Organization
The Debian Project is governed by the Debian Constitution and the Social Contract which set out the governance structure of the project and explicitly states that the goal of the project is the development of a free operating system. Debian is developed by over three thousand volunteers from around the world and supported by donations through several nonprofit organizations around the world. Most important of these is Software in the Public Interest, the owner of the Debian trademark and umbrella organization for various other community free software projects.
Thus, the Debian Project is an independent decentralized organization; it is not backed by a company like Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and Mandriva. The cost of developing all the packages included in Debian 5.0 lenny (323 million lines of code), using the COCOMO model, has been estimated to be about US$ 8 billion. Ohloh estimates that the codebase (54 million lines of code), using the COCOMO model, would cost about US$ 1 billion to develop.
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Famous quotes containing the word organization:
“The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.”
—Henry George (1839–1897)
“To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind of freedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)