Imagination Technologies recently donated several high-performance SDNA-7130 appliances to the Debian Project for the development and maintenance of the MIPS ports.

The SDNA-7130 (Software Defined Network Appliance) platforms are developed by Rhino Labs, a leading provider of high-performance data security, networking, and data infrastructure solutions.

With these new devices, the Debian project will have access to a wide range of 32- and 64-bit MIPS-based platforms.

Debian MIPS ports are also possible thanks to donations from the aql hosting service provider, the Eaton remote controlled ePDU, and many other individual members of the Debian community.

The Debian project would like to thank Imagination, Rhino Labs and aql for this coordinated donation.

More details about GNU/Linux for MIPS CPUs can be found in the related press release at Imagination and their community site about MIPS.

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

• Sven Bartscher (kritzefitz)
• Harlan Lieberman-Berg (hlieberman)

Congratulations!

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".

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected 29 interns to work with us this summer: 4 in Outreachy, and 25 in the Google Summer of Code.

Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them:

Android SDK tools in Debian:

• Chirayu Desai
• Kai-Chung Yan
• Mouaad Aallam

APT - dpkg communications rework:

• David Kalnischkies

Continuous Integration for Debian-Med packages:

• Canberk Koç
• Tatiana Malygina

Extending the Debian Developer Horizon:

• Harsh Daftary

Improving and extending AppRecommender:

• Lucas Albuquerque Medeiros de Moura
• Luciano Prestes Cavalcanti

Improving the debsources frontend:

• Aaron Delaney

Improving voice, video and chat communication with Free Software:

• Alok Anand
• Balram P
• Jaminy Prabaharan
• Keerthana Krishnan
• Kévin Avignon
• Mateus Bellomo
• Mesut Can Gurle
• Nicolas Reynaud
• Nik Vaessen
• Olivier Grégoire
• Pranav Jain
• Simon Désaulniers
• Udit Raikwar

MIPS and MIPSEL ports improvements:

• Jonathan Jackson

Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software:

• ceridwen
• Satyam Zode
• Scarlett Clark
• Valerie Young

Support for KLEE in Debile:

• Marko Dimjašević

The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the effort of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the students weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists.

Congratulations to all of them!

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.