Debian Sid

Ok, I think this is my last one for the night since I'm getting late and I have a meeting in the morning. I've been using Debian Sid on three of my machines, my home PC, my laptop, and my campus machine. I love it because it has the latest packages and of course it's Debian. Sid is what Ubuntu takes and tests and polishes then publishes it 6-months later. By the way, I've been following Ubuntu for a while now to see if they can come up with a business model that actually makes money. It seems like they are having a hard-time. RedHat is essentially the only company that has successfully made money from Linux and it does that through enterprise licensing for security updates and support. Novell tried and Mandriva tried and they have all essentially failed. In my opinion, it's not looking good for Ubuntu for Shuttleworth seems to be a stubborn guy (good luck with that). Anyways back to Debian, it's been around since 1993 and it's been community powered the whole time, so in my opinion it has a future, a better than Ubuntu I think. Back to Sid, basically it works, it's not flawless but free software is never flawless and things crash. But the crashes have forced me to learn to use gdb and file bug reports which is extremely time consuming and worth it. Since I really appreciate when people report bugs for SocialVPN, I understand the value of bug reports. But at the same time, I have to do some triaging before I report my bug to make sure that I am not submitting something someone else submitted. That part is not fun either. I am amazed though by how many people from around the world are interested in support Debian although most of the are European, it does feel like a global effort and that's cool. There's no money involved, people just volunteer part time and make it happen. I think the current Project Leader for Debian is a PhD student just like myself, but I think he's been involved in free software since he was in high school. I've just learned about free software about 3 years ago, so I have a lot of catching up today maybe one day I will be a Debian developer and get to vote and stuff. GET SOMMMMMMMEEEEEE, BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM.

Update: forget to add that the most annoying part of Sid is that I have to update my packages like every saturday, but that's ok. I read a paper that says 1.5% of Debian Sid packages get updated each day and they have about 30,000 packages. That's a lot of updates, but if think about it that trillions of lines of codes means millions of bugs to fix, craaaaazzzzzyyyyyy.