Petter Reinholdtsen recently blogged about ZFS availability in Debian. Many people have worked hard on getting ZFS support available in Debian and we would like to thank everyone involved in getting to this point and explain what ZFS in Debian means.

The landing of ZFS in the Debian archive was blocked for years due to licensing problems. Finally, the inclusion of ZFS was announced slightly more than a year ago, on April 2015 by the DPL at the time, Lucas Nussbaum who wrote "We received legal advice from Software Freedom Law Center about the inclusion of libdvdcss and ZFS in Debian, which should unblock the situation in both cases and enable us to ship them in Debian soon.". In January this year, the following DPL, Neil McGovern blogged with a lot of more details about the legal situation behind this and summarized it as "TLDR: It’s going in contrib, as a source only dkms module."

ZFS is not available exactly in Debian, since Debian is only what's included in the "main" section archive. What people really meant here is that ZFS code is now in included in "contrib" and it's available for users using DKMS.

Many people also mixed this with Ubuntu now including ZFS. However, Debian and Ubuntu are not doing the same, Ubuntu is shipping directly pre-built kernel modules, something that is considered to be a GPL violation. As the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote "while licensed under an acceptable license for Debian's Free Software Guidelines, also has a default use that can cause licensing problems for downstream Debian users".

The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Mehdi Dogguy! Of a total of 1023 developers, 282 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2016 page.

The new term for the project leader starts today April 17th and expire on April 17th 2017.

It's that time of year again for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader!

Neil McGovern who has held the office for the last year will not be seeking reelection. Debian Developers will have to choose between voting for the only candidate running Mehdi Dogguy or None Of The Above. If None Of The Above wins the election then the election procedure is repeated, many times if necessary.

Mehdi Dogguy was a candidate for the DPL position last year, finishing second with a close amount of votes to the winner Neil McGovern.

We are in the middle of the campaigning period that will last until April 2nd. The candidate and Debian contributors are expected to engage in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list.

The voting period starts on April 3rd, and during the following two weeks, Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. The results will be published on April 17th with the term for new the project leader starting immediately that same day.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Gianfranco Costamagna (locutusofborg)
• Graham Inggs (ginggs)
• Ximin Luo (infinity0)
• Christian Kastner (ckk)
• Tianon Gravi (tianon)
• Iain R. Learmonth (irl)
• Laura Arjona Reina (larjona)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Senthil Kumaran
• Riley Baird
• Robie Basak
• Alex Muntada
• Johan Van de Wauw
• Benjamin Barenblat
• Paul Novotny
• Jose Luis Rivero
• Chris Knadle
• Lennart Weller

Congratulations!

The Core Infrastructure Initiative announced today that they will support two Debian Developers, Holger Levsen and Jérémy Bobbio, with $200,000 to advance their Debian work in reproducible builds and to collaborate more closely with other distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenWrt to benefit from this effort.

The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) was established in 2014 to fortify the security of key open source projects. This initiative is funded by more than 20 companies and managed by The Linux Foundation.

The reproducible builds initiative aims to enable anyone to reproduce bit by bit identical binary packages from a given source, thus enabling anyone to independently verify that a binary matches the source code from which it was said it was derived. For example, this allow the users of Debian to rebuild packages and obtain exactly identical packages to the ones provided by the Debian repositories.