Le système Debian a énormément de succès, à tel point qu'il est omniprésent dans nos vies numériques — bien plus que la plupart des gens ne l'imaginent. Quelques chiffres suffisent pour s'en convaincre. Lorsque nous écrivons ces lignes, Debian est la variante de GNU/Linux la plus populaire sur les serveurs web : d'après une étude de
W3Techs, plus de 10 % du web est hébergé sur des serveurs Debian. Pensez-y : de combien de sites web auriez-vous dû vous passer aujourd'hui sans Debian ? Pour un exemple plus édifiant, Debian est le système d'exploitation en usage sur la Station spatiale internationale (ISS). Peut-être suivez-vous le travail des astronautes de l'ISS, peut-être via la présence sur les réseaux sociaux de la NASA ou d'autres organisations internationales ? Eh bien le travail lui-même et les articles qui vous en tiennent informés ont été rendus possibles par des systèmes Debian. D'innombrables sociétés, universités, administrations, collectivités locales, dépendent de Debian au quotidien pour leurs opérations, ce qui leur permet de rendre le service attendu à des millions d'utilisateurs partout dans le monde… et en orbite autour du monde !
But Debian is much more than an operating system, no matter how complex, featureful, and reliable such a system could be. Debian is a vision of the freedoms that people should enjoy in a world where more and more of our daily activities depend on software. Debian is born from the cardinal Free Software idea that people should be in control of their computers, and not the other way around. People with enough software knowledge should be able to dismantle, modify, reassemble and share with others all the software that matters to them. It doesn't matter if the software is used for frivolous activities like posting pictures of kittens on the Web, or for potentially life-threatening tasks such as driving our cars and powering the medical devices which cure us — and Debian is used in all of the above scenarios; you should control it. People without in-depth software knowledge should enjoy those freedoms too: they should be able to delegate to people of their choice, people they trust, the audit or modification of software-based devices on their behalf.
In the quest for the control of people over machines, Free operating systems play a fundamental role: you cannot be in full control of a computer device if you do not control its operating system. This is where Debian's main ambition comes from: producing the best, entirely Free operating system. For more than 20 years now, Debian has both developed a Free operating system and promoted a vision of Free Software around it. In so doing, Debian has set a very high bar for software freedom advocates around the world. Debian's decisions on matters of software licensing, for example, are routinely looked to by international standard organizations, governments, and other Free Software projects, when deciding if something should be considered “free enough” or not.
But this political vision is not yet enough to explain Debian's uniqueness. Debian is also a very peculiar social experiment, strongly attached to its independence. Think for a moment of other mainstream Free Software distributions, or even of popular proprietary operating systems. Chances are that you can associate each of them with a large company that is either the main development force behind the project, or at the very least the steward of all its non-development activities. Debian is different. Within the Debian Project volunteers pack on themselves the responsibilities of all the activities that are needed to keep Debian alive and kicking. The variety of those activities is stunning: from translations to system administration, from marketing to management, from conference organization to artwork design, from bookkeeping to legal issues... not to mention software packaging and development! Debian contributors take care of all of these.
La première de ces conséquences de cette forme d'indépendance radicale est que la communauté Debian est, par nécessité, très hétéroclite. Toutes les compétences mentionnées ci-dessus, et d'autres qui restent à imaginer, peuvent être mis à provis pour contribuer au projet. Une autre conséquence de l'indépendance est qu'on peut avoir confiance que les choix de Debian ne sont pas dictés par les intérêts commerciaux d'entreprises spécifiques — intérêts dont rien ne garantit qu'ils restent alignés avec le but de promouvoir le contrôle des ordinateurs par leurs propriétaires, comme de trop nombreux exemples de l'actualité des nouvelles technologies nous l'ont récemment rappelé.
One last aspect contributes to Debian's uniqueness: the way in which the social experiment is run. Despite the folklore of being bureaucratic, decision making in Debian is in fact highly distributed. There exist clearly defined areas of responsibility within the project. People in charge of those areas are free to drive their own boat. As long as they keep up with the quality requirements agreed upon by the community, no one can tell them what to do or how to do their job. If you want to have a say on how something is done in Debian, you need to put yourself on the line and be ready to take the job on your shoulders. This peculiar form of meritocracy — which we sometimes call do-ocracy — is very empowering for contributors. Anyone with enough skills, time, and motivation can have a real impact on the direction the project is taking. This is testified by a population of about 1 000 official members of the Debian Project, and several thousands of contributors world-wide. It is no wonder that Debian is often credited as the largest community-driven Free Software project in existence.
C'est ainsi : Debian est tout-à-fait unique. Sommes-nous les seuls à le dire ? Certainement pas. D'après
DistroWatch, il y a actuellement environ 300 distributions de logiciels libres. La moitié (environ 140) sont dérivées de Debian, ce qui signifie qu'elles sont parties d'une base Debian, l'ont adaptée aux besoins spécifiques des utilisateurs qu'elles ciblent — souvent en ajoutant, en modifiant ou en recompilant les paquets — et publient le résultat. Ces distributions dérivées ne font qu'appliquer en substance les libertés du logiciel libre, notamment le droit de modifier et de redistribuer des versions modifiées, et les appliquer pas seulement à des logiciels individuels mais à la distribution dans son ensemble. Cela crée un énorme potentiel pour atteindre non seulement de nouveaux utilisateurs de logiciels libres, mais aussi de nouveaux contributeurs, par le biais de distributions dérivées. Nous pensons que cet écosystème, très vivace, est un des plus grands moteurs qui a permis que le logiciel libre rivalise de nos jours avec le logiciel propriétaire même dans des domaines qui en étaient précédemment considérés comme une chasse gardée, comme les déploiements massifs de machines bureautiques. Et c'est Debian qui est placé à la racine du plus grand écosystème de distributions de logiciels libres actuellement existantes : même si vous n'utilisez pas Debian directement, et même si votre distributeur ne vous l'a pas dit, il est très probable que vous bénéficiez en ce moment même du travail de la communauté Debian.
But Debian's uniqueness sometimes comes with unexpected consequences. A consequence of Debian's vision on digital freedoms has been the need of redefining what we mean by software. The Debian Project has since long realized that, as part of an operating system, you need to distribute a lot of non-software material: music, images, documentation, raw data, firmware, etc. But how do you apply software freedoms to that material? Should we have different requirements or should all material be held up to the same high standard of freedom? The Debian Project has decided for the latter: all material shipped as part of Debian should offer the same freedoms to its users. Such a radical philosophical position has far reaching effects. It means we cannot distribute non-free firmware, or artwork not meant to be used in commercial settings, or books that cannot be modified in order to avoid tarnishing (as book publishers folklore goes) the author's/publisher's reputation.
The book you have in your hands is different. It's a free as in freedom book, a book which is up to Debian freedom standards for every aspect of your digital life. For a very long time, the scarce availability of books like this one has been a significant shortcoming of Debian. It meant that there was little reading material that helped to spread Debian and its values, while at the same time embodying those values and showing off their advantages. But it also meant, ironically, that we had little such material that we could distribute as part of Debian itself. This is the first reputable book to address this shortcoming. You can apt install
this book, you can redistribute it, you can fork this book or, better, submit bug reports and patches for it, so that others in the future can benefit from your contributions. The “maintainers” of this book — who are also its authors — are longstanding members of the Debian Project, who grok the freedom ethos that permeates every aspect of Debian and know first-hand what it means to take on the responsibility for important parts of Debian. By releasing this Free book they are doing, once more, such a wonderful service to the Debian community.
Nous espérons que vous apprécierez autant que nous cette pierre angulaire de la lecture libre sur Debian.
October 2015
Stefano Zacchiroli (Debian Project Leader 2010-2013), Lucas Nussbaum (Debian Project Leader 2013-2015) and Neil McGovern (Debian Project Leader 2015-incumbent)