install certain things after the OS

install because they weren't 100% compatible with an open source license. For instance, like an MP3 encoder decoder, you know, MP3 is licensed from some entity, et cetera. And so Debian wasn't going to prepackage that. You could install it later by adding the right apt sources, but Debian's 100% free. And I think that makes it different, right? As a distro, not unique. There's probably other ones that do that, but different enough that it stands apart.

Well, in terms of freedom, when we talk as free as in free, we call it DFSG free, which stands for Debian Free Software Guidelines. This was the document set up way back. I think it was somewhere 96. I'm not even completely sure. But if you look at the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the open source definition,

you'll notice they almost look exactly the same. And that's because when open source definition was founded, they pretty much copied Debian's free software guides. Oh, really? Yeah. And Debian was fine with this. Debian encouraged this even. So the DFSG even predates the open source definition by a few years. And it's great. And when it comes to device drivers and non-free stuff, we had a change recently in our policy towards that. Because how it used to work is if you installed Debian on your laptop a few years ago, for example, your Wi-Fi wouldn't work outside of the box because the Wi-Fi firmware is all non-free and it can't be shipped on our default installation media. But we started to run into problems recently with everything just getting more and more

complicated. Like if you run a Debian live system on some new computers, you would just get a black screen because it needs a display firmware in order to show anything on the display. You can't even show text without initializing the display card with its firmware. And that's a big problem when you want to install something or bootstrap a system. And to make it worse is even the sound audio you need these days, the sound drivers need non-free firmware in order to start up.

So you can't even play a sound or, you know, for blind users, you can't guide them through an installation through that. So last year we had what we call a general resolution where the whole project votes on a specific issue. So we had a general resolution to include non-free firmware by default on the Debian installation media, which is a big departure from our previous policy. So a few people weren't happy with this, but unfortunately, it's just necessary

because the way computers work now, the choice basically comes down to whether we want to be able to install in physical hardware or just be a distribution that installs on a winter container or a WSL on Windows or Docker in Mac or something like that. But people did feel that, you know, we do need to keep Debian installable on physical hardware. And this is why we decided to make this compromise and include non-free firmware on our installation media by default.

And it makes it easier for the users. So I think overall, it is a good thing. And while it is a compromise, there's also other projects that we do to kind of counter it. Like you've probably heard of the RISC-V architecture. It's almost like ARM,

but we get completely free implementations of it. So we're investing in that quite a lot and putting in a lot of effort to make Debian run on RISC-V because this means that if someone does want a completely free system, there is at least completely free hardware available out there to install Debian on. So we're taking a step back in terms of total freeness, but at the same time,

we're taking some steps forward in order to fix that as well. I mean, we can't really control what Nvidia does or what AMD does or Intel. Right. That's interesting. I did not know that. Last time I installed Debian, I recall getting asked to scan the system, I think, if I recall correctly. It was like some sort of request to say there could be non-free software for you to install. I think it was like a system check of sorts. They'll be like, okay, do you have Wi-Fi and other peripherals that might need it? And it's an option to let me install.

Is that what you're speaking to like just that that angst of like okay debian is is really the the base version is like all free software but you can opt into the non-free versions of firmware and whatever else might be needed yeah the installer used to be i used to detect that you have a wi-fi card that needs firmware or a sound card that means firmware and then it would prompt you that um you know if you have a usb disk that contains this you can insert that now and it will load that firmware to continue to install it now that firmware is included on all the installation media by default so at least it doesn't need to do that anymore from your perspective the hardware will

just work this has a version 12 then version 12 yes okay i was like this last one i did install was 11 uh 12 is quite a leap forward 12 12 is a very we've got great feedback from 12 overall so um i suggest giving it a shot sometime what kind of stuff comes out in a linux distribution maybe even step back from that and for the for the completely uninitiated maybe just like the typical Mac developer. Like what is a Linux distribution of which Debian is one? Why isn't it just Linux? What do you have to do in addition?

And then from there you can talk about the ongoing work that goes into it. Okay, great. So Debian is almost comparable to Wikipedia. You know, Wikipedia wants to build this huge base of articles of all knowledge in the world. Debian does that for free software. So if you just take a Linux kernel and boot it up, you don't get anything much exciting. You get a screen with black text scrolling by, and then nothing much else will happen. But what Debian does is it packages and integrates tens of thousands of pieces of free software out there.

Our goal is to eventually package all of the free software that exists. The only problem is that the amount of free software that exists keeps on growing exponentially and we're always playing catch up. But at the moment in debian 12 there's 60 000 binary packages if you just read the descriptions for all of those packages you could spend a lifetime probably more just reading the descriptions and many of these pieces of software have multiple books written about them so there's this huge library of free software that exists that you can use to build new things from. And it's exciting, all the different software that exists from the web

perspective. There's lots of programming languages, web servers, database engines. If you use it on a desktop, there's different desktop environments, things that some people might be familiar with like Chrome and Firefox and Thunderbird and clients for things like Telegram or Signal. There's all the software that makes it usable for desktops, servers, mobile computers. I even have a little cell phone here that, this is actually quite a big cell phone, but this is even, if people are are listening they weren't able to see it but let me show it to you just in case you might find it interesting or uh this is a natural cell phone running debian i have to enter the correct bin as well i don't know if you've seen this it's a libram 5 what's it called so this is actually a complete a libram 5 libram 5 i have not seen this

yeah so this is actually a completely open source phone as well. The hardware is all open source. That's cool. Yeah. And it runs Debian. And I just upgraded it to Debian 12 a while ago. But it's a really thick phone as well because it has lots of replaceable hardware. And it's meant to be a development platform.

But yeah, it's fantastic that you can run Debian on everything from a supercomputer to a cell phone. And that's also why we call it the universal operating system, because it's built out of all these little pieces and you can adapt and tweak it to so many different use cases. ISS, the International Space Station. They use it in Mars, Mars missions. So it's really a widely used and very useful operating system for many different things. Literally universal. Yes. That's cool. The universal. That's pretty cool.

I was listening to something recently. Somebody was on Joe Rogan and they were talking about the monopoly of iOS, that it's like more than, I think it's like 58%. And so the monopoly rules here in the United States, where Jared and I are in the United States, are 50% or more. If you have 50% or more, you know, the government can block you from doing something or force you to break up your company because of just the rules of monopoly and society and how that plays out. It's interesting that you all have a Linux desktop, or I guess a mobile version of it, which is the same Linux though, it's the same Debian, right?

Is it a different version of it, a different flavor of it? This is called Mobian. So it's a team within Debian that creates, it's slightly divergent from the same installation media you'd use to use a desktop or a server. But in the future, we'll probably have one installation media that you can use to use a desktop or a server but in the future we'll probably have one installation media that you can use to install your phone as well yeah well the point i was trying to make there's this choice we really do need choice i know i'm not sure if i would choose open source

hardware and open source software on my phone yet because it's like such a immature state and i would love to check out bobian but it's an interesting world because we only really have two choices here in the u.s i mean maybe it's the same for worldwide i haven't gone to europe or south africa to buy a phone and you know get a phone plan and so i don't know i don't know that experience but here in the states like you basically have a choice of android or ios both backed by you know know, the F and the G in Fang, which is like, you know, has its pros and its cons, obviously. The A.

The G in Fang. The A. My bad. Thank you. The F. I was thinking Facebook. I'm glad you got my back. It's in the Fang, man.

It's in the Fang. It's in the Fang, man. You're picking up my breadcrumbs. It's in the Fang. Yeah. So, I mean, which is okay i guess for a while there because back in 2007 steve jobs got up on stage and proclaimed iphone and the world has changed pretty much since then when it comes to mobile intelligence and mobile accessibility

to the internet and communication and information like it's just drastically changed. It was akin to the internet being born, you know, the iPhone being born and what that revolutionized. But we don't really have much of a choice. And we really need the open source choice, which is for the freedom, is for the, you know, for the user in most, you know, I guess in almost every case that you can think of. And we don't really have that with iOS and with Android. We don't quite have that. And some will say that I think Android might be, or at least was open source. I'm not sure the details of the license and the specifics of it being open source or not, but I understand it to be open source-esque, worst case.

Yeah. The core of Android is open source, but all that is no apps that you need to actually make it useful they're all closed source from google so as a whole it's definitely not open source but you could take android and install it on some custom device but you can't get google maps or all the google account stuff and the things that you actually really really need to make an android uh device useful so uh yeah i'm hoping that debbie and our phones work out there's lots of different reasons why that could be fun at the moment this is just a toy basically the one i have i can't really use it for actual serious day-to-day stuff um also because this specific phone that i have was more of a development phone

its battery life it only lost like six or seven hours at most and so it's really not useful as an actual phone there are new ones that are being made there's the it's called the pine project they have what they call the pine phone and that one is a lot better it's thinner and it lasts a lot longer it's faster so there's a few different projects working on making phones that that can run debian and it's interesting to see in which direction it will end up going at least it can receive sms's it can make phone calls do all the usual things you'd expect from at least a dumb phone plus it runs a full gnome desktop environment so you get all the usual GNOME apps. But yeah, the universality, is that a word, of Debian is quite a big aspect on it.

And also that it's, we talked about the licensing and freeness of it a bit earlier as well. The fact that you can access it without needing to have an account anywhere or filling your email address is really powerful. Also, you can take Debian, build your product on it and ship it to your customers. And you never have to interact with us.

You don't need our permission. We don't need to sign any NDA or contract. You can just do this. And we often have to really reassure companies that you can really do this because they keep asking us to sign documents or ask permission. Is this really okay? Can we really do this because they keep asking us to sign documents to or ask permission is this really okay can we really do this and we're like yeah please you really don't

have to ask us you and uh well it's almost too good to be true you know jonathan and it's almost too good the old saying is if something you know feels too good to be true it probably isn't true and so we tend to stop and say no seriously can you sign this because you know that's almost unheard of when you see why i almost can't believe it to be the case i've almost wondered if i should make some web form where you can enter your company's name and then it just auto generates a pdf that says this company is authorized to use their b in their commercial project. And sign it Forky. Have Forky sign it or somebody. That's a good idea.

Because it could be cheeky and fun rather than legitimately serious. Let's laser in on that because one of the sponsors of DebConf for this year, 2023, is Proxmox. And I believe one of the products you're talking about at least I assume that builds on top of Debian is Proxmox and I believe one of the products you're talking about at least I assume that

builds on top of Debian is Proxmox like you can install Debian and then install Proxmox on top of Debian if you have one of those weird systems where you just have a challenge of installing Proxmox directly but Proxmox is built on Debian and that's been like a big thing for its success, too, that it's built on a stable Linux that is not, I guess, BSD kind of gets a bad name to some degree in some circles of Linux because it's not truly Linux. I don't want to get into that fight because I'm not part of that fight. But the point I'm trying to make is that Proxmox could be an example of one of the companies you're mentioning that builds their product on top of it. Now, Proxmox is also open source, so it's an open source product, but the way they commercialize it is through support. So you can go and buy a support license

through Proxmox for your hypervisor and move along with your life. But I'm curious, is that one of the examples you're talking about or is there somebody else? That's one of the examples, but there's thousands, there's thousands of companies.

It's many. I don't know of all of them. And I've had many of them email me, but once I tell them you can really use Debian, it's fine. Sometimes I sign something for them. I forget about them shortly after. And there's just so many of them. It's amazing how big Linux has grown in the last 20 years or so.

When I first started using Linux and showed it to my friends, no one knew what it was or that it even existed. Now it's almost a household name. Even if people don't know exactly what it is, they've heard the name. But if you look at how widely it's used, every television you buy is running Linux these days. If you're using an ebook reader like the Kindle or Kobo, they all run Linux. If you have a DSL or fiber root in your home, that's running Linux. If you have a car that probably has five or six Linux systems in these days, there's so many Linux computers everywhere that they outnumber all the other devices multiple times. And it's just exploded so much even the supercomputers up until i think four years ago it was 498 out of the 500 top supercomputers running linux and then they switched the last two over recently as well so now it's all 500 of the top supercomputers running

linux um it's just exploded everywhere and and it's become even impossible to avoid. I'm not that surprised by that, honestly, because, I mean, from my perspective, or at least many people's perspective, Windows is not necessarily designed to be a multi-machine or a headless machine operating system. It's meant to be a personal operating system. Mac OS X or Mac OS has traditionally been a personal operating system. They 10 or mac os uh has traditionally been a personal operating

system they've had a server flavor of it but they're not trying to compete with it i think probably because they couldn't really compete well with it whereas linux has been so free and so flexible in so many ways and obviously 1993 and ian murdoch and all these different things like with debian like that has been the trend of the universal operating system to work on a headless machine, work on HPC, work on a server, work for a web application. Linux is far more flexible than I think Windows

or macOS was designed to be. So I'm kind of not surprised, but I am definitely cheering with you, but kind of not surprised because Linux has been designed to be what it's accomplished. Yeah, it's funny because Microsoft used to absolutely hate us. Steve Ballmer even called Linux a cancer at one point. And Apple just ignored us, pretend we don't exist.

And in recent years, when Microsoft wanted the users to upgrade to Windows 10, I almost said Debian 10, they basically had to give Windows 10 away for free in order to get people onto it so that people don't get stuck on these old versions of Windows. This meant that Windows wasn't this cash cow it usually is, but they did Linux on Azure and Azure completely skyrocketed.

So they made so much money out of Linux that it more than made up for the money they lost for having to give away Windows 10 for free and they made record profits. So Microsoft learned to embrace Linux and it worked out for them. And with the release of the Apple m1 based laptop macbook they demoed how well debian the arm 64 version of debian runs on a virtual machine on this machine in an apple keynote this

would have been unheard of a few years ago or almost unbelievable so they all find value in this and there's some integration i don't know where it's going to go in the future, but at the moment it seems like there's lots of space for coexistence and working together. You mentioned the M1 machines and this new Apple Silicon direction they've taken. And the one thing, I don't know if they'll ever do it, but the one thing I want them to do is just natively support Linux.

I don't care about Windows on a Mac. I really don't. I would love to just like install straight Linux on the machine versus Mac OS because they have the most amazing hardware bar none across the board from I mean they win in almost every category when comparing hardware. Now I don't always want to choose Mac OS. I do want to keep choosing Mac hardware though because i think they have in most cases a leg up but then at the same time i really enjoy building out my own systems too so i like to buy intel nux and tinker and have fun and like swap out my ram and choose my own ssd so i kind of don't agree with that all the time but at the same time if i could just buy a mac mini

with without the mac os or with it but then swap out linux that would be a dream for me yep there's lots of work going into that and there's this one guy doing an amazing amount of work reverse engineering all that cool stuff to make linux work on there and i was a bit concerned at one point that apple would try to block this you know add something to the new m1 designs that would not boot anything else than than mac os but apple has actually made a commitment and it's part of the m1 and the later m2 and m3 designs that you can boot whatever you want on that cpu and they basically guarantee this would that yeah that's a fantastic plus one point for apple in this case so i didn't hear that news yeah so linux is just going to get get better on the m1 and above hardware so that is some good news at

least for people who like the apple hardware so they're not blocking it but are they supporting it you know i mean like so it's one thing to block to not block an alternate operating system to be installed but it's another thing to support it i would love it if like tim cook like in support of just an open free world support linux on that hardware natively that would be amazing like don't just allow a separate operating system that's not mac os literally put your hand down and say i support linux on mac hardware that would be to me that's a phenomenal to live live in, I think, for humanity. Don't hold your breath. Jared's like,

what are you saying, Jared? Go ahead. I just said, don't hold your breath. I just said, don't hold your breath. I'm not going to, I can tell you my dreams, Ken. I know, I got no problem with your dream. I'm just over here thinking like,

it's a pipe dream. Yeah, there you go. I'm holding my breath. I'm not holding my breath. It is a pipe dream. But what got me into this, you know this, Jared, because I started to tinker with Linux on old Mac hardware that was Intel. And so when I got to the T2 chip supported, it was still Intel, but it had that T2 chip.

Well, Linux is just very challenging. Debian or Ubuntu, you pick your flavor. Very challenging to install properly on a Intel-based Mac with a T2 chip. And so as a Mac user, I've got this old hardware. I've got like three old Intel Mac minis sitting over there that don't really have a life necessarily. And I can install Linux on those. I did choose Ubuntu, so forgive me.

It is an ancestor, or I guess a derivative, a sibling. Yeah, it's the same family. It's based on, but there's some verses, right? Oh, there you go. Exactly. Like, that's the super old school one. It's like, what, 2003? That's a really old Mac mini.

I think this was 2006. It's got a disk drive. Is that a CD-ROM or a DVD drive on the thing? That is still a DVD drive. Wow. Yeah, super drive. I remember those. This was my only Mac computer i ever bought for those listening jonathan held up an old mac mini

showed it off and jared and i immediately knew what he was showing off there and it had a boontoo sticker on the corner yeah this was back when i used a boontoo i briefly ran a boontoo on this mac mini in 2006 how do you feel about a Ubuntu? I know you said canonical, there were issues when you were involved, but as an operating system, maybe in comparison to Debian, because it does have, it's more modern in terms of like it's going to have more newer software on there for you, more maybe usable for a desktop experience. But what do you think about it? Well, this is something that I liked about Debian 12 as well. For once, at least at release time,

we had lots of new software. We had all the latest software at the time of release, which was great because users are fine when things gradually get older. But when you even have outdated stuff by release time, it's not a lot of fun. And also Debian has backports these days. So you can enable the backports repository and then you can install newer versions of stuff that Debian was not originally released with. So you can still get newer versions of software. It doesn't have to get outdated.

So the backports repository is really great for that. And we support Flatpak and we support Snaps just as much as it's supported in ubuntu so you can install things from a flatback repository or from canonical's snap server and also get newer software like that ubuntu feels very familiar to me because it also is apt and dpkg i don't like when they swap out things when you expect to get a dip when you apt install something and it actually swaps it out for snap in the background i think most other users don't like that much either yeah that is a bit sneaky they did that initially with the web

browsers now they do that with more software but um yeah i would get i would want to get a snap if i snap install something and if i apt something, I want my Debian package installed. The other problem I have with Ubuntu is, well, they talk a lot about how they're free and open and I want to share, but their binary packages aren't free. Their source packages are. What this means is if you want to build your product on Ubuntu and distribute it, you can't do that without signing a license agreement with Canonical first. Either that, or you have to rebuild all the Ubuntu sources and remove all the Ubuntu branding from the system,

which is actually quite a bit of work. So I'm surprised there hasn't been like a CentOS kind of project for Ubuntu in order to allow other people to build their... But I think what people do is they just come to Debian in that case where Ubuntu doesn't work. Close enough, right? Exactly. That's what I'd do. In regards to Snap,

that's how you can check your Snap list, literally with Snap list, and list out the snaps you have installed. So if you've recently installed something with Apt or something else, and you feel like maybe you were SnapFood, just run SnapList and you'll see what's installed via Snap on Ubuntu.

SnapFood, that's a new way. I like that one. Ah, they SnapFood me. Alright, so that's Ubuntu, Jonathan. Now do Arch. Come on. Break it down. I love Arch. What's not to love? The problem with Arch isn't the reason why we did all these arch is it does have stable releases so if you want to install it on 5000 servers or use it in your enterprise or even in your university it just changes too fast you don't

want your web servers not starting one day because the config file format changed at last night's upgrade or something like that. So Arch is fantastic for what it is. If it wasn't for Debian and I didn't need to support a system professionally, I would probably use Arch as well. I think it's a great system. There are a lot more lacks on certain things than we are. So in Debian, for example, when you package something new in Debian, a Debian developer or packager needs to go through all of the source code and document the copyright of literally every file in that upstream source table in the Debian copyright file. In Arch, they just look at what the GitHub page says.

And if it says it's MIT license or GPL, they basically just have a tag that says, this is the license of this package. But meanwhile, there's a bunch of files in the packages that might be under another license. And I think especially if you want to build your product on these packages, it helps to be able to tell exactly what the license terms are that you're using.

So I think as a hobby system, Archie is fantastic, but for more professional stuff, I'd definitely stick with Debian. Makes sense. In regards to the state of the enterprise Linux standard, do you have opinions about that? This whole Red Hat and Rocky and CentOS and all this different stuff that's kind of come down. What's the state of enterprise Linux for you?

Open source enterprise Linux standard. As far as I'm concerned, Debian is the only enterprise Linux that exists. Good answer. I was actually thinking of creating an enterprise theme for Debian that you can install. You add install Debian theme and it will show Debian enterprise all over the system. You know, because what's an enterprise system you just the biggest difference between Debian and enterprise systems is that they call themselves Debian enterprise systems and that's that's an easy enough fix to make yeah the long-term support is a lot longer on red hat I mean you can go up to 10 years with

them but if you delve deep into the issues the the reason why people want 10-year support is they want to install a system and forget about it and have very low maintenance for a very long time. And it turns out that it's not really that simple on Red Hat systems. They use these really Frankenstein kernels on those machines. They would backport the entire stacks from much newer kernels back to the older kernels that they use on the older versions of Red Hat. And you end up having these widely divergent stacks together that wasn't meant to run together the way that they do it. And they come up with all kinds of odd bugs.

And if you look at how easy it is to upgrade a Debian system, and you can also get up to five years support with Debian with the LTS project, it becomes clear that, at least to us, and also the people who use Debian out there, that it's actually better to have good regression testing and upgrades that work well so that you can have a really easy, really quick upgrade that is almost effortless than trying to maintain this weird stack of old software and integrating new stuff with it over a period of 10 years. Because there's been lots of cases where this really bit read at heart, like if you've followed stuff like Heartbleed and where they had to upgrade to tls 1.3

you can't just upgrade open ssl you have to upgrade everything that builds against the open ssl and it's just it ends up being a huge mess and there's more and more of these cases where it really proves that being ahead of the curve and things like that and upgrades really help a lot. Like the people that did really big Debian web installations, they could just enable TLS 1.3 and it was done instead of this being a big complicated fix.

I like this idea though. Well, I hear folks though, like this whole snafu with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and if they can't have that, if they can't have CentOS, they say, okay, well, then I want Rocky. I don't hear them say, I want Debian instead. Why do you think you feel that way?

And I think that I don't disagree with you, but when the general public says, okay, I can't have a Red Hat compatible Linux or an Enterprise Linux that's Red Hat compatible, why are they moving to Rocky or Alma because they can't have CentOS instead of Debian? Well, we have lots of people moving to Debian after the Red Hat saga. But I think for some people, it's a case of they've invested, you know, they have all

their configuration against Red Hat Linux or Cent centos and they have so much config and software configured against that that it would be easier for them at least or path of least resistance to just use rocky linux or alma linux or one of these others for another two or three years until they could figure out um a longer term strategy on how they want to do things. And maybe they want to see how things evolve in the enterprise Linux space as well. But I think it's mostly to buy themselves some more time. Is this something y'all are planning to take advantage of somehow?

Like, while you may be in, quote, enterprise in your eyes or the public's eyes, is this something y'all are planning to take advantage of? Is there a concerted effort inside to take advantage of this mungy standard, I suppose? Not at all. Unfortunately, our marketing sucks. We're not good at promoting ourselves or marketing.

You're putting a good pitch. I love it. And this has been a concern brought up over the years with Evian. And we're trying some different things but we're just not good at blowing our own trumpet i am because i'm debian project leader and i'm good at converting people to debian a few weeks ago my one friend told me my one linux friend told me that linux is basically dead on the desktop and i said well okay i believe you but then the stats came out

from netcraft or was it someone released the big desktop stats from the users here and the next is at an all-time high on desktop um if you look at all the browser stats that come in it it reached three percent for the first time i think last month and that's big news so the next is not only not dead on a desktop it's bigger than it's ever been. I saw that. I was going somewhere with this. Well, you were talking about marketing. I'm curious if you all have...

Well, it was more like, is there a concerted effort on the inside to take advantage of this mushy term of the open-source enterprise Linux standard? It's in question because of the change that RHEL made, Red Hat made with RHEL, and then there obviously, standard. It's in question now because of the change that RHEL made, Red Hat made with RHEL, and then there obviously, it's going to be more challenging for

Rocky and Alma to be bug for bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it's just not going to be that way. And there's a chance now to reestablish what it might be to be this open source Enterprise Linux standard. Well, you probably saw that Seuss is doing a hard fork of

Reddit enterprise Linux. And it might be that Alma and Rocky might end up tracking that instead and that that becomes a bigger, I don't want to call it a standard because it's not really a standard. Maybe it could be a de facto standard if

all the companies that build their products That's how I'm using the term. It's not literally, in quotes, the standard, but it kind of is based on usage. Yeah, exactly. A lot of enterprises do use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and they often use CentOS, or they did before it changed and was acquired by Red Hat and then changed and turned to Stream. And then they would use Rocky in tandem with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in production. One, because they just don't want to pay licenses for every possible machine they ever have because they don't need to support every single machine, you know?

And so that was why CentOS made sense and why Rocky made sense. So if you look at the actual enterprise software that you'd need Red Hat Linux for, like SAP or Oracle database server server these will never support the free variations of that system if someone rebuilds the sources of reddit and say i want to run sap only for example they will just simply say your system is not certified to run this right so for certified software you want the real thing you. You want the Reddit Linux or the Oracle Linux. Then there's another class of software like cPanel and the likes that they actually sell themselves as a product

that runs on Reddit Enterprise Linux. But if you run them on CentOS, they will run just fine as well. And many web hosts across the internet run cPanel, for example, on CentOS and similar systems. So I think those will either move to the SUSE hard fork or they will start supporting additional systems too.

I see cPanel specifically is starting to support Ubuntu now as well. So you can run cPanel on Ubuntu, where previously you could only run it on Red Hat systems. So I think that's something we're going to see more and more of. Some of these big pieces of software that used to just run on Red Hat Linux is going to expand a bit. I think they're going to dilute their overall market share that way

through this process. It seems inevitable as these changes continue to lose trust and credibility. Also, it's instability for your organization if you have to rely on whatever flavor of the day red hat tone you have to use. That's one of the things I loved about Debian as I was using it back when I administered more servers than I do now.

I wasn't afraid of any of the upgrades or anything. It was always just like, yeah, go ahead, app get, update, whatever. Debian just worked. And I would upgrade it with impunity because it would never break stuff. And just like I like Postgres for that exact reason, historically, as a database server, as an operating system, like silky smooth and reliable for me is number one. And if I have to go grab some new piece of software that's not prepackaged, sure, I'll go ahead and update my sources and I'll go get it or download it or compile it myself if I

have to. But that stable foundation, especially if you're running a business, like the last thing you want to be doing is dealing with these infrastructure changes as the rug gets pulled out from underneath you when you're trying to like push other areas of your enterprise forward not manage a crisis right down in your inner working so i know that that being as the free universal system isn't always the choice for enterprises that need certain license and stuff but for everybody else i, I mean, it's like, it's kind of a why not proposition in my opinion. I'm surprised that the likes of cPanel haven't started to support Dubin2 or Debian previously,

but I think there's some clout that comes with running on an enterprise Linux system. So if you, Centurion has even had a lot of clouds around it and i think uh they kind of surfed on top of that as well are there companies or entities that provide enterprise support around debian like as you can hire them to in in a bind to come in and do stuff for you yeah there's quite a number of them the biggest one i can think of is called FreakSian, which is not a very enterprising name. But they actually managed

the LTS project for Debian and the extended LTS project. So if you want to go above five years of support for Debian system, you can sign a contract with them and they'll provide the longer term support.

So if you have specific packages that you need to keep running, they'll update it and provide security updates for it. But there's, for other Debian things, software development, packaging, and also LTE stuff, there's so many companies out there that provide the professional support for it.

Well, there's the CYA that many people need in order to make a choice like that. Because it's usually just that. It's usually like, well, I don't want to have unmitigated risk. And so how can I somehow hedge against a catastrophe? And the answer to that is some sort of support contract. And there's your enterprise Linux, right?

Unfortunately, we just don't match the global scale of these big companies like Red Hat or Oracle. Like most of these companies, the bigger ones might cover big parts of Europe or big parts of the US, but no one is as global as Red Hat or Oracle. And maybe we'll get there. Maybe some of these companies will grow to that level.

You know, it's more of a journey than a destination. And there has been a steady and slow growth that's been happening over the last 30 years. And I hope that it continues to grow on at least the same trajectory over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years. If it happens faster, that's fine. But if it just keeps on going at the current pace,

it will get there eventually. It's just a matter of time. How long is it that you can continue to run for DPL? Is there a similar, here in the US, a president can be president twice, two terms? How many terms can you do as a DPL, for example? I don't think there's a limit inside of the project. So you could probably go on forever

if you have enough stamina. I'm at my end. So this is my last term that I'm doing DPL. It seems like one or two years is what most people are doing. Right. One or two years is, I think, as long as a normal person can hold out.

Just a lot of work or why? Is it one year at a time or is it two years? When you get elected, is it one year at a time or is it two years? What's the, when you get elected, is it one single year? One year. One term is one year. But I want to return

to technical stuff. I have so many, so many ideas and so many, well, relatively small projects, but that has big impact. And next year, I want to focus on that.

I have so many ideas to make installer stuff better, to make it easy to find the actualizers. One person called our downloads page an IQ test because just finding the Debian image they want is too difficult. It is pretty challenging. I can attest to that. There's still so many low-hanging fruits that, well, anyone else could do too,

but that I have an itch to scratch. I want to make it better. And the DPL role is so time intensive. There's so much to do. It's kind of mind-blowing. What I do like about the previous DPLs is each previous DPL from the last few years did some work to lower the responsibility of a DPL, which is fantastic.

And I'm doing work on that as well. For example, we have a reimbursement system where Debian developers can buy stuff and claim the money back from Debian. And for each one of those reimbursements, it's like 20 or 30 emails. It's just too much paperwork. And we're finally moving to a web-based system now

that will take care of that. So at least that some load that I'm taking off of future dpls yeah also something that will continue getting better over time and maybe we won't even have a dpl in the future maybe we'll have a small board this is all stuff that's continuing to evolve and hopefully we can make it better and easier on everyone this position you hold is a fully volunteer position yeah that's right so what's your day job at my day job i work at a university we use debian there as well we do maths and science we get mathematicians from all over africa together and get them on phd level and all our classes run on Debian, all our services run on Debian. They do all this AI courses and math and science of Debian.

So it's exciting. It's fun. Yeah, that's cool. Does your full-time job then kind of support the fact that you're the DPL for Debian? Do they give you hours? Do they sort of subsidize some of your employment to focus on Debian? Yeah, we don't have a very formal agreement, but they know I'm working on Debian? Yeah, we don't have a very formal agreement, but they know I'm working on Debian in work time

and even after work time. And when I go to DebConf, I still get my salary for that time. So it's not like I have to take holiday or unpaid time off to go do Debian stuff, which helps a lot. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be able to do it. Very cool.

Wow. Cool for that, right? Last term as DPL. Do you think you'll get the organization? What are some of your items that you plan to make sure you get done before you call it mic drop on DPL? These two things we discussed, two of the things at least, are very high on my list. Getting the, what we call it, the diversity. now ah i forgot what we want to call it the outreach delegation that's what we're calling it the debian outreach project where we can give micro grants to people

who want to work on specific areas of debian that would be one part to finalize and get done the other one would be be to get the formalization of our organizational structure finished and better agreements with our trusted organization and some framework to connect to new trusted organizations because we have the three at the moment, but it would be nice to have even more and in more different regions of the world.

How many TOs do you have throughout the world? Is it hundreds? Small handful? How many TOs are there for you all? It's SPI in the US and there's Debian Switzerland in Switzerland and Debian France. So it's just the three.

But we've had more organizations who wanted to come on board and we just didn't have the structure to do that properly. So for small TOs like Debian France and Debian Switzerland it's easy because they were specifically founded to be TOs for Debian but there's so many others like the Software Conservancy and Free Software Foundations in Brazil in Taiwan in, and other countries who want to be able to accept donations for Debian and help administer our resources. But we just need that framework in place to be able to do that. So those two things I would like to finish.

So if there's somebody listening to this that can support you in that effort, what kind of support could you need from the public, from just those out there who care about Debian and can in some way, shape or form either make contact for you or help you with the connection or leverage their network? Or what kind of kind of support would you call for from the community? For that point, unfortunately, something we just have to do. But if someone has lots of legal experience in this area and they'd like to get in touch, I'd be happy to listen to some advice. Jonathan, before we let you go, I did want to ask about this section in the detailed history. I know you didn't write this document, but chapter four of the history of the Debian project, it lists out all of the releases and then also has important events. And this is a very interesting section

because it's like the official history of Debian. And it's mostly a list of people who have passed away, some tragically, many young. Of course, you and I both know, maybe our listener doesn't know, that the project's founder, Ian Murdoch, passed away in 2015, so he's no longer involved. But there's like 12 to 15 lists of important events,

and these are all Debian contributors who have died. And I thought that was kind of interesting and maybe poignant to an extent, maybe showing how much this project's about the people. But I just wanted to see if you've noticed that, if you've read that, and if you could comment on it. Yeah, it's tough because we're over a thousand people, right? And also DPL, if someone gets cancer, if someone gets divorced,

if someone's going through any kind of tough time, they get in touch with you. So you get to know, statistically out of a thousand active developers, you're going to get some bad news now and again. And unfortunately, someone does get terminally ill. Unfortunately, sometimes someone passes away and it's tough on all of us, especially if we've been in a community

for a very long time. So yeah, I mean, we work together every day, even though we don't work for the same company, we see each other at Debian events. So you get to know people over a period of many years and you think of them as family and friends. So the human connection is definitely very strong. So some of us don't even know where the other people in Debian work in the day job. We know this person does this piece of work

and we know what they're interested in and what the technical capabilities are. But for us, we're like a Debian family. It sounds so cheesy. I almost don't want to say it because it sounds so cheesy, but it is true. There's a very strong connection between us

and we do care about each other. That's the sense that I got when I read this. I thought, who puts together a history of their project? You know, a lot of times it's like milestones. This many users, some big deal happened, a big release. And it's like, here's our history. And it's like a listing of people who were Debian contributors who had passed on. And I thought, that is interesting.

How do you all communicate and collaborate and come together? Like how does this bond form remotely amongst Debian's a thousand volunteers? It's a huge mess because we have so many communication platforms. So we use IRC a lot. We use mailing lists a lot, lots of other unofficial channels that we use to communicate. Some people use Telegram and Signal a lot these days, although those are not officially sanctioned in the sense that we don't have any,

we leave it to them, whatever they do there is not something that we monitor or actively promote on our website. So we tend to steer people to mailing lists and I receive the most. And we also have a matrix instance now, which is gaining some traction. Our in-person events is really the thing

that really glues us together. Without that, we really struggle. When we had COVID and we had to do everything remotely, initially it actually worked really well because we know each other personally and it was fun seeing each other on our computer screens, which we oddly never did before COVID. But once COVID started,

there are many teams who started video conferencing and I said, hey, this is great. We should do this more often. And we were very enthusiastic about this. But by 2021, we got this, what they call Zoom fatigue. We got really tired of being at our computers and productivity over the whole debian noticeably went down and once we were able to get back together in person again things improved drastically if you look at the debian 12 released

it had the shortest release cycle of any debian release before typically we try to release about every two years and sometimes it goes up to 25 or 26 months this time it was i think i i don't even have the data with me but it's something like 18 months after the previous release so um having back the physical events really drove up the enthusiasm again. And we have all kinds of in-person events. There's like birthday parties coming up on the day that this episode is released. There's prints, which are activities where people get together to fix bugs, all kinds of releases. And the in-person events really make Debian work.

I know you want to wrap up, but another thing that was part of my DPL platform was to establish a more formal framework for local groups. So local groups are groups of just Debian users who get together and do Debian stuff. So for example, in Brazil and in other parts of the world, they just have like a big Debian party where they do talks and have cake and drink beer and have all these kinds of Debian events happening. And we want to see how we can support these groups a bit more,

either financially or sending them some swag for their events or helping people get bootstrapped when a new local group is formed. And that's a big part of what I'd like to achieve in this DPL term as well. Make local groups easier, make it easier for people to start off with. I've been wanting to get one off the ground in my country for a long time. And I finally have a few people who's interested in helping out. But there's little documentation and help that I can send them to right now.

And hopefully we can get that bootstrapped and fixed for the future. Well, one thing we did before was we had Zach Lada on a while back talking about Hack Club. It's not hat, H-A-T, if I mispronounced. It's hackclub.com. So I would suggest that you check out that episode. Yeah. Because, hey, why not promote our back catalog? But at the same time, just pay attention to what they're doing

because they did a lot of stuff in person. But Zach talked specifically about this online presence and a lot of the things you're talking about that really revived the debuting community, but then also thrived it prior to COVID and not being able to meet as much in person and whatnot but like there's just a lot that they have done that keeps the spirit alive despite not always being able to have that many teen hackers what

do they call themselves jared hackers clubbers clubbers hackers clubbers is what they say online yeah you know so there's some things i think you can check out that they're doing well and if you want an intro to zach i'd be happy to connect you because he's a great dude and has a lot of great ideas and obviously has done well with hack club it's a 501c3 it's a non-profit organization and it thrives very very well so i'd check that out check out what they're doing well when it comes to how you may plan future debian meetups and localize things. Especially locally. Yeah.

Yeah. I'd love to speak to them. I see on their website, they are here in Cape Town as well. So maybe I can check out the local instance of Acclum locally. Yeah, absolutely. Well, very cool. Yes. Thank you so much for taking us on this Debian journey, this 30 years.

You know, you're- 30 years. This year being your fourth year 30 years you know you're 30 years this year being your fourth year of service as you said your last year of service and you have some goals that you have in mind for it really a big fan of debian thanks so much for just sharing the the journey here with us and all your effort to make it what it is today and what will be tomorrow technically or organizationally yeah man thank you for having me and helping us share some Debian thoughts with the world out there. I don't know about you, but I'm a big Debian fan. I'm a big fan of products being able to be built on top of Debian. I think Debian has truly the hallmark of the way to lead

a free and open distro of Linux for everyone to use, even the enterprise, as Jonathan shared here in the show today. And like many of you, we join in celebration of 30 years of Debian and hopefully 30 more years or more to come. Again, we have some bonus content for our Plus Plus subscribers, so stick around for that. changelog.com slash plus plus for those who are not members. Check it out.

And by the way, Jared and I will be at the Strange Loop Conference, the last Strange Loop Conference. So if you're going to be there, make sure you say hello. Hit us up on Twitter, hop in our Slack,

changelog.com slash community. It's free to join. We'd love to see you there. You can learn more at thestrangeloop.com. And yes, a big, massive thank you to our friends and our partners at Fastly, Fly, and also TypeSense and our Beats Master in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder. Keep them beats coming. Thank you. Thank you. But that's it. This show's done done we'll see you again on friday Thank you. you