The Debian ecosystem has been in turmoil for the past year and all sorts of important decisions were reached, usually after a voting process. Some of them are still not too popular, like the adoption of systemd. Now, an important Debian developer has decided to leave the project and he's doing it because he doesn't like the direction taken by the operating system.

The open source community is usually a calm environment and developers don't usually get upset, or at least they don't do it in the mailing list. Due to the changes that have been made in the Debian project, more voices than usual have expressed their discontent. A few of the developers have come to terms with the changes, but it seems that it was too much for others.

Debian is a very important Linux distribution and numerous operating systems are using it, including Ubuntu. That means that whatever modifications are being made to the system, they will probably land in all the other distros as well. For example, the decision to adopt systemd affectes Ubuntu, which is already making the preparations for this new feature.

The Debian project is experiencing some problems

It doesn't happen often for a developer to leave a project in such a manner, so when Joey Hess announced his retirement, it left quite an impression. Not only that he won't take any part in Debian's future, but he also abandoned all the projects related to the distribution. And he worked on quite a few.

"It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996. We've made some good things, and I wish everyone well, but I'm out. Note that this also constitutes an orphaning as upstream of debhelper, alien, dpkg-repack, and debmirror."

"If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions," wrote Joey Hess on the official mailing list.

The response of the other developers has been very polite and many have expressed their regret to see him go, but surprisingly no one tried to convince him to stay. I any case, the Debian project has lost an important contributor and his decision will certainly have an impact.