LXF: How happy are you with how Debian has turned out?

IM: I'm generally pretty happy. Clearly, you can't argue that Debian has done a lot of good things and had a major impact. Certainly, it has exceeded all my expectations going into it. I'm a little dismayed by certain aspects of it. I think in some respects Debian is blowing a pretty big opportunity. If you look at the way Linux is used in big enterprise all the way down to the other end of the spectrum, Debian is one of the three big distributions worldwide; Red Hat and SUSE are the other two. There are just a few little things that hold it back. One big one is the fact that it has never had a predictable release schedule. When is the next version going to come out? "Whenever it's done" doesn't tend to be a very compelling answer for a broad swathe of the market, right?

I said a year and a half ago that Debian had a big opportunity in front of it and that the most important thing they needed to do was to get Etch released on time. So to see how not only that has slipped but the manner in which it has slipped - namely that there is almost a prediction among certain developers that it's never going to work because you've introduced money into the equation with the DuncTank project and that it's doomed to fail, and the passive aggressive actions by those same developers to make sure that their prediction comes true - that sort of exposes the worst part of the open source development process. It allows the people outside the community who don't understand it to misunderstand. Not to mention that they are missing a big opportunity.

LXF: Do you think that's a failure of the process, though, or a particular failing of Debian? None of the other distributions seems to have quite so much internal strife.

IM: To a certain extent it's pretty typical. You see the same kind of internal strife at any company; the question is, how publicly does that kind of information get shared? Most of the time you never hear about it because this kind of positioning and jousting happens behind closed doors. So it's really nothing new. The thing with Debian is that everything is so open and transparent, so you see it.

I think to a certain extent that Debian is in a lot of ways process run amok. You need to have some sort of a process to scale. I mean, you go from one person to ten people, and that exposes a whole new set of issues. You go from ten to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand, and you have to build process in order to scale. The problem with too much process is you get into design by committee - you get into a situation where without strong leadership no one feels empowered to make decisions. Sometimes you have to make decisions that are unpopular; that's what leaders do. What ends up happening in this committee mentality is that no leader feels empowered to make decisions unless everyone agrees with him. And since no one as the size of the organization grows ever agrees on anything, no decisions ever get made.

That's the quandary that Debian finds itself in today: how can it get itself out of the situation it finds itself in?

LXF: If Debian was a do-over, is there some way that that could have been fixed?

IM: Frankly, I can see this on Slashdot already, so I might as well keep going! I think the fundamental mistake was this adoption of a democratic process, which happened after my time and I was opposed to.

LXF: You were against it?

IM: I was against it. Mainly for that same reason: I believe that open source projects are no different from businesses or any other kind of organization in that to get any meaningful work done, there has to be strong leadership. That leadership has to be empowered to make decisions even when those decisions are unpopular. I think that's part of the reason why Ubuntu has done well: there is a strong leader, and that strong is empowered.

And an enlightened leader will listen to what the community is saying and factor that into account, and understand that sometimes the leader makes bad decisions and that they have to be revisited. I think the problem with adopting... I think in some ways the people who were really pushing for pure democracy at Debian wanted to see this as a sort of social experiment - what happens when every decision is put up to a vote. You know, pure democracy... It looks a lot better on paper than it ends up in practice.

That's why I was always opposed to it. You know, I've been pleased with the current leadership at Debian: I think Anthony Towns has done a very good job and certainly hasn't been afraid to make unpopular decisions; DuncTank being one example. At this point it is more of an institutional problem. Hopefully the strong leadership will continue.

LXF: You mentioned Ubuntu, and many people have cited that as Debian 'done properly'. It has had an amazing take-up in a short period of time, because it seems to be giving people what they actually want. Are you upset by the fact that Ubuntu is a populist version of Debian?

IM: Let me defend Debian now that I've attacked it for a little while. One has to remember how completely groundbreaking Debian was. This whole idea of open development, distributed development... it was a model that Debian truly pioneered. Linux really pioneered it, but Debian was the first attempt to explicitly build something this way.

So clearly whenever you are breaking new ground, entering new territory you're going to make mistakes, and part of the measure of a successful organization is the ability to understand when you've made mistakes. The whole notion that Ubuntu is Debian done right somehow implies that Debian is done wrong, which I think is wrong-headed. Are there things that Debian can learn from Ubuntu and the extraordinary uptake that it has seen and frankly all the things that it is getting right? Absolutely. I think that's the single biggest positive impact of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has certainly raised the bar. They have had a tremendous impact on the number of people worldwide using Debian (I do consider Ubuntu to be Debian). In terms of what have they done wrong? I think they have made mistakes, but I think that they have shown that they are capable of acknowledging where they have made mistakes and correcting them. I was pretty vocal early on about my concerns about compatibility; namely that we were starting to see Debian packages that you couldn't run on Debian.

I remember when that happened around RPM in the late nineties and I didn't want that to happen to Debian too. We had some differences of opinion about how to go about doing that - DCC and the various other things that came and went. But at the end of the day, Ubuntu is now an active participant in my current project, Linux Standard Base, which has compatibility at its core, so for the most part those initial concerns that I had have been addressed.

For more from Ian Murdock, including his thoughts on the Linux Standards Base and the FSG/OSDL merger, grab a copy of Linux Format 92 when it goes on sale on April 5th.

Other interviews:

• Mark Shuttleworth
• Andrew Morton
• Gael Duval