Today's the festival of Opinion in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a day for people to speak their minds about various subjects.
My current opinion is about the Dunc Tank, a project by various users, developers, and maintainers of Debian to make sure that we hit the 4 Dec 2006 release date for Debian 4.0 (codename 'etch'). (That's 13 Frimaire CCXV for you revolutionaries out there.)
One sub-project of Dunc Tank is to raise money to support the release managers for etch -- the people most responsible for keeping the release on schedule. This would free the RMs from worrying about their day jobs and keep them 100% focused on the release.
I think this is a great plan. Debian is a fantastic operating system, and we have a lot to be proud of, but the main source of criticism for the project is that we don't hit our release dates. Not the first, not the second, not the fourth release dates. We've built up a reputation as a reliable, flexible OS, and we need to start earning one as a reliable, flexible organization. Projects like Ubuntu have shown that it's not impossible to get code released on time -- I think we can do it in Debian, too.
I've already pledged money privately for the Dunc Tank project, and if you're interested in this particular way for getting 'etch' released on time, I hope you consider contributing too.
tags: debian dunc tank etch release os deadline
I can comment. Finally, or not-so finally, WIKI insertion style (it feels like I am usurping something). So given that it's Opinion day, I wanted to say, umm, sh*t. What did I want to say?