The Debian Development Team

From its humble beginnings, with a mere handful of developers, the Debian

Development Team has grown to nearly 400 active developers and enough

additional help from regular contributors to bring the total list of participants

to over 600 people. Most of these people have never physically met each

other. Almost all of the communication between developers takes place via

e mail using the various mailing lists that the project supports through donor

supplied hardware and bandwidth.

All contributions to the project are completely voluntary, including the many

fine people, businesses, and institutions that contribute hardware to operate

those lists and disk space to store the archives. What little actual cash is

necessary, has in the past been paid out of pocket by the person taking care

of the issue. Software in the Public Interest now provides services that

allow for the project to collect donations for such cash necessities. This vol 

unteer organization, by its very nature, does not lend itself to the hierarchical

structures usually found in development organizations. Control from a central

location is ineffective, at best, and counterproductive in many cases. The rea 

son this process works without those controls stems from the modular package

scheme that was developed so early in the project. This allows an individual

developer to take responsibility for a  known  piece of the distribution. The

efforts of this diverse group are directed by the bug tracking system, and the

set of Policy documents that define the construction of Debian packages, and

to some extent by the Debian Project Leader.

The combination of mailing lists and bug reporting system provides the only

checks and balances needed to adequately control each individual developer.

If developers have any questions about the proper way to deal with package

responsibilities, the mailing list provides the access to other developers who

will gladly assist them with suggestions and comments. If developers generate

packages which are poorly formed, the bug tracking system allows anyone

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