Debian celebrates its 10th Birthday

Zitat

On August 16th, the Debian Project will celebrate its 10th birthday with several parties around the globe. The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a "distribution" of GNU/Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. The creation of Debian was sponsored by the FSF's GNU project for one year.

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. 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.

The most prominent guidelines are the Debian Free Software Guidelines which are part of the Social Contract and which direct Debian's interpretation of Free Software and upon which the Debian distribution is based. They were later adopted as the Open Source Definition.

More than 1,100 people are registered as developers in the Debian project and an additional two hundred have applied to join the project's ranks. Organisationally, the Debian Project has a project leader, who is supported by a secretary and several delegates. The distribution is tripartite these days, consisting of the stable release (current codename "woody"), the testing distribution (current codename "sarge") which will become the next stable release, and the unstable distribution (codename "sid") with more than 12,000 binary packages where development efforts are primarily focused.

The Debian Project is celebrating its birthday at various places around the globe, since a single large party doesn't seem appropriate for a project which is spread worldwide. Some parties are simply a social get-together at a restaurant, while others are organised for larger audience.