List of Debian project leaders

Last updated

This is a chronological list of Debian project leaders. Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open-source software primarily under the GNU General Public License, [1] developed by a group of individuals known as the Debian project. The Project Leader is a role defined in the Debian Constitution, and is elected once per year by the Debian developers.

Contents

Leaders

Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock IanMurdock.jpg
Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock, the first Debian project leader and the "ian" in "Debian", was an American software engineer. He founded the Debian project in August 1993, naming it after his then-girlfriend and later wife, Debra Lynn, and himself (Deb and Ian). He later started Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company. He was the Chief Technology Officer of the Free Standards Group and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup, CTO of the Linux Foundation when the group was formed from the merger of the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs. He left the Linux Foundation to join Sun Microsystems leading the Project Indiana making OpenSolaris distribution with GNU userland. From 2011 until 2015, Murdock was Vice President of Platform and Developer Community at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. From November 2015 until his death, Murdock worked for Docker, Inc.

Bruce Perens

Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer, an advocate of the free software movement and author of BusyBox. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond and Software in the Public Interest. He represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society at the invitation of the United Nations Development Programme in 2005. He was the Debian project leader from April 1996 to December 1997, replacing Ian Murdock.

Ian Jackson

Ian Jackson is a long-time free software author and Debian developer. He wrote dpkg, SAUCE (Software Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), userv and debbugs. He used to maintain the Linux FAQ. He was the Debian project leader between 1998 and 1999. Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm) was released during his term. He was also a vice-president and then president of Software in the Public Interest in 1998 and 1999. He was a member of the Debian Technical Committee until November 2014 when he resigned [2] as a result of controversies around the migration of Debian to systemd. [3]

Wichert Akkerman

Wichert Akkerman is a Dutch computer programmer who has contributed to Debian, dpkg, Plone and strace. He was elected for two terms as the Debian project leader and served from January 1999 to March 2001, and was succeeded by Ben Collins. He has also served as the Secretary to Software in the Public Interest.

Ben Collins

Ben Collins is an American programmer, Linux developer and system administrator. From April 2001 to April 2002 [4] [5] [6] Collins acted as the Debian project leader. During his tenure, he specialised on the UltraSPARC port and advocated for proactive security and testing policies. [7] [8] Collins had stood for Debian project leader two times prior to being elected. When he took up the role he commented that when he joined the project Ian Jackson, who was at the end of his term as Debian project leader, was "very inactive". Jackson was followed by Wichert Akkerman for two terms, and according to Collins "did an excellent job keeping Debian going". Once elected Collins declared his intent to get Debian moving and during his tenure he sought to provide strategic leadership to build the Debian movement. [7] [8] Collins was succeeded as Debian project leader by Bdale Garbee.[ citation needed ]

Bdale Garbee

Bdale Garbee is an American computer specialist who works with Linux, particularly Debian. He is also an amateur radio hobbyist, a member of AMSAT, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (former vice-president) and the American Radio Relay League and a member of the board of directors of the Linux Foundation and FreedomBox Foundation's board of directors. He was the Debian project leader for one year between 2002 and 2003.

Martin Michlmayr

Martin Michlmayr is a free and open-source software advocate and Debian developer. Michlmayr completed a doctorate in technology management at the University of Cambridge in 2007. The focus of this research was on quality improvement in free software and open source projects, and particularly on release management processes and practices. Between 2008 and 2014, he served on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative and is a member of Software Freedom Conservancy's evaluation committee. In the past he acted as an advisor to Software in the Public Interest. He was elected as Debian project leader in 2003 and re-elected to that position in 2004.

Branden Robinson

G. Branden Robinson is known for his contributions to the packaging of the X Window System and his tenure as the Debian project leader from April 2005 to April 2006. [9] [10] He has contributed to Debian since 1998. His most visible contribution is his long-time maintenance of the X Window System packages, which he took over from Mark W. Eichin by uploading the 3.3.2 release of the XFree86 packages on 1998-03-25. Robinson was elected by his fellow developers in 2005 after running for the position five times between 2001 and 2005. He succeeded Martin Michlmayr, who had been elected project leader in 2003 and 2004. During Branden Robinson's term as a leader, the project achieved some incremental successes, such as a stable point release of stable by new release managers for that distribution, having AMD64 added to testing, and the inclusion of modular X in unstable.

Anthony Towns

Anthony Towns (born 21 June 1978)[ citation needed ] is a computer programmer who was a long-time Debian release manager, ftpmaster team member and later the Debian project leader (from 17 April 2006 until 17 April 2007). He ran for Debian project leader in 2005, but was defeated by Branden Robinson by a margin of 23 effective votes. [11] He ran again in 2006, and was elected as the new Debian project leader on 9 April 2006, beginning his term on 19 April 2006. [12] Towns was elected by the second-narrowest-ever margin [13] and was the first project leader to face a recall vote while in office. [14] Towns was also the first project leader whose support by Debian Developers was reaffirmed through a General Resolution. [15] Since a great deal of Debian work takes place in Europe, Queensland-based Towns created the post of "Debian Second in Charge" (2IC) to lead discussion, support developers, and represent the project in locations which could more easily be reached by the runner-up candidate, Steve McIntyre, than himself. [13]

In September 2006, the Dunc-tank project started a fund-raising programme to help Debian release its next distribution, Etch, on the scheduled date of 4 December 2006. [16] Towns's involvement with Dunc-Tank came under severe criticism, including hitherto-unseen calls to end his Debian project leadership to make clear that the Dunc-Tank project was not officially supported by Debian project members. Some developers slowed down their unpaid work on Debian in response to the programme. Debian "Etch" was not released in December 2006 as hoped; instead its release happened in April 2007. Nonetheless, Towns views the outcome of the Dunc Tank project as positive, [17] highlighting that Dunc-Tank opposition helped to improve quality of Debian Etch.

Sam Hocevar

Samuel "Sam" Hocevar is a French software and video game developer, author of the WTFPL version 2, a permissive free software license. Hocevar was a Wikimedia France board member from 2005 to 2006. He is known for his contributions to the VideoLAN project and his expertise in reverse engineering and image processing and for authoring the first CAPTCHA decoder framework to defeat multiple CAPTCHAs. He was the Debian project leader from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008.

Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer, known for his contributions in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian project leader in 2006 and 2007 but was defeated. During the 2006 term, he acted as "Second in charge" of the Debian Project. [13] In 2008 he was elected the Debian project leader, [18] and was re-elected in 2009. [19] He chose not to run in the 2010 election; that election was won by Stefano Zacchiroli. [20]

Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian-French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris. He became a Debian Developer in 2001 involved mainly in the OCaml packaging and in the quality assurance team. He was the Debian project leader between April 2010 and April 2013.

Lucas Nussbaum

Nussbaum in 2013 Lucas Nussbaum.jpg
Nussbaum in 2013

Lucas Nussbaum is a French computer science engineer and assistant professor at University of Lorraine, researcher at LORIA laboratory. Nussbaum was elected leader of the Debian project in April 2013. [21] He has been a Debian Developer since 2007. [22] Since then, he has been active, amongst other things, as a Debian Ruby packager, with the Universal Debian Database or the full rebuilds of the Debian Archive. [23] During the 2012 election, outgoing leader Stefano Zacchiroli announced that this would be the last term for which he would run; thus, in the 2013 election, the election did not include the incumbent. Nussbaum ran for the first time, opposite Gergely Nagy and Moray Allan. His term started on April 17, 2013. [21] He was re-elected on April 14, 2014. [24]

Neil McGovern

Neil McGovern, an Executive Director at the Gnome Foundation, was elected in April 2015, [25] after running for the second time in a row. [26]

Mehdi Dogguy

Mehdi Dogguy, a Tunisian-French technical manager at Électricité de France, [27] was elected in April 2016, [28] running without opponents.

Chris Lamb

Chris Lamb, a British freelancer, [29] was elected in April 2017, [30] running against the incumbent leader Mehdi Dogguy. He was re-elected in April 2018. [31]

Sam Hartman

Sam Hartman served as DPL from April 2019 to April 2020. Hartman worked as the Chief Technologist at the MIT Kerberos Consortium and as a Security Area Director of the Internet Engineering Taskforce, and joined Debian in 2000. [32] He was elected running against Joerg Jaspert, Jonathan Carter and Martin Michlmayr [33] and focused his term on resolving conflicts in Debian and facilitating project-wide discussions and decision-making on contentious technical issues. [34]

Jonathan Carter

Jonathan Carter was elected in April 2020, running against Sruthi Chandran and Brian Gupta. [35] [36] Carter was re-elected in April 2021, running against Sruthi Chandran [37] and in April 2022, running against Felix Lechner and Hideki Yamane. [38] In April 2023, he was re-elected without opponents. [39]

Andreas Tille

Andreas Tille was elected in April 2024, running against Sruthi Chandran. [40] [41] This was his first time running for the position after being a Debian Developer for more than 25 years. [42]

Comparison

LeaderFirst yearTotal yearsAge at first term
Murdock, Ian19933 a 20
Perens, Bruce19962 b 38
Jackson, Ian19981 c
Akkerman, Wichert19992
Collins, Ben2001129
Garbee, Bdale20021
Michlmayr, Martin20032
Robinson, Branden20051
Towns, Anthony2006127
Hocevar, Sam2007128
McIntyre, Steve2008234
Zacchiroli, Stefano2010331
Nussbaum, Lucas20132
McGovern, Neil20151
Dogguy, Mehdi20161
Lamb, Chris20172
Hartman, Sam20191
Carter, Jonathan2020438
Tille, Andreas2024current56

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Debian</span> Linux distribution based on free and open-source software

Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software and optionally non-free firmware or software developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993, and its first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996. The Debian Stable branch is the most popular edition for personal computers and servers. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions that have different purposes, like Proxmox for servers, Ubuntu or Linux Mint for desktops, Kali for penetration testing, and Pardus and Astra for government use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU</span> Free software collection

GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Murdock</span> American computer scientist, open source developer, entrepreneur

Ian Ashley Murdock was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux distribution</span> Operating system based on the Linux kernel

A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software in the Public Interest</span> American nonprofit organization

Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization domiciled in New York State formed to help other organizations create and distribute free open-source software and open-source hardware. Anyone is eligible to apply for membership, and contributing membership is available to those who participate in the free software community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bdale Garbee</span> Computer scientist from the United States

Bdale Garbee is an American computer specialist who works with Linux, particularly Debian. He is also an amateur radio hobbyist (KB0G), and a member of AMSAT, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio, and the American Radio Relay League. As of 2023 he is the President of Amateur Radio Digital Communications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FOSDEM</span> Annual event in Brussels centered on free and open source software development

Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodore Ts'o</span> American computer scientist, free software developer

Theodore Yue Tak Ts'o is an American software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the secondary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.

udev is a device manager for the Linux kernel. As the successor of devfsd and hotplug, udev primarily manages device nodes in the /dev directory. At the same time, udev also handles all user space events raised when hardware devices are added into the system or removed from it, including firmware loading as required by certain devices.

Ian Jackson is a longtime free software author and Debian developer. Jackson wrote dpkg, SAUCE, userv and debbugs. He used to maintain the Linux FAQ. He runs chiark.greenend.org.uk, a Linux system which is home to PuTTY among other things.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Michlmayr</span>

Martin Michlmayr is a free and open-source software advocate and Debian developer, formerly president of Software in the Public Interest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multiseat configuration</span> Single computer that supports multiple local users at the same time

A multiseat, multi-station or multiterminal system is a single computer which supports multiple independent local users at the same time.

In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux</span> Family of Unix-like operating systems

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.

Upstart is a discontinued event-based replacement for the traditional init daemon—the method by which several Unix-like computer operating systems perform tasks when the computer is started. It was written by Scott James Remnant, a former employee of Canonical Ltd. In 2014, Upstart was placed in maintenance mode, and other init daemons, such as systemd, were recommended in place of Upstart. Ubuntu moved away from Upstart with the release of version 15.04 in favor of migrating to systemd. As of March 2023, there have been no updates released for Upstart since September 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stefano Zacchiroli</span>

Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian and French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris, and a former Debian Project Leader.

systemd Suite of system components for Linux

systemd is a software suite that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. The main aim is to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its primary component is a "system and service manager" – an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes. It also provides replacements for various daemons and utilities, including device management, login management, network connection management, and event logging. The name systemd adheres to the Unix convention of naming daemons by appending the letter d. It also plays on the term "System D", which refers to a person's ability to adapt quickly and improvise to solve problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lennart Poettering</span> German software engineer

Lennart Poettering is a German software engineer working for Microsoft and the original author of PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd.

Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where it describes a software edition that is supported for months or years longer than the software's standard edition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Devuan</span> Linux distribution based on Debian

Devuan is a fork of the Debian Linux distribution that uses sysvinit, runit or OpenRC instead of systemd. Devuan aims to avoid "lock-in" by projects like systemd and aims to maintain compatibility with other init systems to avoid detaching Linux from other Unix systems.

References

  1. ↑ "What Does Free Mean? or What do you mean by Free Software?". official Debian site. The Debian Project. Retrieved 2009-12-01.
  2. ↑ Jackson, Ian (19 November 2014). "Resignation". Debian Mailing List. Retrieved 19 November 2014. I am resigning from the Technical Committee with immediate effect. While it is important that the views of the 30-40% of the project who agree with me should continue to be represented on the TC, I myself am clearly too controversial a figure at this point to do so. I should step aside to try to reduce the extent to which conversations about the project's governance are personalised.
  3. ↑ Hoffman, Chris (3 December 2014). "Meet Devuan, the Debian fork born from a bitter systemd revolt". PCWorld. Retrieved 20 June 2016. A Debian systemd maintainer and others have resigned, a splinter group threatened to fork Debian if the controversial init system was made mandatory, and a Debian Technical Comitttee vote chose systemd as Debian's default init system.
  4. ↑ Zacchiroli, Stefano (2011-03-21). Since then — 12 Debian Project Leaders (DPL) (slides). Software Liberty Association of Taiwan (SLAT). Debian: 17 years of Free Software, "do-ocracy", and democracy. Taipei. p. 7. Retrieved 2012-02-11.
  5. ↑ Bretton, A.J. (2001-04-02). "Debian Gets New Chef". Client Server News. G2 Computer Intelligence. Archived from the original on November 18, 2018. Retrieved 2012-02-11.
  6. ↑ Debian Documentation Team (2005-08-10). "Leadership" (PDF). A Brief History of Debian. 2.5. Archived from the original (slides) on 2014-11-29.
  7. 1 2 "Interview with Ben Collins, the new Debian Project Leader". Linux Gazette (66). May 2001.
  8. 1 2 "Ben Collins". Corporate Information. SwissDisk. 2011. Retrieved 2012-02-11.
  9. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2005" . Retrieved 2011-11-27.
  10. ↑ Krafft, Martin F. (2005). The Debian system: concepts and techniques. No Starch Press. p. 34. ISBN   978-1-59327-069-8 . Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  11. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2005". Debian.org. 2005-04-17. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  12. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2006". Debian.org. 2006-04-17. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  13. 1 2 3 Towns, Anthony (2006-04-23). "Bits from the DPL".
  14. ↑ Barbier, Denis. "General Resolution: Recall the project leader". Archived from the original on 5 February 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-23.
  15. ↑ "General Resolution: Re-affirm support to the Debian Project Leader". Debian.org. Retrieved 2011-12-10.
  16. ↑ "Announcement of Dunc-Tank.org". Archived from the original on 2 March 2007. Retrieved 2007-02-23.
  17. ↑ Tay, Liz. "Dunc-Tank: Success or failure?". Computerworld (Australia). Retrieved 2007-02-23.
  18. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Election 2008 Results" . Retrieved 2011-11-26.
  19. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2009". 2009-04-17. Retrieved 2011-11-26.
  20. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Election 2010 Results" . Retrieved 2010-04-19.
  21. 1 2 "Results for Debian Project Leader 2013 Election". 2013-04-14. Retrieved 2013-04-14.
  22. ↑ "New Member page for Lucas Nussbaum". 2013-04-14.
  23. ↑ Nussbaum, Lucas (2013-03-18). "DPL Platform for Lucas Nussbaum" . Retrieved 2013-04-14.
  24. ↑ "Results for the 2014 Debian Project Leader election". Archived from the original on 2014-12-02.
  25. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2015".
  26. ↑ McGovern, Neil. "DPL Platform for Neil McGovern".
  27. ↑ Dogguy, Mehdi. "DPL Platform for Mehdi Dogguy".
  28. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2016".
  29. ↑ Lamb, Chris. "DPL Platform for Chris Lamb".
  30. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2017".
  31. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2018". www.debian.org. Retrieved 2018-05-23.
  32. ↑ Hartman, Sam. "DPL Platform for Sam Hartman".
  33. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2019".
  34. ↑ Hartman, Sam. "Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020".
  35. ↑ Carter, Jonathan. "DPL Platform for Jonathan Carter".
  36. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2020".
  37. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2021". www.debian.org.
  38. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2022". www.debian.org.
  39. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2023". www.debian.org.
  40. ↑ Roeckx, Kurt (22 April 2024). "Debian Project Leader Election 2024 Results". debian-vote (Mailing list).
  41. ↑ "Debian Project Leader Elections 2024".
  42. ↑ Tille, Andreas. "DPL Platform for Andreas Tille".
  43. ↑ "Chapter 2 – Leadership". A Brief History of Debian. Debian. 2013-05-04. Archived from the original on December 26, 2010. Retrieved 2014-07-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.