The story of Debian's community governance model

[Danny Spitzberg]

   Hi all-
   Folks here might appreciate this short summary of a long history,
   written up for a library of community ownership conversions for various
   tech projects and startups worldwide:
   See the online sources
   at [1]https://twitter.com/exittocommunity/status/1743289066362167383
   and [2]https://e2c.how/Debian-87f0bf52db7641bb9eb02b02d5cf0b3d or read
   below:

Summary

   Debian is a free operating system, built on the Linux kernel. When Ian
   Murdock started Debian as a 22-year-old college student in 1993, Linux
   was primarily used by students and computer scientists. Debian sought
   to make Linux easier to install and deploy, and was the first truly
   free and open Linux distribution, meaning any developer or user could
   contribute to its code. Debian now holds about 25% of the market for
   Linux distributions, and is the largest free distribution. The project
   is built and maintained by over 1,000 people across more than 40
   countries, making up a large and geographically-dispersed community of
   contributors. A subset of these contributors are officially recognized
   as “Debian developers” (aka “project members”) and can vote on
   resolutions regarding technical, social, and governance questions as
   well as in Debian Project Leader elections. Notably, unlike many other
   major FOSS operating systems, Debian is not housed under a
   nonprofit/foundation, business, or other legal entity.

Motivation and Readiness

   Early on, Debian functioned under the centralized leadership of its
   founder, Ian Murdock. Murdock had a fairly laid-back approach to
   leadership and an openness to considering contributors' opinions and
   input, but ultimately held the final say as decisions were made. In
   1994, he released a manifesto for the project, proclaiming that Debian
   was to be “non-commercial” and developed by and for the community of
   developers.

   In 1996, Murdock left the project and unilaterally appointed Bruce
   Perens as the new leader. There was no formal governance process in
   place to represent contributors’ opinions or resolve disputes, so when
   Perens turned out to hold a more expansive vision of authority than had
   Murdock, project members grew frustrated. They began to question the
   basis of Perens’ authority; he felt this strain and suggested that the
   community elect a board of directors as a check on his power. But
   project members felt that this wouldn’t go far enough, and asked Perens
   to step down. Following his recall, project members stepped up to
   design a new governance system geared towards better representing their
   interests and ensuring Debian’s continued sustainability.

Process and Tensions

   In response to what they felt to be Perens’ overstepping of authority,
   Debian project members drafted and ratified a constitution that
   delimited the role of a Debian Project Leader (DPL). With the
   constitution in place, the first DPL election was held in 1998. In
   1999, Debian developers began electing project leaders for one-year
   terms. This led to a period of experimentation with the role, where
   various attitudes and approaches to governance could be tested out.
   Some worked better than others, and developers’ opinions of the DPL
   role varied widely. Competing visions around ideal leadership
   principles sometimes caused tension in the community throughout the
   1990s. One challenge was establishing the right ideas around
   meritocracy: while project members initially assumed that the
   contributors with the most astute technical skills should hold
   authority positions, it became clear over time that the best
   programmers don’t always, or even usually, make the best leaders.
   Different models of leadership valuing different ways of contributing
   to the project – beyond just writing good code – had to be tested out
   as the community learned, in practice, what qualities they needed in a
   leader figure.

Results

   By the end of 2006, the Debian community had achieved consensus around
   the ways of distributing power and making laws that suited them best.
   Through collective experimentation, they landed on a conception of
   democratic rule where leaders hold some, albeit limited, authority over
   technical matters, but also defer to the community and can be recalled
   by community members if they overstep their authority. If the DPL
   becomes indisposed for any reason – or if the community fails to elect
   a new one – the role’s powers and responsibilities will be taken on by
   a Technical Advisory Committee. The DPL’s role is mostly restricted to
   coordinating project-wide decisions, serving as and/or delegating a
   representative to other organizations or the public, and facilitating
   conflict resolution, so most of the authority to make choices about
   Debian’s governance is laterally distributed throughout the community.
   However, the DPL does have final approval over financial decisions.
   Cory Doctorow wrote, [3]following Ian Murdock's death in 2015, that
   "The Debian project fundamentally shifted the way free/open code got
   made by fusing an insistence on engineering excellence with a public
   declaration of the ethical nature of doing free software development."

Sources

     * E2C conversation with Debian user Molly de Blanc
     * [4]“The Emergence of Governance in an Open-Source Community” – The
       Academy of Management Journal
     * [5]Ian Murdock in His Own Words: What Made Debian Such a Community
       Project? – TechDirt

References

   1. https://twitter.com/exittocommunity/status/1743289066362167383
   2. https://e2c.how/Debian-87f0bf52db7641bb9eb02b02d5cf0b3d
   3. 
https://www.zdnet.com/article/debian-linux-founder-ian-murdock-would-have-been-amazed-at-its-legacy/
   4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20159914.pdf
   5. 
https://www.techdirt.com/2016/01/14/ian-murdock-his-own-words-what-made-debian-such-community-project/