Published at LXer:

The resignation of Matthew Garrett, one of the most active developers in Debian, has drawn attention to some ongoing issues about how the project operates. Specifically, Garrett's announcement on his blog cites a lack of civility and a slowness in decision-making, and compares Debian unfavorably to Ubuntu, the Debian-derived distribution which is increasingly attracting the efforts of many Debian maintainers.

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Obviously, the departure of a key player with significant corporate memory is not an easy thing to absorb. The famous scalding exchanges between Debian developers in the semi-public #irc channels is the stuff of legends and I'm sure people get tired of it. Maybe some policing is called for, maybe not. Maybe one of the most common reasons people reach a point of saturation is age (maturity?). At he same time, system development is a young person's arena. There are lots of capable folks eager to claim the title of Debian Developer, and I hope they get a good one.

As Charles De Gaulle famously said, "The graveyards are full of irreplaceable people."