jim submits :

"Debian Celebrates Its 10th Birthday"

Martin Schulz

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[1]
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[2], who is supported by a secretary[3] and several
delegates[4]. 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[5] where development efforts are
primarily focused.

The Debian Project is celebrating its birthday at various places[6]
around the globe, since a single large party doesn't seem appropriate
for a project which is spread worldwide[7]. Some parties are simply a
social get-together at a restaurant, while others are organised for
larger audience.

The following list only enumerates the largest birthday parties[8].

Czech Republic

Where: Brno

What: Celebration

Registration: http://www.penguin.cz/~skim/10deb

Finland

Where: Turku

What: Birthday meeting

Registration: http://www.linux-aktivaattori.org/twiki/bin/view/B azaar/DebianBirthdayTurku2003



Germany

Where: Wallenrod

What: Barbecue and party

Registration: http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/party/

Where: Berlin

What: Party outside

Info: http://buug.de/deb10/

United Kingdom

Where: Cambridge

What: Party and barbecue

Information: http://the.earth.li/~huggie/cgi-bin/moin/Debian10t hBirthday

More parties are planned in Alaska, Australia, Austria, Belarus,
Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany,
Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Taiwan and in the United States. For a party in your
area, please check the full list of parties[6].



We invite all interested people to attend these parties, meet Debian
developers and users, exchange GnuPG fingerprints, discuss various
topics on Debian and Free Software, and otherwise participate in our
vibrant community.



Links:

1. http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

2. http://www.debian.org/devel/leader

3. http://www.debian.org/devel/secretary

4. http://www.debian.org/intro/organization

5. http://master.debian.org/~joey/archive/overview.ht ml

6. http://www.debconf.org/10years/

7. http://www.debian.org/events/materials/posters/wor ldmap/

8. http://www.debian.org/events/2003/0816-birthday