Re: Freexian, security and Debian

Hi,

On 19/07/26 at 19:57 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> 2. Debusine, and Freexian in general
> ------------------------------------
> 
> While it is laudable that Freexian has the explicit goal of helping 
> Debian, Debian giving preferential treatment to one company might
> outweigh the benefits when this drives away other contributors.

A long time ago, I was the DPL when Debian LTS was set up.

I was very careful at the time to defend a setup where mutiple actors
could collaborate on Debian LTS. I think that this still holds: if
someone if sufficiently unhappy with Freexian's contributions to LTS,
there's space to setup other actors, with their own funding models.

> While there is valid criticism at the current use of GitLab in our core 
> infrastructure,[1] using Debusine in our infrastructure would be worse:
> 
> Similar to GitLab, Freexian SARL is a private for-profit company.
> 
> Similar to Gitlab, Debusine is Open Source that is also commercially 
> offered as SaaS.[2]
> 
> Worse than GitLab Inc., which is a neutral player providing equal offers 
> to everyone in the Debian ecosystem, Freexian SARL is competing directly 
> with the businesses and employers of many other contributors (including 
> many DDs) in our ecosystem.[3]

Unlike GitLab, Debusine does not have an Open Core business model, where
the editor could decide to remove important features from the Community
Edition we are using. It is pure GPLv3 with no CLA. I think that's a key
distinction.

Lucas