So, I have to be honest
I'm really honored to be here
I don't say that to just every conference
I care a lot about Debian
This is my 3rd Debconf I've ever been to
There have been a lot of them so I obviously haven't been to that many
But I was at Debconf1
which I just learned today that it was zero based so that it wasn't the first Debconf
which I should have known but didn't for some reason
but so I was at the 2nd Debconf and
by accident somewhat because I was going to Libre Software meeting
and just happened to book my flights so that I could be at Debconf as well
and because it was in New York city where I was living at the time
I gave a regular track talk at Debconf10 about the GPL v3
and here I'm giving an invited speaker talk
or a keynote or whatever else it is called here
That really means a lot to me
I'm a fan of Debian, I'm a user of Debian.
I don't actually consider myself part of the Debian community
because other than filing a few bugs over the years
I haven't contributed all that much to Debian
but I've relied on it and used it and been a fan of it for so long
that I really love your project.
So I am really honored to be invited to speak here
and I really believe that Debian is a very special project
for a lot of reasons
First of all it has thrived for longer than almost any free software project in existence
in a lot of ways. There are top 10 lists of projects that Debian is certainly on as far as longevity goes, maybe the top 5
It's governance is one of the few
democratically elected and
democratically controlled
governance processes in free software
Everyone is a fan of talking about this
'benevolent dictator' stuff
which I think is really horrible
The fact that somebody would call
themselves a 'self appointed benevolent
dictator for life' is really disturbing.
You are democratic.
You elect your leadership.
You have referendums on major issues
that everyone can vote on.
That is amazingly rare, impressive
and important for free software.
The other thing that really impresses me,
in particular being somebody from the
non-profit world,
is that Debian has been staunchly
non-commercial for it's entire existence
Of course I don't mean that Debian
can't be used in commercial settings
DFSG free means that things can be put
into commercial products.
What I mean is the project itself has
always been non-commercial,
meaning that the people that work on it
are volunteering, and even if their
employers are paying them to work on it
they are part of a community
and are not doing their work inside Debian
as officially part of
some commercial activity.
Most free software projects these days
are controlled by
some commercial entity or another.
Debian is not.
I was at Debconf1 which was really
exciting for me.
I was a young executive director of
Free Software.
I showed this picture to Karen Sandler who
I work with and said how different I look.
She said I don't look different at all,
but, speaking as the person that looks
at that face in the mirror every morning,
there are a lot more lines on my face
than there.