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August 19, 2008

Debian just celebrated its 15th birthday Sunday and, though Debian is still alive and very well, some industry insiders and people in the Linux community are starting to ask if it still holds the market position that it should at this point in its development cycle.

There are actually quite a few Linux distributions based on Debian: Ubuntu, Xandros and a few more among them.

Additionally, and since 1993, there has actually been some effort to create an Enterprise Debian support system/vendor of some sort. How well did it fly? Well let's see... Ian Murdoch has certainly tried with his firm Progeny which ultimately failed.

Then of course there was the DCCA (Debian Common Core Alliance) which like Progeny also failed miserably.

Bruce Perens -- a former Debian Project Leader himself -- also tried with "User Linux" which never ended up materializing either. Strange, ain't it?

Today, Hewlett-Packard is a major backing partner of Debian and seems to be even profiting from the experience as well. Outside of HP's success, and Ubuntu's success being based off Debian - Debian has not hit the same level of commercial success as Red Hat or even Novell for that matter.

Is it time for a change? Read on...

There are actually many reasons why Debian has sputtered so much over the past fifteen years. The most obvious one is the lack of a consistent and very reliable release schedule which is what helped to give birth to Red Hat and even Ubuntu.

Whether some may like this or not, Debian is actually a massive repository for many Linux architectures and various subsystems and applications.

Debian is an unmatched resource for downstream distributions like Ubuntu and Xandros to build from. You may not think about it too much but it's a well known fact in the Linux community.

However, there are some that still argue that it could have been more. But more than what? More than whom?

At this point in time, Ubuntu has well eclipsed Debian in terms of popular mindshare and actual "Blog Buzz".

Ian Murdoch once said that he thought that Ubuntu's popularity was more harmful than helpful to Debian itself.

Additionally, Debian is the model for true community leadership and participation. The Debian Project Leader is an elected position and its Social Contract is the model for Open Source itself. Ask most people in the Linux community and the majority will agree.

Since the beginning, Debian has been and will probably continue to be a mainstay of Linux and most in the open source community hope that it will remain that way for at least another 15 years.

So hopefully in 2023, those of us that are still around will be able to place 30 candles on the cake instead of the 15 on Sunday... (To be continued...)     :-)

Source: IT Direction.

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