Debian and the grass roots of Linux

Debian is both the most conservative and the most radical of Linux distributions, resolute and true to the ideals of the movement from which it sprang. The Debian project reaches back to a time when Linux was young and easy, when real programmers rode on the metal and coded in the buff, and a couple of floppies was sufficient to carry Linux, GNU and all the tools that were required to get a system up and running on a 386.

Owen le Blanc compiled the first 'MCC interim release' of Linux in February 1992, named after the Manchester Computing Centre in Manchester, England. Later that year Peter McDonald released SLS (Softlanding Linux System), which was the first attempt to pull together all the available software to make a popular Linux distribution as we might recognise it today.

But SLS wasn't to everybody's liking. There was little concept of packaging, and though the system was 'good enough' it left the user with lots of work to do. The shortcomings of SLS led Patrik Volkerding to create Slackware, which became the blueprint for many later commercial distributions, including Red Hat and SuSE. Dissatisfaction with SLS was also the spur for Ian Murdock's decision to initiate the Debian project. "SLS is possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available," he wrote in 1994. "Unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular."

The melting pot

The arrival of Linux had coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and the first generation of students and programmers with wider access to the Internet. Out of this had grown the beginnings of what was to become an unplanned and organic methodology of distributed development which, when allied to the framework of free software, was to revolutionise the world of programming.

Murdock's notion was to take this collaborative trick and apply it to the concept of a Linux distribution. Many hands make light work. They can also prod round the corners of an increasingly complex system and identify and remove bugs before they are released into the wider world. The Linux kernel developers pioneered this way of working, but Debian was the first project to be modelled explicitly on distributed software development.

Legend has it that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) went looking for someone to coordinate an FSF sponsored release of Linux, and Murdock, then a student at Purdue University, responded to the subsequent advert. This version of the story doesn't appear in the histories, so may be apocryphal. Nonetheless, the FSF did sponsor the promotion and sale of CDs, and Debian has remained on the free software wing of the free and open source software debate ever since.

Murdock announced the imminent arrival of Debian on comp.os.linux.development on Aug 16, 1993. The announcement contained the seeds of much that was to feature later in Debian. The emphasis on reliability, stability, ease of installation, upgrades, and package management has been the defining characteristic of all Debian derived distributions ever since. There were interim releases, but the first 1.x release didn't arrive until Debian Buzz in June 1996. Debian has never had a predictable release schedule, and strategic point releases have sometimes appeared several years apart.

As Murdock argued earlier this year: "When is the next version going to come out? 'Whenever it's done' doesn't tend to be a very compelling answer for a broad swathe of the market, right?"