[ Thanks to Jim
Lynch for this link. ]
“It wasn’t too long ago that I did a very late review
of Debian 5. I’m happy to say that it didn’t take me nearly as long
to get around to the latest release, Debian 6 Squeeze. If you
aren’t familiar with Debian then this release is a great chance to
learn about a distro that is the foundation for a lot of other
distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others.“Debian has three main branches:
“Stable
Testing
Unstable“Debian 6 is the latest stable release. For more background on
Debian in general, please see the Wikipedia overview article.“The Debian Project is governed by the Debian Constitution and
the Social Contract which set out the governance structure of the
project as well as explicitly stating that the goal of the project
is the development of a free operating system.[8][9] Debian is
developed by over three thousand volunteers[10] from around the
world and supported by donations through several non-profit
organizations around the world. Most important of these is Software
in the Public Interest,[11] the owner of the Debian trademark and
umbrella organization for various other community free software
projects.[12]“Thus, the Debian Project is an independent decentralized
organization; it is not backed by a company like some other
GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, and
Mandriva. The cost of developing all the packages included in
Debian 4.0 etch (283 million lines of code), using the COCOMO
model, has been estimated to be close to US$13 billion.[13] As of
April 2, 2009, Ohloh estimates that the codebase of the Debian
GNU/Linux project (45 million lines of code), using the COCOMO
model, would cost about US$819 million to develop.[14]”