Tim Pearson added as Debian maintainer

[Borley]

Some news from Debian micronews: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Timothy Pearson

[MPC7500]

Yes. Only because of Chromium. Not such a big deal.

[Borley]

Still, always exciting to see a familiar name listed there.

[MPC7500]

Yes, it's a good thing.

[MauryG5]

Yes I agree, always good that Power supporters are considered active for the Linux world!

[pocock]

Two things come to mind:

Debian involvement can be a burden for any developer, taking up a little bit more time and energy that could be used for other parts of the platform.

Tim's presence as a maintainer may be a hint that there is a shortage of other volunteers willing to do POWER related tasks in the Debian world.  In fact, all the big distributions have had problems that are discouraging volunteers, it is not only an issue for POWER.

[tle]

That's a good news. Chromium packaging needs as much help as possible. Because Google would not even bother to do anything to support ppc64, we are going to spend countless cycles of effort to keep patching it.

[MauryG5]

For Google we at Power represent a kind of threat because they can't have total control over us like they do on Arm and X86 and that's why unfortunately they officially stopped letting us develop our Chromium and force us to carry on ours through Tim ... We are always grateful to him for the great work he does for Chromium on Power!

[pocock]

If you can only access a particular application by running it from a web site in Chrome / Chromium then that is still very bad news.  It implies there is no equivalent application that you can run natively.

By way of example, people have been trying to promote free, open source webcam and chat solutions for many years but when the pandemic came along, a lot of users were willing to download the Zoom client or run the WebAssembly client in their browser and the free software community was completely left out in the cold.

[MauryG5]

friend Daniel, I hope you have resolved your dispute with Debian on the developer talk, I hope you can be back in your development post on Power for Debian...

[pocock]

"dispute with Debian" is not correct.

If you look at the vote about Dr Richard Stallman, the majority of Debian Developers do not want these disputes at all and they voted not to comment on the dispute.

There are a hardcore group of people who run these disputes.  In many cases, they hide what they are doing from the rest of us.  Many of the victims are afraid to speak up.  For example, if somebody receives some email about the CoC, they usually just quit and go to work on something else.  Quitting like that is not an admission of wrongdoing, the victims just don't want to lose their time with these games.