Today, the Debian Project has overwhelmingly decided in a General Resolution to formally acknowlege the contribution made by many people who help Debian in ways other than maintaining packages -- by opening up the process of becoming an officially recognised Debian Developer.

Stefano raised again the issue of providing some kind of Debian membership to people that contribute to Debian in unusual ways like doing translation, documentation, marketing, design, etc. But what for?

"It has now been more than 4 months since the last Debian developer account was created. 18 contributors have been through all steps, and are simply waiting for this simple administrative task to be done..."

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve caught myself wondering why there are so many “easy-to-use” Debian-based distros. I used to think of Debian as the distro that was way up there, a long long way to go, in terms of user-friendlyness. I didn’t think that I was going to be able to use Debian. It just seemed to hard.

«The Debian project announced yesterday that it has renamed the former “Custom Debian Distribution” concept (under which Debian projects such as Debian Edu, Debian Jr, Debian Med, Debian GIS and Debian Science were collectively known) to the catchier name “Debian Pure Blends.” ...»

At april 18th 2008, 19 new Debian Developers (DD) accounts were created.

Debian Project is a volunteer effort, and needs more skilled manpower at many human knowledge areas.

There are various ways to try Debian before you ‘buy’ it. One is the live CD either Debian or Ubuntu, and the other is to run a self contained install from a USB drive. Seeing as these handy little gadgets are getting larger and cheaper as time goes in, this is a pretty viable method of doing things.

This is not a rant about Debian vs. Ubuntu. I used both, loved both, and I'm currently using Debian Lenny. It's not about Debian versus any other distribution either: in fact, I only tried a few other distros, and most of them were Debian-based. Here are the top 10 reasons for which I enjoy using Debian:

"I am very happy that 19 contributors who were waiting for their accounts, sometimes for a very long time, became Debian Developers today. This is great news for them, and for the project as a whole. Many thanks to all people involved for making this possible, including Joerg Jaspert, Steve McIntyre and James Troup. And congratulations to (using their account names)..."