Free Software and the Debian Project Vincent Danjean [email protected] May 6, 2014 UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil The Debian Project 1 / 45 Outline 1 Free Software 2 Debian: what is it? A Technical Project A philosophical & political project A Social Experiment (Join us!) 3 Debian Specialties 4 Debian & Derivatives 5 Conclusion The Debian Project 2 / 45 What is Free Software? 4 fundamental freedoms (from FSF) 1 right to run the software 2 right to modify it (so source-level access is required) 3 right to distribute it (with or without payment) 4 right to distribute modified versions I Initially started in 1983, when proprietary software got popular I A software for which you can read the sources is not always Free Software I For example, without any explicit license, code from stackoverflow website is not Free Software. The Debian Project 3 / 45 Open Source Initiative (OSI) Organization founded in 1998 I goal: to promote free software I means: maintain the Open Source Definition and a list of compliant licenses I target: major software businesses and other high-tech industries They decide to approve or not submitted licenses with the OSI label The Debian Project 4 / 45 Criteria for Open Source 1 Free redistribution 2 Source code availability 3 Derived works Allowed with the same license 4 Integrity of the author’s source code: patches may be required 5 No discrimination against persons or groups 6 No discrimination against fields of endeavor 7 Distribution of license: no need for additional licenses 8 License must not be specific to a product 9 License must not restrict other software 10 License must be technology-neutral The Debian Project 5 / 45 Wrong I No discrimination against persons or groups My free software will always be free (no cost) Wrong I It would be impossible to put it on CD to sell (think of RedHat, etc.) I Selling software is a great incomes for the FSF A free software is necessarily free (no cost) somewhere Wrong I Blender software has been bought 100 000 e in 2002, October Quiz: true or false? My free software wont be available for soldats The Debian Project 6 / 45 Wrong I It would be impossible to put it on CD to sell (think of RedHat, etc.) I Selling software is a great incomes for the FSF A free software is necessarily free (no cost) somewhere Wrong I Blender software has been bought 100 000 e in 2002, October Quiz: true or false? My free software wont be available for soldats Wrong I No discrimination against persons or groups My free software will always be free (no cost) The Debian Project 6 / 45 Wrong I Blender software has been bought 100 000 e in 2002, October Quiz: true or false? My free software wont be available for soldats Wrong I No discrimination against persons or groups My free software will always be free (no cost) Wrong I It would be impossible to put it on CD to sell (think of RedHat, etc.) I Selling software is a great incomes for the FSF A free software is necessarily free (no cost) somewhere The Debian Project 6 / 45 Quiz: true or false? My free software wont be available for soldats Wrong I No discrimination against persons or groups My free software will always be free (no cost) Wrong I It would be impossible to put it on CD to sell (think of RedHat, etc.) I Selling software is a great incomes for the FSF A free software is necessarily free (no cost) somewhere Wrong I Blender software has been bought 100 000 e in 2002, October The Debian Project 6 / 45 Three tests from the Debian Legal mailing list The Desert Island test A user that cannot send data must be able to use the software The Dissident test Modifications must not have to be sent to other people I No “send me a postcard if you use my software” license The Tentacles of Evil test Granted right cannot be revoked The Debian Project 7 / 45 Free Software Licenses Jungle I Lots of different free licenses I GPL, LGPL, BSD, AGPL, Creative Common, MPL, MIT, Apache, . I and most of them have several versions and/or options I All are free licenses according to the previous criteria I But lots of incompatibility between them The Debian Project 8 / 45 Outline 1 Free Software 2 Debian: what is it? A Technical Project A philosophical & political project A Social Experiment (Join us!) 3 Debian Specialties 4 Debian & Derivatives 5 Conclusion The Debian Project 9 / 45 I A philosophical & political project I Promoting and defending Free Software I With an impact on many users I A social experiment I Thousands of volunteer contributors all over the world What’s Debian, really? I A technical project I Building a successful distribution I With a real impact on the world The Debian Project 10 / 45 I A social experiment I Thousands of volunteer contributors all over the world What’s Debian, really? I A technical project I Building a successful distribution I With a real impact on the world I A philosophical & political project I Promoting and defending Free Software I With an impact on many users The Debian Project 10 / 45 What’s Debian, really? I A technical project I Building a successful distribution I With a real impact on the world I A philosophical & political project I Promoting and defending Free Software I With an impact on many users I A social experiment I Thousands of volunteer contributors all over the world The Debian Project 10 / 45 What’s Debian, really? I A technical project I Building a successful distribution I With a real impact on the world I A philosophical & political project I Promoting and defending Free Software I With an impact on many users I A social experiment I Thousands of volunteer contributors all over the world Part of the landscape of Free Software: I 1983 – GNU I 1991 – Linux I 1993 – Slackware, Debian, Red Hat I 1998 – OSI created by former DPL; definition based on DFSG I 2004 – Ubuntu The Debian Project 10 / 45 Free Software without distributions Many different: I project hosting solutions (sourceforge, author’s homepage, etc.) I build systems (autotools, CMake, Rubygems, custom-made) I causes of problems (dependencies, conflicting libraries, etc.) 1 download foo-1.0.tar.gz checksum mismatch, missing public key, etc. 2 ./configure error: missing bar, baz,. 3 foreach (bar, baz, . ) go to 1 until (recursive) success 4 make error: symbol not found 5 make install error: cp: cannot create regular file /some/weird/path The Debian Project 11 / 45 feedback/bugs software packages feedback/bugs 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer A Free Software distribution Alice Bob Carol Dave The Debian Project 12 / 45 feedback/bugs packages feedback/bugs 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer A Free Software distribution software Alice Bob Carol Dave The Debian Project 12 / 45 feedback/bugs feedback/bugs 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer A Free Software distribution software packages Alice Bob Carol Dave The Debian Project 12 / 45 feedback/bugs 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer A Free Software distribution software packages feedback/bugs Alice Bob Carol Dave The Debian Project 12 / 45 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer A Free Software distribution feedback/bugs software packages feedback/bugs Alice Bob Carol Dave The Debian Project 12 / 45 A Free Software distribution feedback/bugs software packages feedback/bugs Alice Bob Carol Dave 1 Integration of upstream projects (avoid conflicting versions) 2 Efficient infrastructure to distribute software to users (mirrors) 3 Unified interface for software installation, upgrade and removal 4 Intermediate, unified support layer The Debian Project 12 / 45 A very successful project I 20000 source packages, 41000 binary packages I a dozen of ports (with 3 different kernels – Linux, Hurd, FreeBSD) amd64, armel, armhf, hurd-i386, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, s390x, sparc I 100% Free Software (including infrastructure) I Known for stability, robustness, expertise of package maintainers I Stable releases every 2 years (+/- few months) release cycle freeze 4.0 "etch" 22 months 17 weeks 5.0 "lenny" 22 months 28 weeks 6.0 "squeeze" 24 months 26 weeks 7.0 "wheezy" 28 months 44 weeks jessie: freeze on 2014-11-05 The Debian Project 13 / 45 Who is doing Debian? I Thousands of volunteers (including ~1000 Debian Developers) I Organized in teams, focusing on: I Packaging tasks: Ruby, KDE, scientific, etc. and also: porters, security, release management, blends, translation, etc. I Distribution infrastructure: system administration, packages archive, build daemons, mirrors, quality assurance, etc. I Project support & communication: press, documentation, trademark, auditors & accounting, events, videos, etc. I Real experts of their packages, and of their tasks in general The Debian Project 14 / 45 A distributed and independent organization I Developers from 63 countries (us[18%], de, fr, .