trunk/project-history/project-history.sgml

<!doctype debiandoc system>
<debiandoc>
<book>
<title>A Brief History of Debian</title>
<author>Debian Documentation Team <email>debian-doc@lists.debian.org</email>

<!-- This has been converted to UTF-8 -->

<!-- NOTE:
To extract the number of developers:
$ ldapsearch -xLLLH ldap://db.debian.org -b ou=users,dc=debian,dc=org \
  gidNumber=800 keyFingerPrint \
  | sed -rne ':s;/^dn:/bl;n;bs;:l;n;/^keyFingerPrint:/{p;bs}' \
  | wc -l
-->

<!-- TODO:

  - Convert to Docbook-XML
  - Use po4a to ease translations

  Content:
  - Add information of Release Managers just as the Wikipedia article
    does (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Squeeze#Release_managers)
  - Add graphical information such as:
        * The logos of Debconf and maybe the group photos too
        * A timeline for releases such as the one shown at the Wikipedia
          article at 
            http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/aefb78756648fa27bd7932ae25a5a9b6.png
        * Pictures of the leaders?

-->

<version>2.19 (last revised 4th May 2013)</version>

<abstract>
This document describes the history and goals of the Debian project.
</abstract>

<copyright>
This document may be freely redistributed or modified in any form provided
your changes are clearly documented.

<p>
This document may be redistributed for fee or free,  and may be
modified (including translation from one type of media or file format to 
another or from one spoken language to another) provided that all changes
from the original are clearly marked as such.

<p>
Significant contributions were made to this document by 
<list>
<item>Javier Fernández-Sanguino <email>jfs@debian.org</email>
<item>Bdale Garbee <email>bdale@debian.org</email>
<item>Hartmut Koptein <email>koptein@debian.org</email>
<item>Nils Lohner <email>lohner@debian.org</email>
<item>Will Lowe <email>lowe@debian.org</email>
<item>Bill Mitchell <email>Bill.Mitchell@pobox.com</email>
<item>Ian Murdock <email>imurdock@debian.org</email>
<item>Martin Schulze <email>joey@debian.org</email>
<item>Craig Small <email>csmall@debian.org</email>
</list>

<p>
This document is primarily maintained by Bdale Garbee
<email>bdale@debian.org</email>.

</copyright>

<toc>

<chapt id="intro">Introduction -- What is the Debian Project?

<p>
<url id="http://www.debian.org/" name="The Debian Project"> is a
worldwide group of volunteers who endeavor to produce an operating
system distribution that is composed entirely of free software.  The
principle product of the project to date is the Debian GNU/Linux
software distribution, which includes the Linux operating system
kernel, and thousands of prepackaged applications.  Various processor
types are supported to one extent or another, including Intel i386 and
above, Alpha, ARM, Intel IA-64, Motorola 68k, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, Sparc
(and UltraSparc), IBM S/390 and Hitachi SuperH.

<p>
Debian motivated the formation of
<url id="http://www.spi-inc.org/" name="Software in the Public Interest, Inc.,">
a New York-based non-profit organization.  SPI was founded to help
Debian and other similar organizations develop and distribute open
hardware and software.  Among other things, SPI provides a mechanism
by which The Debian Project may accept contributions that are tax
deductable in the United States.

<p>
For more information about free software, see the <url
id="http://www.debian.org/social_contract" name="Debian Social
Contract"> and associated Debian Free Software Guidelines, or the
<url id="http://www.debian.org/intro/free" name="Debian What Does Free Mean?">
page.

<sect>In the Beginning
<!-- .. was the command line (sorry, could not resist - jfs) -->


<p>
The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on
<url name="August 16th, 1993" id="http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=CBusDD.MIK%40unix.portal.com&#38;output=gplain">.
At that time, the whole concept of a "distribution" of Linux
was new.  Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be
made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU (read his manifesto provided
as an appendix to this document for more details).  The creation of Debian
was sponsored by the FSF's GNU project for one year (November 1994 to 
November 1995).

<p>
Debian was meant to be carefully and conscientiously put together, and
to be maintained and supported with similar care.  It started as a
small, tightly-knit group of Free Software hackers, and gradually grew
to become a large, well-organized community of developers and
users.

<p>
When it began, Debian was the only distribution that was open for every 
developer and user to contribute their work.  It remains the most significant 
distributor of Linux that is not a commercial entity.  
It is the only large project with a
constitution, social contract, and policy documents to organize the project.
Debian is also the only distribution which is "micro packaged" using detailed
dependency information regarding inter-package relationships to ensure system
consistency across upgrades.  

<p>
To achieve and maintain high standards of quality, Debian has adopted an 
extensive set of policies and procedures for packaging and delivering software.
These standards are backed up by tools, automation, and documentation 
implementing all of Debian's key elements in an open and visible way.

</sect>

<sect>Pronouncing Debian

<p>
The official pronunciation of Debian is 'deb ee n'.  The name comes
from the names of the creator of Debian, Ian Murdock, and his wife,
Debra.  


</sect>
</chapt>

<chapt id="leaders">Leadership

<p>
Debian has had several leaders since its beginnings in 1993.

<p>
Ian Murdock founded Debian in August 1993 and led it until March 1996.

<p>
Bruce Perens led Debian from April 1996 until December 1997.

<p>
Ian Jackson led Debian from January 1998 until December 1998.

<p>
Wichert Akkerman led Debian from January 1999 until March 2001.

<p>
Ben Collins led Debian from April 2001 until April 2002.

<p>
Bdale Garbee led Debian from April 2002 until April 2003.

<p>
Martin Michlmayr led Debian from March 2003 until March 2005.

<p>
Branden Robinson led Debian from April 2005 until April 2006.

<p>
Anthony Towns led Debian from April 2006 until April 2007.

<p>
Sam Hocevar led Debian from April 2007 until April 2008.

<p>
Steve McIntyre led Debian from April 2008 until April 2010.

<p>
Stefano Zacchiroli led Debian from April 2010 until April 2013.

<p>
Lucas Nussbaum was elected in April 2013 and is our current leader.

</chapt>

<chapt id="releases">Debian Releases

<p>Debian 0.01 through 0.90 (August-December 1993)

<p>
Debian 0.91 (January 1994): This release had a simple package system
which could install and uninstall packages.  The project had grown to several
dozen people at this point.

<p>
Debian 0.93R5 (March 1995): Responsibility for each package was
clearly assigned to a developer by this point, and the package manager
(<prgn>dpkg</prgn>) was used to install packages after the
installation of a base system.

<p>
Debian 0.93R6 (November 1995): <prgn>dselect</prgn> appears.  This
was the last Debian release using the a.out binary format; there were about 
60 developers.  
The first master.debian.org server was built by Bdale Garbee and hosted
by HP in parallel with the 0.93R6 release.  The deployment of an explicit
master server on which Debian developers would construct each release led
directly to the formation of the Debian mirror network, and indirectly to
the development of many of the policies and procedures used to manage the
project today.

<p>
Debian 1.0 was never released: InfoMagic, a CD vendor, accidentally
shipped a development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0.  On December
11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was
screwed.  Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic
Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not
the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only
partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and
does not represent the quality of a released Debian system.  To prevent
confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release,
the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1".  The
premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.

<p>
The hosting of master.debian.org moved from HP to i-Connect.Net around the
end of 1995.  Michael Neuffer and Shimon Shapiro, founders of i-Connect.Net,
hosted master on their own hardware for a little more than a year.  During
this time, they provided many services to Debian, including running what was 
essentially the New Maintainer process of the day, and significantly aiding 
the growth of the early Debian mirror network.

<p>
Debian 1.1 <em>Buzz</em> (June 17th, 1996): This was the first Debian
release with a code name.  It was taken, like all others so far, from
a character in one of the <em>Toy Story</em> movies... in this case, Buzz
Lightyear. By this time, Bruce Perens had taken over leadership of
the Project from Ian Murdock, and Bruce was working at Pixar, the
company that produced the movies.  This release was fully ELF, used
Linux kernel 2.0, and contained 474 packages.

<p>
Debian 1.2 <em>Rex</em> (December 12th, 1996): Named for the plastic dinosaur
in the <em>Toy Story</em> movies. This release consisted of 848 packages maintained by 
120 developers

<p>
Debian 1.3 <em>Bo</em> (June 5th, 1997): Named for Bo Peep, the shepherdess.
This release consisted of 974 packages maintained by 200 developers.

<p>
Debian 2.0 <em>Hamm</em> (July 24th, 1998): Named for the piggy-bank in the <em>Toy Story</em> movies.
This was the first multi-architecture release of Debian, adding support for
the Motorola 68000 series architectures.  With Ian Jackson as Project Leader,
this release made the transition to libc6, and consisted of over 1500 packages
maintained by over 400 developers.

<p>
Debian 2.1 <em>Slink</em> (March 9th, 1999): Named for the slinky-dog in the
movie.  Two more architectures were added, 
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/alpha/" name="Alpha">
and
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/" name="SPARC">.
With Wichert Akkerman as Project Leader, this release consisted of about
2250 packages and required 2 CDs in the official set.  The key technical
innovation was the introduction of apt, a new package management
interface.  Widely emulated, apt addressed issues resulting from Debian's 
continuing growth, and established a new paradigm for package acquisition and 
installation on Open Source operating systems.

<p>
Debian 2.2 <em>Potato</em> (15 August 2000): Named for "Mr Potato Head" in 
the <em>Toy Story</em> movies.
This release added support for the
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/" name="PowerPC">
and
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/" name="ARM">
architectures.  With Wichert still serving as Project Leader, this release
consisted of more than 3900 binary packages derived from over 2600 source
packages maintained by more than 450 Debian developers.

<!-- (jfs) Is this too long? I do not see the number of binary/source
packages in the release notes, also the number of DD could be revised -->
<p>
Debian 3.0 <em>Woody</em> (19 July 2002): Named for the main character
the <em>Toy Story</em> movies: "Woody" the cowboy.
Even more architectures were added in this release:
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/ia64/" name="IA-64">,
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/hppa/" name="HP PA-RISC">,
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/mips/" name="MIPS (big endian)">,
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/mipsel/" name="MIPS (little endian)">
and
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/s390/" name="S/390">. This is
also the first release to include cryptographic software due to the
restrictions for exportation being <em>lightened</em> in the US, and
also the first one to include KDE, now that the license issues with QT were 
resolved.  
With Bdale Garbee recently appointed Project Leader, and more than 900
Debian developers, this release contained around 8,500 binary
packages and 7 binary CDs in the official set.

<p>Debian 3.1 <em>Sarge</em> (6 June 2005): named for the sergeant of
the Green Plastic Army Men. No new architectures were added to the
release, although an unofficial AMD64 port was published at the same
time and distributed through the new <url
id="http://alioth.debian.org" name="Alioth project hosting site">.
This release features a new installer:
<em>debian-installer</em>, a modular piece of software that feature
automatic hardware detection, unattended installation features and was
released fully translated to over thirty languages.  It was also the
first release to include a full office suite: OpenOffice.org.
Branden Robinson had just been appointed as Project Leader. This release was made by
more than nine hundred Debian developers, and contained around 15,400
binary packages and 14 binary CDs in the official set.

<p>Debian 4.0 <em>Etch</em> (8 April 2007): named for the sketch toy in
the  movie.  One architecture was added in this release: <url
id="http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/" name="AMD64">, and official
support for <url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/" name="m68k"> was dropped.
This release continued using the <em>debian-installer</em>, but featuring
in this release a graphical installer, cryptographic verification of downloaded
packages, more flexible partitioning (with support for encrypted partitions),
simplified mail configuration, a more flexible desktop selection, simplified
but improved localization and new modes, including a <em>rescue</em> mode.  New
installations would not need to reboot through the installation process as the
previous two phases of installation were now integrated.  This new installer
provided support for scripts using composed characters and complex languages in
its graphical version, increasing the number of available translations to over fifty.
Sam Hocevar was appointed Project Leader the very same day, and the project
included more than one thousand and thirty Debian developers. The release
contained around 18,000 binary packages over 20 binary CDs (3 DVDs) in the
official set. There were also two binary CDs available to install the system 
with alternate desktop environments different to the default one.

<p>Debian 5.0 <em>Lenny</em> (February 2009): named for the wind up
binoculars in the <em>Toy Story</em> movies.  One architecture was added in this release: <url
id="http://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort" name="ARM EABI"> (or <em>armel</em>),
providing support for newer ARM processors and deprecating the old ARM
port (<em>arm</em>).
The <url id="http://wiki.debian.org/M68k" name="m68k"> port was not 
included in this release, although it was still provided in the
<em>unstable</em> distribution. This release did not feature the
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/" name="FreeBSD port">,
although much work on the port had been done to make it qualify
it did not meet yet the
<url id="http://release.debian.org/lenny/arch_qualify.html" name="qualification requirements"> for this release.
This release added support for Marvell's Orion platform which is used in many
storage devices and also provided supported several Netbooks,
in particular the Eee PC by Asus. <em>Lenny</em> also contained the build tools
for Emdebian which allowed Debian source packages to be cross-built and shrunk
to suit embedded ARM systems.
It was also the first release to provide free versions of Sun's Java
technology, making it possible to provide Java applications in the
<em>main</em> section.


<p>Debian 6.0 <em>Squeeze</em> (February 2011): named for the green three-eyed
aliens.

<p>The release was frozen on August 6, 2010, with many of the Debian
developers gathered at the 10th Debconf at New York City.

<p>While two architectures (alpha and hppa) were dropped, two
architectures of the 
new <url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/"
name="FreeBSD port"> (kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64) were made
available as <em>technology preview</em>, including the kernel and userland
tools as well as common server software (though not advanced desktop features
yet).  This was the first time a Linux distribution has been extended to also
allow use of a non-Linux kernel. 

<!-- TODO: Review:
"startpar was available as an option in Lenny, and the move to dash as system
shell deserves some of the credit for faster boot times"  
-->
<p>The new release introduced a dependency based boot sequence, which
allowed for parallel init script processing, speeding system startup.

<p>Debian 7.0 <em>Wheezy</em> (May 2013): named for the rubber toy 
penguin with a red bow tie.

<p>Debian 8.0 <em>Jessie</em> (no date defined for release yet): named for the cow girl doll who first 
appeared in Toy Story 2.


</chapt>

<chapt id="detailed">A Detailed History

<sect>The 0.x Releases

<p>
Debian was begun in August 1993 by Ian Murdock, then an undergraduate
at Purdue University.  Debian was sponsored by the GNU Project of <url
id="http://www.fsf.org/" name="The Free Software Foundation">, the
organization started by Richard Stallman and associated with the
General Public License (GPL), for one year -- from November 1994 to
November 1995.

<p>
Debian 0.01 through Debian 0.90 were released between August and December
of 1993.  Ian Murdock writes:

<p>
"Debian 0.91 was released in January 1994.  It had a primitive package
system that allowed users to manipulate packages but that did little
else (it certainly didn't have dependencies or anything like that).
By this time, there were a few dozen people working on Debian, though
I was still mostly putting together the releases myself.  0.91 was
the last release done in this way.

<p>
Most of 1994 was spent organizing the Debian Project so that others
could more effectively contribute, as well as working on
<prgn>dpkg</prgn> (Ian Jackson was largely responsible for this).
There were no releases to the public in 1994 that I can remember,
though there were several internal releases as we worked to get the
process right.

<p>
Debian 0.93 Release 5 happened in March 1995 and was the first
"modern" release of Debian: there were many more developers by then
(though I can't remember exactly how many), each maintaining their own
packages, and <prgn>dpkg</prgn> was being used to install and maintain
all these packages after a base system was installed.

<p>
"Debian 0.93 Release 6 happened in November 1995 and was the last a.out
release.  There were about sixty developers maintaining packages in
0.93R6.  If I remember correctly, <prgn>dselect</prgn> first appeared in 0.93R6."


<p>
Ian Murdock also notes that Debian 0.93R6 "... has always been my
favorite release of Debian", although he admits to the possibility of
some personal bias, as he stopped actively working on the project in
March 1996 during the pre-production of Debian 1.0, which was actually
released as Debian 1.1 to avoid confusion after a CDROM manufacturer
mistakenly labelled an unreleased version as Debian 1.0.  That
incident led to the concept of "official" CDROM images, as a way for
the project to help vendors avoid this kind of mistake.

<p>
During August 1995 (between Debian 0.93 Release 5 and Debian 0.93
Release 6), Hartmut Koptein started the first port for Debian, for the
Motorola m68k family.  He reports that "Many, many packages were
i386-centric (little endian, -m486, -O6 and all for libc4) and it was
a hard time to get a starting base of packages on my machine (an Atari
Medusa 68040, 32 MHz).  After three months (in November 1995), I
uploaded 200 packages from 250 available packages, all for libc5!"
Later he started another port together with Vincent Renardias and
Martin Schulze, for the PowerPC family.

<p>
Since this time,  the Debian Project has grown to include several
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/" name="ports"> to other architectures,
a port to a new (non-Linux) kernel, the GNU Hurd microkernel, and 
at least one flavor of BSD kernel.

<p>
An early member of the project, Bill Mitchell, remembers the Linux
kernel

<p>
"... being between 0.99r8 and 0.99r15 when we got started.  For a long
time, I could build the kernel in less than 30 minutes on a 20 Mhz
386-based machine, and could also do a Debian install in that same
amount of time in under 10Mb of disk space.

<p>
" ... I recall the initial group as including Ian Murdock, myself,
Ian Jackson, another Ian who's surname I don't recall, Dan Quinlan, and some
other people who's names I don't recall. Matt Welsh was either part of the
initial group or joined pretty early on (he has since left the project).
Someone set up a mailing list, and we were off and running. 

<p>
As I recall, we didn't start off with a plan, and we didn't start off by
putting together a plan in any highly organized fashion. Right from the
start, I do recall, we started off collecting up sources for a pretty random 
collection of packages. Over time, we came to focus on a collection of items
which would be required to put together the core of a distribution:  
the kernel, a shell, update, getty, various other programs and support
files needed to init the system, and a set of core utilities." 

<sect1>The Early Debian Packaging System 

<p>
At the very early stages of the Project, members considered distributing
source-only packages. Each package would consist of the upstream source
code and a Debianized patch file, and users would untar the sources, apply
the patches, and compile binaries themselves. They soon realized, however,
that some sort of binary distribution scheme would be needed. The earliest
packaging tool, written by Ian Murdock and called <prgn>dpkg</prgn>,
created a package in a Debian-specific binary format, and could be used
later to unpack and install the files in the package. 

<p>
Ian Jackson soon took over the development of the packaging tool, renaming
the tool itself <prgn>dpkg-deb</prgn> and writing a front-end program he named 
<prgn>dpkg</prgn> to facilitate the use of <prgn>dpkg-deb</prgn> and provide the
<em>Dependencies</em> and <em>Conflicts</em> of today's Debian system. The
packages produced by these tools had a header listing the version of the
tool used to create the package and an offset within the file to a
<prgn>tar</prgn>-produced archive, which was separated from the header by some
control information. 

<p>
At about this time some debate arose between members of the project --
some felt that the Debian-specific format created by
<prgn>dpkg-deb</prgn> should be dropped in favor of the format
produced by the <prgn>ar</prgn> program.  After several revised file
formats and correspondingly-revised packaging tools, the
<prgn>ar</prgn> format was adopted.  The key value of this change is
that it makes it possible for a Debian package to be un-packaged on
any Unix-like system without the need to run an untrusted executable.
In other words, only standard tools present on every Unix system like
'ar' and 'tar' are required to unpack a Debian binary package and
examine the contents.
</sect1>

<sect>The 1.x Releases

<p>
When Ian Murdock left Debian, he appointed Bruce Perens as the next
leader of the project.  Bruce first became interested in Debian while
he was attempting to create a Linux distribution CD to be called "Linux
for Hams", which would include all of the Linux software useful to ham
radio operators.  Finding that the Debian core system would require
much further work to support his project, Bruce ended up working
heavily on the base Linux system and related installation tools,
postponing his ham radio distribution, including organizing (with Ian
Murdock) the first set of Debian install scripts, eventually resulting
in the Debian Rescue Floppy that was a core component of the Debian
installation toolset for several releases.

<p>
Ian Murdock states: 

<p>
"Bruce was the natural choice to succeed me, as he had been maintaining the 
base system for nearly a year, and he had been picking up the slack as the
amount of time I could devote to Debian declined rapidly." 

<p>

He initiated several important facets of the project, including
coordinating the effort to produce the Debian Free Software Guidelines
and the Debian Social Contract, and initiating an Open Hardware Project.
During his time as Project Leader, Debian gained market share and a
reputation as a platform for serious, technically-capable Linux users.

<p>
Bruce Perens also spearheaded the effort to create <url
id="http://www.spi-inc.org/" name="Software in the Public Interest,
Inc.">.  Originally intended to provide the Debian Project with a
legal entity capable of accepting donations, its aims quickly expanded
to include supporting free software projects outside the Debian
Project.

<p>
The following Debian versions were released during this time: 

<p>
<list>
<item>1.1 <em>Buzz</em> released June 1996 (474 packages, 2.0 kernel, fully ELF, <prgn>dpkg</prgn>)
<item>1.2 <em>Rex</em> released December 1996 (848 packages, 120 developers)
<item>1.3 <em>Bo</em> released July 1997 (974 packages, 200 developers)
</list>

<p>
There were several interim "point" releases made to 1.3,  with the last being 
1.3.1R6.

<p>
Bruce Perens was replaced by
Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader at the beginning of January,
1998, after leading the project much of the way through the
preparation for the 2.0 release.
</sect>

<sect>The 2.x Releases

<p>
Ian Jackson became the Leader of the Debian Project at the beginning
of 1998, and was shortly thereafter added to the board of Software in
the Public Interest in the capacity of Vice President.  After the
resignation of the Treasurer (Tim Sailer), President (Bruce Perens),
and Secretary (Ian Murdock), he became President of the Board and
three new members were chosen: Martin Schulze (Vice President), Dale
Scheetz (Secretary), and Nils Lohner (Treasurer).

<p>
Debian 2.0 (<em>Hamm</em>) was released July 1998 for the Intel i386
and Motorola 68000 series architectures.  This release marked the move
to a new version of the system C libraries (glibc2 or for historical
reasons libc6).  At the time of release, there were 1500+ packages
maintained by more than 400 Debian developers.

<p>
Wichert Akkerman succeeded Ian Jackson as Debian Project Leader in January
of 1999.  <url id="http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/" name="Debian 2.1">
was <url id="http://www.debian.org/News/1999/19990309" name="released"> on 
09 March, 1999, after being delayed by a week when a few last-minute 
issues arose.

<p>
Debian 2.1 (<em>Slink</em>) featured official support for two new architectures:  
<url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/alpha/" name="Alpha">
and <url id="http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/" name="Sparc">.  The
X-Windows packages included with Debian 2.1 were greatly reorganized
from previous releases, and 2.1 included <prgn>apt</prgn>, the
next-generation Debian package manager interface.  Also, this release
of Debian was the first to require 2 CD-ROMs for the "Official Debian
CD set"; the distribution included about 2250 packages.

<p>
On 21 April 1999, <url id="http://www.corel.com/" name="Corel
Corporation"> and the
<url id="http://www.kde.org/" name="K Desktop Project">
effectively formed an alliance with Debian when Corel announced its
intentions to release a Linux distribution based on Debian and the
desktop environment produced by the KDE group.  During the following
spring and summer months, another Debian-based distribution,
Storm Linux, appeared, and the Debian Project chose a new <url
id="http://www.debian.org/logos/" name="logo">, featuring both an
Official version for use on Debian-sanctioned materials such as
CD-ROMs and official Project websites, and an Unofficial logo for use
on material mentioning or derived from Debian.

<p>
A new, unique, Debian port also began at this time, for the <url
id="http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/" name="Hurd"> port.  This is the
first port to use a non-Linux kernel, instead using the <url
id="http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html" name="GNU Hurd">, a
version of the GNU Mach microkernel.

<!-- (jfs) talk about Progeny? and other Debian-derived distributions
like Libranet, Stormix... ?-->

<p>
Debian 2.2 (<em>Potato</em>) was released August 15th, 2000 for the
Intel i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC and ARM
architectures.  This was the first release including PowerPC and ARM
ports.  At the time of release, there were 3900+ binary and 2600+
source packages maintained by more than 450 Debian developers.

<p>An interesting fact about Debian 2.2 is that it showed how 
an free software effort could lead to a modern operating system despite
all the issues around it. This was studied<footnote><p>The 
<url id="http://libresoft.es/debian-counting/potato/index.php?menu=Statistics" name="raw statitics data"> for Potato are also available at <url id="http://libresoft.es/debian-counting/" name="Debian counting site">, as well
as papers analysing later releases.</p></footnote>
thoroughly by a group of interested people in
an article called <url
id="http://pascal.case.unibz.it/retrieve/3246/counting-potatoes.html"
name="Counting potatoes"> quoting from this article:
 
<p><em> "[...] we use David A. Wheeler's sloccount system to determine
the number of physical source lines of code (SLOC) of Debian 2.2 (aka
potato). We show that Debian 2.2 includes more than 55,000,000
physical SLOC (almost twice than Red Hat 7.1, released about 8 months
later), showing that the Debian development model (based on the work
of a large group of voluntary developers spread around the world) is
at least as capable as other development methods [...] It is also
shown that if Debian had been developed using traditional proprietary
methods, the COCOMO model estimates that its cost would be close to
$1.9 billion USD to develop Debian 2.2. In addition, we offer both an
analysis of the programming languages used in the distribution (C
amounts for about 70%, C++ for about 10%, LISP and Shell are around
5%, with many others to follow), and the largest packages (Mozilla,
the Linux kernel, PM3, XFree86, etc.)"</em>


</sect>

<sect>The 3.x Releases
<p>Before woody could even begin to be prepared for release, a change to
the archive system on ftp-master had to be made. Package pools, which
enabled special purpose distributions, such as the new "Testing"
distribution used for the first time to get woody ready for release,
were <url
id="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0012/msg00004.html"
name="activated on ftp-master"> in mid December 2000. A package pool
is just a collection of different versions of a given package, from
which multiple distributions (currently experimental, unstable,
testing, and stable) can draw packages, which are then included in
that distribution's Packages file.

<p>At the same time a new distribution
<em>testing</em> was introduced.  Mainly, packages from unstable that
are said to be stable moved to testing (after a period of a few weeks). 
This was introduced in order to reduce freeze time and give the project
the ability to prepare a new release at any time.  

<p>In that period, some of the companies that were shipping modified
versions of Debian closed down. Corel sold
its Linux division in the first quarter of 2001, 
Stormix declared bankruptcy on January 17th 2001, and Progeny
ceased development of its distribution on October 1st, 2001.


<p>The freeze for the next release started on July 1st 2001. However, 
it took the project a little more than a year to get to the next 
release, due to <url
id="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0104/msg00004.html"
name="problems in boot-floppies">,
because of the introduction of cryptographic software in the main archive
and due to the changes in the underlying architecture 
(the incoming archive and the security architecture).  In that time, however,
the stable release (Debian 2.2) was revised up to seven times, and two
Project Leaders were elected: Ben Collins (in 2001) and Bdale Garbee.
Also, work in many areas of Debian besides packaging kept growing,
including internationalization, Debian's web site (over a thousand
webpages) was translated into over 20 different languages, and installation
for the next release was ready in 23 languages. Two internal projects:
Debian Junior (for children) and Debian Med (for medical practice
and research) started during the woody release time frame 
providing the project with different focuses to make Debian 
suitable for those tasks.

<p>The work around Debian didn't stop the developers from organising
an annual meeting called <url id="http://www.debconf.org" name="Debconf">. The first meeting 
was held from the 2nd to the 5th of July together with the 
Libre Software Meeting (LSM) at Bordeaux (France) gathered around
forty Debian developers. The second conference took place in
Toronto (Canada) July 5th 2002 with over eighty participants.

<p>Debian 3.0 (<em>woody</em>) was released July 19th, 2002 for the
Intel i386, Motorola 68000 series, alpha, SUN Sparc, PowerPC, ARM, 
HP PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC) and IBM s/390 architectures.  
This is the first release including HP PA-RISC, IA-64, MIPS, MIPS (DEC) 
and IBM s/390 ports.  At the time of release, there were around 8500
binary packages maintained by over nine hundred Debian developers,
becoming the first release to be available on DVD media as well
as CD-ROMs.

<!-- (jfs) # of source packages? : 
~$ grep ^Source  /var/lib/dpkg/available | sort -u | wc -l
1442

????
-->

<p>Before the next release the <em>Debconf</em> annual meeting
continued with the fourth conference taking place in Oslo from July
18th to July 20th 2003 with over one hundred and twenty participants,
with a <em>Debcamp</em> preceding it, from July 12th to July 17th. The
fifth conference took place from May 26th to June 2nd 2004 in Porto
Alegre, Brazil with over one hundred and sixty participants from
twenty six different countries.

<p>Debian 3.1 (<em>sarge</em>) was released June 6th, 2005 for the
same architectures than <em>woody</em>, although an unofficial AMD64
port was released at the same time using the project hosting
infrastructure provided for the distribution and available at <url
id="http://alioth.debian.org">. There were around 15,000 binary
packages maintained by more than one thousand and five hundred Debian
developers.

<p>There were many major changes in the <em>sarge</em> release, mostly
due to the large time it took to freeze and release the
distribution. Not only did this release update over 73% of the
software shipped in the previous version, but it also included much
more software than previous releases almost doubling in size with
9,000 new packages including the OpenOffice suite, the Firefox web
browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.

<p>This release shipped with the 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernel series,
XFree86 4.3, GNOME 2.8 and KDE 3.3 and with a brand new
installer. This new installer replaced the aging boot-floopies
installer with a modular design with provided for more advanced
installations (with RAID, XFS and LVM support) including hardware
detections and making installations easier for novice users of all the
architectures. It also switched to <prgn>aptitude</prgn> as the selected tool for
package management. But the installation system also boasted full
internationalization support as the software was translated into
almost forty languages. The supporting documentation: installation
manual and release notes, were made available with the release in ten
and fifteen different languages respectively.

<p>This release included the efforts of the Debian-Edu/Skolelinux,
Debian-Med and Debian-Accessibility sub-projects which boosted the
number of educational packages and those with a medical affiliation as
well as packages designed especially for people with disabilities.

<!-- Notes:
Mention more information on subprojects, i.e. Skolelinux helped develop d-i ?
Mention Debian usage all over the world
Mention Ubuntu (Canonical)?
-->

<p>The sixth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Espoo, Finland, from
July 10th to July 17th, 2005 with over three hundred participants.
<url id="http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf5/" name="Videos"> from this
conference are available online.

<p>The seventh <em>Debconf</em> was held in Oaxtepec, Mexico, from May 14th to
May 22nd, 2006 with around <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/aigars/dc6_group_photo_big" name="two hundred"> participants.  <url
id="http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/"
name="Videos"> and <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/debconf6" name="pictures"> from this conference are available online.
<!-- TODO: Use final report from DC7 to add more information about
   this event, see http://media.debconf.org/dc7/report/ -->

<!-- TODO: Might be worth mentioning the different Real Life group meetings 
  that started at Extremadura and continued after that -->

<!--(jfs) NOTE: Xandros is up and running http://www.xandros.com/ and
so is Lindows http://www.lindows.com/-->

</sect>

<sect>The 4.x Releases

<!-- TODO: Add more info about etch and Debian related events here -->

<p>Debian 4.0 (<em>etch</em>) was <url
id="http://www.debian.org/News/2007/20070408" name="released"> April 8th, 2007
for the same number of architectures as in <em>sarge</em>.  This included the
AMD64 port but dropped support for m68k. The m68k port was, however, still
available in the <em>unstable</em> distribution. There were around 18,200
binary packages maintained by more than one thousand and thirty Debian
developers.

<!-- TODO (jfs) Review if this content is still valid and can be integrated here
<p>
For <em>etch</em>, Debian is working towards resolving <url
id="http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.html"
name="issues"> with the FSF's Free Documentation License (FDL), make
amd64 an official architecture, introducing a dependency-based init
system, and introducing SElinux support. There are many other things
that the developers will work for <em>etch</em> on but which are not
considered release, please read the <url
id="http://wiki.debian.net/?EtchTODOList" name="Etch TODO list">.

<p>
Other goals for etch already implemented include: introduce gpg
authentication for apt repositories (done june 2005), integrating Xorg
in Debian to replace Xfree86 (finished july 2005) and integrating tags
into the package information (done july 2005).

-->


</sect>

<sect>The 5.x Releases

<!-- TODO: Add more info about lenny and other Debian events here -->

<p>Debian 5.0 (<em>lenny</em>) was <url
id="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090214" name="released"> February 14th,
2009 for one more architecture than its predecessor, <em>etch</em>. This
included the port for newer ARM processors. As with the previous release,
support for the m68k architecture was still available in <em>unstable</em>.
There were around 23,000 binary packages (built from over 12,000 source
packages) maintained by more than one thousand and ten Debian
developers.
<!-- NOTE: Developer count based on leader's vote in March -->

<!-- More information:

  Release goals  (See http://release.debian.org/lenny/goals.txt and
    http://wiki.debian.org/LennyReleaseGoals)
     - debmake (old packaging tool) removed
     - i18n improvements: all packages using debconf  and package descriptions
        available in apt
     - standard Python is 2.5

  Reuse Whats new from Release Notes:
  http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html
-->

<p>The eighth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, from
June 17th to 23th, 2007 with over four hundred participants.
<url id="http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2007/debconf7/" name="Videos"> and <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/debconf7" name="pictures"> from this
conference are available online.
<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://media.debconf.org/dc7/report/debconf7-report-small.pdf
and
https://debconf7.debconf.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf7
-->

<p>The ninth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Mar de Plata, Argentina, from
August 10th to 16th, 2008 with over <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/v/debconf8/karora/OfficialPhoto.jpg.html" name="two hundred"> participants.
<url id="http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2008/debconf8/" name="Videos"> and <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/v/debconf8/" name="pictures">
from this
conference are available online.
<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://media.debconf.org/dc8/report/
and
http://debconf8.debconf.org/
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Category:DebConf8
-->

<p>The tenth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Caceres, Spain, from
July 23th to 30th, 2009 with over <url id="http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf9/Pictures/GroupPhoto" name="two hundred"> participants.
<url id="http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2009/debconf9/" name="Videos">  and <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/v/debconf9/" name="pictures">
from this
conference are available online.
<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://media.debconf.org/dc9/report/
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Category:DebConf9
http://debconf9.debconf.org/
-->

<p>The eleventh <em>Debconf</em> was held in New York City, United States of
America, from August 1st to 7th, 2010 with Debcamp preceeding it from July 25th
to 31st.  Over <url id="http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10/GroupPhoto"
name="200 people"> including Debian developers, maintainers, users 
gathered at the Columbia Campus to participate in the conference.
<url id="http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2010/debconf10/"
name="Videos"> and <url id="https://gallery.debconf.org/v/debconf10/"
name="pictures"> from this conference are available online.
<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://debconf10.debconf.org/
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf10
-->

<sect>The 6.x Releases
<p>Debian 6.0 (<em>squeeze</em>) was released February 6th, 2011.

<p>
After the project decided, the 29th of July 2009, to <url
id="http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729" name="adopt time-based releases">
so that new releases would be published the first half of every even year.
Squeeze was the a one-time exception to the two-year policy in order to get
into the new time schedule. 

<p>
This policy was adopted in order to provide better predictability of releases
for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do
better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle provided more time for
disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having
predictable freezes was expected also to reduce overall freeze time.

<p>
However, even though the freeze was expected in December 2009, the <url
id="http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100806" name="frozen announcement"> came
in August 2010, coinciding with the celebration of the 10th annual
Debconf meeting in New York.

<p>
New features include:

<list>
<item> Linux Kernel 2.6.32, now completely free and without problematic
 firmware files.
<item> libc: eglibc 2.11
<item> GNOME 2.30.0 with some pieces of 2.32
<item> KDE 4.4.5
<item> X.org 7.5
<item> Xfce 4.6
<item> OpenOffice.org 3.2.1
<item> Apache 2.2.16
<item> PHP 5.3.3
<item> MySQL 5.1.49
<item> PostgreSQL 8.4.6
<item> Samba 3.5.6
<item> GCC 4.4
<item> Perl 5.10
<item> Python 2.6 and 3.1
<item> 10,000 new packages, for more than 29,000 binary packages built from
 nearly 15,000 source packages.
<item> DKMS, a framework to generate Linux kernel modules whose sources do not
 reside in the Linux kernel source tree.
<item> Dependency-based ordering of init scripts using insserv, allowing
 parallel execution to shorten the time needed to boot the system.
<item>Two new ports, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64.
</list>

<p>
Many packages started using a new source package format based on quilt. This
<url id="http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/DebSrc3.0" name="new format">, called
"3.0 (quilt)" for non-native packages, separates Debian patches from the
distributed source code. A new format, "3.0 (native)", was also introduced for
native packages. New features in these formats include support for multiple
upstream tarballs, support for bzip2 and lzma compressed tarballs and the
inclusion of binary files.

<!-- TODO
   Content to consider including here:

   - http://wiki.debian.org/DebianSqueeze (development and milestones)
   - http://wiki.debian.org/NewInSqueeze
   - http://wiki.debian.org/UserVisibleChangesInSqueeze

    Release Goals: http://release.debian.org/squeeze/goals.txt
    and http://wiki.debian.org/SqueezeReleaseGoals

-->

<p>The twelfth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska, 
Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 24 to 30 July 2011, with Debcamp preceeding it 
from 17 to 23 July.
<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://debconf11.debconf.org/
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11
-->

<p>The thirteenth <em>Debconf</em> was held in Managua, Nicaragua, from 8 to
14 July 2012, with Debcamp preceeding it from 1 to 6 July, and a Debian Day
on 7 July.

<!-- TODO: Add more information based on
http://debconf12.debconf.org/
http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf12
-->


<sect>The 7.x Releases
<p>Debian 7.0 (<em>wheezy</em>) was released May 4th, 2013. 
This new version of Debian included various interesting features such as
<url id="http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110726b" name="multiarch support">, 
several <url id="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120425" name="specific tools to
deploy private clouds">, an improved installer, and a complete set of 
multimedia codecs and front-ends which removed the need for third-party repositories.


<p>
During the Debian Conference DebConf11, in july 2011, the "multiarch support"
was introduced. This feature was a release goal for this release.
Multiarch is a radical rethinking of the filesystem hierarchy with respect to
library and header paths, to make programs and libraries of different hardware
architectures easily installable in parallel on the very same system.  This allows
user to install packages from 
multiple architectures on the same machine. This is useful in various ways,
but the most common is installing both 64 and 32-bit software on the same
machine and having dependencies correctly resolved automatically. This feature
is described extensively in the <url
id="http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO" name="Multiarch manual">.

<p>
The installation process was greatly improved. The system could be
installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who
do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of
translators, the installation system was available in 73 languages, and more
than a dozen of them were available for speech synthesis too.  
In addition, for the first time, Debian supported installation and booting using
UEFI for new 64-bit PCs, although there was no support for <em>Secure Boot</em> yet.

<!-- TODO:

  Talk about:

   - Rebuild with hardening features
   - Talk about AppArmor 
   - Improved multimedia support
   - Cloud and distributed computing

  Extract useful information from:
     - http://wiki.debian.org/NewInWheezy
     - http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWheezy

-->


<p>
Other new features and updated software packages included:

<list>
<item> Linux Kernel 3.2
<item> kFreeBSD kernel 8.3 and 9.0
<item> libc: eglibc 2.13
<item> the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment
<item> KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.8.4
<item> the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment
<item> X.org 7.7
<item> LibreOffice 3.5.4 (replacing OpenOffice)
<item> Xen Hypervisor 4.1.4 
<item> Apache 2.2.22
<item> Tomcat 6.0.35 and 7.0.28 
<item> PHP 5.4
<item> MySQL 5.5.30
<item> PostgreSQL 9.1
<item> Samba 3.6.6
<item> GCC 4.7 on PCs (4.6 elsewhere)
<item> Perl 5.14
<item> Python 2.7

<item> 12,800 new packages, for more than 37,400 binary packages built from
nearly 17,500 source packages.
</list>

<p>
For more information on the new features introduced in this release, see
the <em>What's new in Debian 7.0</em> chapter of <em>Wheezy</em>
<url id="http://www.debian.org/releases/wheezy/releasenotes" name="Release Notes">.

<!--  TODO - enable after Debconf:
<p>The fourteenth <em>DebConf</em> was held in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, from 11 to
18 August 2013, with Debcamp preceeding it from xxx to yyy August, and a Debian Day
on xxxx August.
-->

<!-- TODO: 
Add more information based on:
        http://debconf13.debconf.org/
        http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13
-->


<sect>Important Events

<sect1>July 2000: Joel Klecker died

<p>
On July 11th, 2000, Joel Klecker, who was also known as Espy, passed
away at 21 years of age.  No one who saw 'Espy' in #mklinux, the
Debian lists or channels knew that behind this nickname was a young
man suffering from a form of <url
id="http://mdausa.org/disease/dmd.html" name="Duchenne muscular
dystrophy">.  Most people only knew him as 'the Debian glibc and
powerpc guy' and had no idea of the hardships Joel fought.  Though
physically impaired, he shared his great mind with others.

<p>
Joel Klecker (also known as Espy) will be missed.
</sect1>

<sect1>October 2000: Implementation of Package Pools

<p>
James Troup <url
id="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0010/msg00007.html"
name="reported"> that he has been working on re-implementing the
archive maintenance tools and switching to package pools.  From this
date, files are stored in a directory named after the corresponding
source package inside of the <file>pools</file> directory.  The distribution
directories will only contain Packages files that contain references
to the pool.  This simplifies overlapping distributions such as
testing and unstable.  The archive is also database-driven using
PostgreSQL which also speeds up lookups.
<p>
This concept of managing Debian's archives sort of like a package cache
was first introduced by Bdale Garbee in 
<url id="http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/05/msg01607.html" 
name="this email"> to the debian-devel list in May of 1998.

</sect1>

<sect1>March 2001: Christopher Rutter died

<p>
On March 1st, 2001, Christopher Matthew Rutter (also known as cmr) was
killed after he was struck by a car at the age of 19.  Christopher was
a young and well known member of the Debian project helping the ARM
port. The buildd.debian.org site is dedicated to his memory.

<p>
Chris Rutter will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>March 2001: Fabrizio Polacco died

<p>
On March 28th, 2001, Fabrizio Polacco passed away after a long
illness.  The Debian Project honors his good work and strong
dedication to Debian and Free Software.  The contributions of Fabrizio
will not be forgotten, and other developers will step forward to
continue his work.

<p>
Fabrizio Polacco will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>July 2002: Martin Butterweck died

<p>
On July 21st, 2002, Martin Butterweck (also known as blendi) died
after battling leukemia.  Martin was a young member of the Debian
project who recently joined the project.

<p>
Martin Butterweck will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>November 2002: Fire burnt Debian server

<p>
Around 08:00 CET on November 20th, 2002, the University of Twente
Network Operations Center (NOC) caught fire.  The building burnt
to the ground.  The fire department gave up hope on
protecting the server area.  Among other things the NOC hosted
satie.debian.org which contained both the security and non-US archive
as well as the new-maintainer (nm) and quality assurance (qa)
databases.  Debian rebuilt these services on the host klecker, which
was recently moved from the U.S.A. to the Netherlands.

</sect1>

<sect1>May 2004: Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier died

<p>
On May 9th Manuel Estrada Sainz (ranty) and Andrés
García Solier (ErConde) were killed in a tragic car accident while
returning from the Free Software conference held at Valencia, Spain.

<p>
Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>July 2005: Jens Schmalzing died

<p>
On July 30th Jens Schmalzing (jensen) died in a tragic accident at his
workplace in Munich, Germany.
He was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, as
supporter of the PowerPC port, as a member of the kernel team, and was
instrumental in taking the PowerPC kernel package to version 2.6.  He
also maintained the Mac-on-Linux emulator and its kernel modules,
helped with the installer and with local Munich activities.  

<p>
Jens Schmalzing will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>December 2008: Thiemo Seufer died

<p>
On December 26th Thiemo Seufer (ths) died in a car accident. 
He was the lead maintainer of the MIPS and MIPSEL port and he had also
contributed at length in the debian-installer long before 
<url id="http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2004/06/msg00021.html" name="he
became a Debian developer"> in 2004. As a member of the QEMU team he wrote
most of the MIPS emulation layer.

<p>
Thiemo Seufer will be missed.

</sect1>

<sect1>August 2010: Frans Pop died

<p> Frans Pop (fjp) died on August 20th. Frans was involved in Debian as a
maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the
most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian listmaster,
editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as
well as a Dutch translator.

<p>
Frans Pop will be missed.

</sect>

<sect>What's Next?

<p>
The Debian Project continues to work on the <em>unstable</em>
distribution (codenamed <em>sid</em>, after the evil and "unstable"
kid next door from the <em>Toy Story 1</em> who should never be let out
into the world). Sid is the permanent name for the unstable
distribution and is always 'Still In Development'.  Most new or
updated packages are uploaded into this distribution.

<p>
The <em>testing</em> release is intended to become the next stable
release and is currently codenamed <em>jessie</em>.

</sect>
</chapt>

<appendix id="manifesto">The Debian Manifesto

<p>
Written by  Ian A. Murdock, Revised 01/06/94

<sect>What is Debian Linux?

<p>
Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution.  Rather than
being developed by one isolated individual or group, as other
distributions of Linux have been developed in the past, Debian is being
developed openly in the spirit of Linux and GNU.  The primary purpose
of the Debian project is to finally create a distribution that lives up
to the Linux name.  Debian is being carefully and conscientiously put
together and will be maintained and supported with similar care.

<p>
It is also an attempt to create a non-commercial distribution that will
be able to effectively compete in the commercial market.  It will
eventually be distributed by The Free Software Foundation on CD-ROM,
and The Debian Linux Association will offer the distribution on floppy
disk and tape along with printed manuals, technical support and other
end-user essentials.  All of the above will be available at little more
than cost, and the excess will be put toward further development of
free software for all users.  Such distribution is essential to the
success of the Linux operating system in the commercial market, and it
must be done by organizations in a position to successfully advance and
advocate free software without the pressure of profits or returns.
</sect>

<sect>Why is Debian being constructed?

<p>
Distributions are essential to the future of Linux.  Essentially, they
eliminate the need for the user to locate, download, compile, install
and integrate a fairly large number of essential tools to assemble a
working Linux system.  Instead, the burden of system construction is
placed on the distribution creator, whose work can be shared with
thousands of other users.  Almost all users of Linux will get their
first taste of it through a distribution, and most users will continue
to use a distribution for the sake of convenience even after they are
familiar with the operating system.  Thus, distributions play a very
important role indeed.

<p>
Despite their obvious importance, distributions have attracted little
attention from developers.  There is a simple reason for this: they are
neither easy nor glamorous to construct and require a great deal of
ongoing effort from the creator to keep the distribution bug-free and
up-to-date.  It is one thing to put together a system from scratch; it
is quite another to ensure that the system is easy for others to
install, is installable and usable under a wide variety of hardware
configurations, contains software that others will find useful, and is
updated when the components themselves are improved.

<p>
Many distributions have started out as fairly good systems, but as time
passes attention to maintaining the distribution becomes a secondary
concern.  A case-in-point is the Softlanding Linux System (better known
as SLS).  It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained
Linux distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly
the most popular.  It is, without question, the distribution that
attracts the most attention from the many commercial "distributors" of
Linux that have surfaced to capitalize on the growing popularity of the
operating system.

<p>
This is a bad combination indeed, as most people who obtain Linux from
these "distributors" receive a bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux
distribution.  As if this wasn't bad enough, these "distributors" have
a disturbing tendency to misleadingly advertise non-functional or
extremely unstable "features" of their product.  Combine this with the
fact that the buyers will, of course, expect the product to live up to
its advertisement and the fact that many may believe it to be a
commercial operating system (there is also a tendency not to mention
that Linux is free nor that it is distributed under the GNU General
Public License).  To top it all off, these "distributors" are actually
making enough money from their effort to justify buying larger
advertisements in more magazines; it is the classic example of
unacceptable behavior being rewarded by those who simply do not know
any better.  Clearly something needs to be done to remedy the
situation.
</sect>

<sect>How will Debian attempt to put an end to these problems?

<p>
The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of the
highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user community.
By involving others with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds,
Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion.  Its components
are of high quality because those with expertise in a certain area are
given the opportunity to construct or maintain the individual
components of Debian involving that area.  Involving others also
ensures that valuable suggestions for improvement can be incorporated
into the distribution during its development; thus, a distribution is
created based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs
and wants of the constructor.  It is very difficult for one individual
or small group to anticipate these needs and wants in advance without
direct input from others.

<p>
Debian Linux will also be distributed on physical media by the Free
Software Foundation and the Debian Linux Association.  This provides
Debian to users without access to the Internet or FTP and additionally
makes products and services such as printed manuals and technical
support available to all users of the system.  In this way, Debian may
be used by many more individuals and organizations than is otherwise
possible, the focus will be on providing a first-class product and not
on profits or returns, and the margin from the products and services
provided may be used to improve the software itself for all users
whether they paid to obtain it or not.

<p>
The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in the
future of Debian.  By the simple fact that they will be distributing
it, a message is sent to the world that Linux is not a commercial
product and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that
Linux will never be able to compete commercially.  For those of you who
disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU Emacs and
GCC, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an
impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact.

<p>
The time has come to concentrate on the future of Linux rather than on
the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire
Linux community and its future.  The development and distribution of
Debian may not be the answer to the problems that I have outlined in
the Manifesto, but I hope that it will at least attract enough
attention to these problems to allow them to be solved.
</sect>

</appendix>

</book>

</debiandoc>