Steve,

I have been a Debian user (as sysadmin for my employer) since 2001. I have only revealed myself to Debian developers once in 2002 when I got Woody to run on a '98-vintage IBM RS/6000:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2002/08/msg00638.html

As a professional Debian user I am seriously concerned that the social issues you consider central to your DPL platform are damaging the project:

- The DPL and Release Manager unilaterally make a decision (Dunc-Tank) which, perhaps unexpectedly for them at the time, deeply affects the project culture.

- A group of people (Dunc-Bank) who disagree with the DPL's and RM's unilateral actions begin actively working to delay release via aggressive bug reporting.

- The DPL, instead of acknowledging he has been wrong, and that his decision has damaged the fabric of the project, merrily notes that their aggressive bug reporting is improving the product quality. Full marks for political acumen (the ability to word-spin a sow's ear into a silk purse) but zero for doing the project any good - a bit like "real-life" politicians.

- The issue of non-free hex blobs in kernel device drivers, for which there appear to be solutions that both cover the needs of users who require these drivers for installation and the project's requirement that only free software be distributed in main, becomes the subject of a long debate which generates more heat than light, and results in a General Resolution the result of which, for better or worse, the kernel team sees fit to disregard and thereby render pointless.

These, and other, events makes me worried that the thousand-odd developers of the project have lost sight of the wood for the trees. There are some of us out there who can't continue running Sarge forever, and who need Etch for the features Woody doesn't have and no, running it off of testing isn't good enough, especially when drivers appear and disappear out of the kernel at arbitrary intervals. Some of us have bosses that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for hardware that does millions of dollars' worth of business, bosses who pay our salaries and trust our decision to use Debian instead of any other OS. Some of us had to fight those very bosses to get Debian installed, and have only succeeded because Debian provided the goods where other distributions failed. And some of us are in positions where it won't take more than one serious screwup to see Debian - and perhaps the sysadmin too - permanently uninstalled.

And no, the argument "so go ahead and contribute to the project rather than complain" doesn't cut it. Some of us are paid to be sysadmins, not coders, don't have the coding skills, and aren't interested in acquiring the standard of coding skills required to join Debian, thank you very much. I might need coding skills I don't have to join the project, which I don't wish to do, but I don't need more than common sense to form an opinion as to what's going on.

I very much look forward to your new platform statement, and your rebuttals of the other candidates' platforms - I hope they will be as balanced as they were last year. I sincerely hope that you, or some other candidate with priorities similar to yours, wins the election for DPL and puts the project back on track.

I fully appreciate the need for democratic debate, the importance of the Social Contract, the DFSG and all the other important components of Debian. My concern is that the mechanisms for reaching meaningful decisions by democratic means within the project have become dysfunctional, and this does indeed appear to be due to social issues.

Having broken cover for the second time in five years, I will now duck again back into the obscurity of lurkerdom and go back to trying to build a cluster on some IBM blades using Etch.