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Lessons learned from the Debian project

Lars Wirzenius has put together this document to help the
Free/Open Source community.

“This text lists the important things I think the Debian
development community has learned about project management in the
course of developing the Debian GNU/Linux system. These are my
personal opinions, not those of the project or other developers. I
hope this list will be useful to Debian, other Linux distributions,
and other free software projects.”

  • Make sure things scale up.
  • Make sure the foundation is good.
  • Document important things.
  • Automate repetitive tasks when possible.
  • Avoid single points of failure, especially for volunteers.
  • Do not worry about time tables; keep goals realistic.
  • Make it easy to work independently.
  • Do not overload developers.
  • Be open and keep things in public.
  • Make it easy to contribute.
  • Have leadership.
  • Conflicts are natural, but mustn’t get out of hand.
  • Use a bug tracking system.

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