Interview with Don Armstrong from Debian
SCALE interviewed Debian developer, Don Armstrong following SCALE. He was kind enough to answer question about his favorite Linux distribution as well as open source in general.
SCALE: Gareth J. Greenaway, SCALE Community Relations
Don: Don Armstrong, Debian
SCALE: Please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Don: My name is Don Armstrong; I’m currently a graduate student in the Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology program at UC Riverside, where I study lipid membranes and lupus using Debian (and other Free Software tools.)
SCALE: How did you get involved in Open Source software?
Don: I started using Free Software in 1997 or thereabouts (though I had been using some bits of the GNU toolkit and perl earlier). At first I started because I was doing more work programming and was tired of having to deal with problems that I had to work around instead of resolve completely. By around 1999 I was using Free Software almost exclusively, and have been almost continuously since then.
SCALE: What role do you play in the Debian Development Community?
Don: I’m a Debian Developer; that means that I have the ability to upload packages to the archive, to vote, log into developer-accessible project machines, and run for elected positions. Specifically, I maintain a few perl packages, some sendmail related packages.
SCALE: What, if any steps, have been done to speed up the release cycles for Debian?
Don: The most major thing I’ve been working on is trying to make sure that the information that maintainers need to be aware of the bugs that affect their packages are made available to them, and that people who are interested in bugs can get information regarding them. Other than that, I’ve been doing things that everyone else can do: filing patches for RC bugs, fixing my own RC bugs when they happen, and making NMUs for unfixed RC bugs. Anyone who wants to see Debian release faster can do the first of these three; DD’s will handle the last for you once that’s done.
SCALE: What are your thoughts on the commercialized Debian based distributions? Xandros? Linspire? What about Click N’ Run?
Don: I don’t really have much of an opinion on them. To the extent that they give back to Debian, they’re a positive force. Some of them also fill a user-support niche that Debian will probably never bother to actually fill for itself (especially as we don’t have employees and likely never will.) There are some problems with commercial distributions that are just inherent, such as vendor-lock-in, lack of support for unusual configurations for smaller customers, presence of non-free software, etc., but those are the issues that you find with any type of commercial distribution.
SCALE: What are your thoughts on Ubuntu? Has it been good or bad for Debian?
Don: When Ubuntu is at it’s best, it’s good for Debian. When it’s not, it’s presence is pretty much irrelevant for Debian. There’s always a problem with highly skilled developers being hired out by companies and then being able to spend less time on Debian, but I’d imagine that a large number of Canonical-hired developers can actually spend more time working on Debian than they could in the past, just because their day job benifits by making Debian better.
The most wide-ranging impact is the market visibility for average users: Debian has always been present in the racks of dinosaur pens, but few outside of those who used Debian on servers use it on the desktop. The final impact in terms of developer mindshare still remains to be seen, but I hope it’s a positive force.
SCALE: Where do you see Debian going in the future? Will support for certain architectures be dropped?
Don: The big things that I hope we’re able to do are better support for different hardware, a more agile release process, and still maintain our fanatical commitment to technical excellence and long-term production-level stability. As far as architectures being dropped, I think that the critical aspect there is just developer time and machine availability. Architectures which do not have machine availability and developer mindshare we’ll have no choice but to drop, but we’ll probably keep adding new architectures like hurd-i386, kFreeBSD-{i386,amd64}, armel, armeb et al. as fast as we have to drop other architectures.
SCALE: What do you like most & like least about open source software?
Don: The best thing that I like about Free Software is the ability to modify the software at any time; with that goes the ability to often directly contact the implementor of a particular portion of a program and communicate and get inside their mindset to see what they were invisioning when they wrote and designed their software. I’ve never been able to write a single e-mail and get the engineer or developer responsible for a non-FOSS work (hardware or software) to respond.
The thing that I dislike most about Free Software is more of a double edged sword; a lot of FOSS is about scratching one’s one itch. Because of that, our doucmentation (when it exists!) tends to be written from the perspective of a person who is intimately familiar with the actual code (and usually unerringly correct) but often impenetrable to users who are not conversant with the sourcecode for a project, or at least the jargon that serious programmers and unix users use. The only way I can see to fix that
SCALE: What is the hardest thing about working on an open source project?
Don: Getting started, usually. There are few FOSS projects where it’s immediately obvious where to jump in and start working without duplicating work.
SCALE: Do you ever use any other Linux distributions? What about other open source operating systems besides Linux?
Don: I try very hard not to use other distributions; usually I leave machines which have had Debian surreptitiously installed in my wake. I sometimes use other kernels, but they’re usually all Debian too! 
SCALE: What other open source projects are you most excited about besides Debian?
Don: I’ve really been following the work going on around OLPC, open cores, R, bioconductor, openmoko, gnu radio, and of course the open media work like IMSLP, Gutenberg, and Mutopia quite closely. I really hope that soon we’ll be able to have Free forms of all aspects of different forms of digital information where we can control every aspect of their function and mold them into our desired image.
SCALE: Thank you Don.