- Combining open source developers outside the core development regions and major cultural spheres could potentially secure roughly as many contributors as the entire US. - Funding shortages for non-profit foundations are deeply entrenched. Denying or attempting to fix this immediately becomes greed. - It is possible to manage language barriers, cultural barriers, and guidelines for distant countries without becoming a greedy for-profit entity. - This does not mean holding DebConf in every country. However, if the awareness is simply that ‘there used to be no borders, but now it's different from the 90s’ regarding the shortage of personnel, then improvements should be more proactive. - The 2020s are no longer an era of romanticism where one flies from Angola to Germany just for the sake of romance. - Especially as Debian has established itself as an invisible system, becoming the backbone of countless cloud services, there is less room for romanticism to intervene.
I've used Debian since 2015 and have had no complaints during that time. Korea also had ‘administrators’ who spared no expense on plane tickets for GNU since the 90s, but most have now stepped down due to age, or, exhausted from trying to salvage communities torn apart by toxic members, have turned around and declared ‘BSD was right’. However, the project's sustainability deteriorating due to a ‘lack of administrators’ is definitely something that needs to be considered. If sufficient people cannot be recruited, and given that we cannot extend the freeze cycle like Slackware at present, communication between upstream and downstream and the active recruitment of multinational developers are important to resolve the complaints of ‘dependent families’ like Ubuntu.
perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik
Dude I play eve online! We compete for these unpaid space jobs where you have to read reports and click a button on a website without even logging into the game.
Heck I play with at least one ports commit guy from a bsd
Genuine respect to anyone doing thankless package maintenance for free. But maybe the real problem isn't that Debian volunteers go quiet — it's that we have 100 distros on DistroWatch and half of them are the same thing with a different wallpaper?
More substantively, I don’t believe it is true, but hypothetically why would “the real” problem be having 100 distros on distrowatch with little to choose between them? The benefit of open source for the individual is supposed to be the opportunity to learn by doing and to have the freedom to do things however you want, and the benefit to the community is this extreme Darwinian process where lots of crazy people try all sorts of things and the community as a whole picks results they like. All of these benefits arise precisely because there are a lot of projects, many of which don’t achieve mass adoption.
Please don't. If you want to contribute, contribute your own words.
Being on social media is very relevant due to both content discovery algorithms being able to connect people who may be interested in the project with the project itself and because social media sites can have things go viral outside of your own personal reach. Your post can reposted or spread by other accounts easier if its originating from the platform itself instead of hopping someone sees it and copies onto the platform.
Holing up in mailing lists definitely isn't going to help with pulling in users or devs.
[1] although it was maybe specifically just me they weren’t trying to attract.
[2] to the point where I actually worked with someone in my day job who was a debian dev and he wouldn’t sign my key without me producing physical official ID like a passport or something. Just really bizarre level of paranoia like a government kyc process or something.