Ted Ts’o: Debian Can Learn from Ubuntu
Newly appointed CTO of the Linux Foundation and kernel developer Ted Ts'o is appealing to the Debian project to adopt a more pragmatic attitude about its Linux distro. The provocation for his advice is the current controversy over Debian's next 5.0 "Lenny" release.
The debate over the free and proprietary aspects of the Debian GNU/Linux has been whirling up for a while and with each new update to the OS. It peaked recently with the call for votes to determine the course of the Lenny release and Debian's social contract, which ended in the resignation of the project's secretary, Manoj Srivastava. The prominent Linux developer and CTO of the Linux Foundation, Ted Ts'o, responded to the debate in a recent blog, using a quote from Gordon Dickson's Tactics of Mistakes. The book treats of philosophers and how their militant followers pursue their ideas uncompromisingly. Ts'o writes, "The conflict between idealism and pragmatism is a very old one in the Free and Open Source Software Movement." He gives Richard Stallman as an example of someone "who has never compromised on issues regarding his vision of Software Freedom."
