I posted this on debian-devel today. I am also posting it here, because I believe it is important to more than just Debian developers.

Good afternoon,

This message comes on the heels of Sam Hartman’s wonderful plea for compassion [1] and the sad news of Joey Hess’s resignation from Debian [2].

I no longer frequently post to this list, but when you’ve been a Debian developer for 18 years, and still care deeply about the community and the project, perhaps you have a bit of perspective to share.

Let me start with this:

Debian is not a Free Software project.

Debian is a making-the-world-better project, a caring for people project, a freedom-spreading project. Free Software is our tool.

As many of you, hopefully all of you, I joined Debian because I enjoyed working on this project. We all did, didn’t we? We joined Debian because it was fun, because we were passionate about it, because we wanted to make the world a better place and have fun doing it.

In short, Debian is life-giving, both to its developers and its users.

As volunteers, it is healthy to step back every so often, and ask ourselves two questions: 1) Is this activity still life-giving for me? 2) Is it life-giving for others?

I have my opinions about init. Strong ones, in fact. [3] They’re not terribly relevant to this post. Because I can see that they are not really all that relevant.

14 years ago, I proposed what was, until now anyhow, one of the most controversial GRs in Debian history. It didn’t go the way I hoped. I cared about it deeply then, and still care about the principles.

I had two choices: I could be angry and let that process ruin my enjoyment of Debian. Or I could let it pass, and continue to have fun working on a project that I love. I am glad I chose the latter.

Remember, for today, one way or another, jessie will still boot.

18 years ago when I joined Debian, our major concerns were helping newbies figure out how to compile their kernels, finding manuals for monitors so we could set the X modelines properly, finding some sort of Free web browser, finding some acceptable Office-type software.

Wow. We WON, didn’t we? Not just Debian, but everyone. Freedom won.

I promise you – 18 years from now, it will not matter what init Debian chose in 2014. It will probably barely matter in 3 years. This is not key to our goals of making the world a better place. Jessie will still boot. I say that even though my system runs out of memory every few days because systemd-logind has a mysterious bug [4]. It will be fixed. I say that even though I don’t know what init system it will use, or how much choice there will be. I say that because it is simply true. We are Debian. We will make it work, one way or another.

I don’t post much on this list anymore because my personal passion isn’t with posting on this list anymore. I make liberal use of my Delete Thread keybinding on -vote these days, because although I care about the GR, I don’t care about it enough to read all the messages about it. I have not yet decided if I will spend the time researching it in order to vote. Instead of debating the init GR, sometimes I sit on the sofa with my wife. Sometimes I go out and fly the remote-control airplane I’m learning to fly. Sometimes I repair my plane after a flight that was shorter than planned. Sometimes I play games with my boys, or help them with homework, or share my 8-year-old’s delight as a text file full of facts about the Titanic that he wrote in Emacs comes spitting out of the printer. Sometimes I write code or play with the latest Linux filesystems or build a new server for my basement.

All these things matter more to me than init. I have been using Debian at home for almost 20 years, at various workplaces for almost that long, and it is not going to stop being a part of my life any time soon. Perhaps I will have to learn how to administer a new init system. Well, so be it; I enjoy learning new things. Or perhaps I will have to learn to live with some desktop limitations with an old init system. Well, so be it; it won’t bother me much anyhow. Either way, I’m still going to be using what is, to me, the best operating system in the world, made by one of the world’s foremost Freedom projects.

My hope is that all of you may also have the sense of peace I do, that you may have your strong convictions, but may put them all in perspective. That we as a project realize that the enemy isn’t the lovers of the other init, but the people that would use law and technology to repress people all over the world. We are but one shining beacon on a hill, but the world will be worse off if our beacon winked out.

My plea is that we each may get angry at what matters, and let go of the smaller frustrations in life; that we may each find something more important than init/systemd to derive enjoyment and meaning from. [5] May you each find that airplane to soar freely in the skies, to lift your soul so that the joy of using Free Software to make the world a better place may still be here, regardless of what /sbin/init is.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/11/msg00002.html

[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00174.html

[3] A hint might be that in my more grumpy moments, I realize I haven’t ever quite figured out why the heck this dbus thing is on so many of my systems, or why I have to edit XML to configure it… ;-)

[4] #765870

[5] No disrespect meant to the init/systemd maintainers. Keep enjoying what you do, too!