25 years of Debian Jose Miguel Parrella [email protected] @bureado As presented at the 20 years of Open Source anniversary by the Open Source Initiative at OSCON 18 July 2018

Who I'm NOT Not a historian https://timeline.debian.net/ https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ Not part of the early history of the project https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/83/

My journey with Debian Not my first distro (it was Knoppix) I jumped in between woody and sarge Package management Perl libraries, PAM libraries, XMMS, Nginx Technical upbringing in LATAM Derivatives, incl. consumer-facing (2-4M+ users) Building community in Latin America

It was never just about the distro DFSG, Social Contract & Debian Policy Solid and mature APT/DPKG Size of the project, codebase, architectures Initial derivatives discussions (July 2003)

Time since August 1993 to... An official release: 2 years (Oct 1995) A board of directors: 3.5 years A legal entity for financials: 3.5 years APT (Deity): 3.5 years A non-x86 release: almost 5 years Logo as we know it: 5.5 years (May 1999) A process for new maintainers: over 6 years A conference: almost 8 years (July 2001)

Innovation keeps happening Package signing, new dpkg features, merged usr... Reproducible builds From CDD to derivatives Researchers Weird use cases GSOC and Outreachy

Innovation keeps happening Package signing, new dpkg features, merged usr... Reproducible builds From CDD to derivatives Researchers Weird use cases GSOC and Outreachy ...changing the engine (release cadence) while driving (20K source, 50K binary packages)

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Here's to the next 25! Don't be discouraged by the T+ gap It was never just about the distro... but about the project Who the "user " is has changed, but Debian is staying true!