Debian Celebrates 31 years! – Bits from Debian

As the expression goes, “Time flies when you are having fun”, meaning you do not normally account for the passage of time when you are distracted and enjoying yourself. The expression is a well established English idiom, though today for a moment the Debian Project pauses to reflect on that expression.

It has been 31 years now that we have been around.

It has been 31 amazing years of fun and amazement in watching the world around us grow and ourselves grow into the world.

Let us tell you, we have had a great time in doing so.

We have been invited to nearly every continent and country for over 25 Debian Developer Conferences, we have contributed to the sciences with our Blends[1] distributions; we have not given up on or discounted aged hardware with Long Term Support (LTS)[2]; we have encouraged and sponsored diversity with our Outreach Programs[3]. We have contributed to exploration of this lovely planet and the vast vacuum of space[4] (where no one hears Developers scream).

There is more to what we have done but from a cursory glance, we seem to have done it all.

But we never noticed it.

Time does fly or “escape irretrievably”[5] when having a good time and making progress, though our pause at this moment is that we have also had a few moments of honest self-evaluation and reflection. Over the years the project has lost some significant loved ones who were dear to us – you may have called them Developers while we called them Friends, we called them Mentors, we hurt, we grieved, and in their memories we keep moving forward.

The course of the project has seen a few tragedies, has seen heated discourse in the public domain, has addressed and weathered concerns, and has still continually grown.

And we did that in the public sphere, because at the core this is an open project. Our code is public, our bugs and failings are public, our communications are public, our meetings are public, and our love of FLOSS is most definitely public.

And now more that ever the Debian Project realizes that the “we” that is sprinkled throughout this letter is just another way of saying: “you”. You, the user, contributor, sponsor, developer, maintainer, bug squasher; all of you make the WE that is Debian. So what are WE waiting for? Lets celebrate!

Join the worldwide celebration or find an event local to you by visiting our DebianDay events page[6] – see you there!

[1] https://www.debian.org/blends

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

[3] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Outreach

[4] https://bits.debian.org/2017/04/unknown-parallel-universe-uses-debian.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempus_fugit

[6] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDay/2024