[Pardus-devel] What Happened to Pardus

[Bahadır Kandemir]

 Hello,

 I've resigned from TUBITAK in June 2010 after finding myself not enjoying my 
 job any more. Developing two different distributions with different code 
 base, trying to plan every process and policy from scratch, and working with 
 state institutions was exhausting, so I quit after 5 years.

 A few Pardus developers were tired like I was, so they quit as well in mid 
 summer. That was no big deal, since there were still many talented full time 
 developers working for the project. Then a game changing event happened, 
 government took over the TUBITAK [0] completely. TUBITAK was always under 
 pressure [1], but nothing effected projects under UEKAE (National Institute 
 of Electronics and Cryptography) like this one.

 Before 2010 summer, TUBITAK was managed by Nuket Yetis and UEKAE was managed 
 by her husband, Onder Yetis. When TUBITAK took a decision to pull together 
 all smaller institutes under an umbrella, she assigned her husband as the 
 chairman of the BILGEM (the "umbrella") and after that, she was accused of 
 showing favor for her husband. He wasn't really a great manager, but he was 
 the best choice since was managing UEKAE since it was a small electronics lab 
 in 90s. Mrs. Yetis was not showing favor but people in the government were 
 not thinking so. Mr. Yetis resigned as the manager and retired, and 
 government replaced Mrs. Yetis immediately.

 In Turkey, management changes effect whole institution in a very bad way. 
 Yetis couple were not great managers (OK Mrs. Yetis was one of the worst 
 TUBITAK chairman in the history), but new chairman and new board was even 
 worse. Government filled board with non-academic and non-talented people who 
 has nothing to do with science, research and development.

 Firing someone is very expensive if you are working in a government 
 institue, but you can assign people to another project which is based on 
 another cities; they will eventually resign. Problem solved. Many department 
 managers had to resign or retire, or silently moved to other cities and 
 changed their lives to keep their jobs. The bad thing was, almost all retired 
 or resigned people were the only people that believe in Pardus project in the 
 whole institue. Many engineers and managers were hating Pardus, because they 
 were so happy with their crappy code bases, development processes and beloved 
 Windows desktops. Making project work on Linux? WTF?

 In the end, Pardus project members were all alone, so they can be expended. 
 In a press dinner, new TUBITAK chairman was asked about the future of Pardus 
 and his response was "I don't know why people say that we are shutting down 
 Pardus, we have no such decision.", but developers were resigning one by one 
 every week. Just like Mrs. Yetis, he doesn't know what the heck is going on 
 in the institute.

 I've heard stories from resigned developers about how other project managers 
 were visiting Pardus office and recruiting people for their projects as if 
 Pardus office was a recruitment pool. They were just transferring employees 
 to other "important" projects. Pardus had like 35 employees last year, not it 
 has like 5. They are not shutting down the project, they are killing it very 
 slowly. Maybe they are going to keep it alive with one or two developers, 
 just in case.

 Last week new project manager, Ekin Meroglu, (who is a Pardus developer 
 since 2005) announced that rumors were not true, and TUBITAK was organizing a 
 workshop for the future of Pardus. This workshop won't change anything, I 
 tell you. TUBITAK won't hire new developers. They do this workshop to show 
 people that they are caring. They don't. Retired/resigned developers won't 
 work on Pardus remotely from their homes either, I'm sure of it. They are 
 extremely tired. Since it's almost impossible to find an open source related 
 job in Turkey, they are going to work for the dark side and won't find any 
 free time to contribute any open source project. Sad but true.

 I know there are plans to fork Pardus, but without paid developers it's very 
 hard to keep a Linux distribution project alive. TUBITAK was the reason that 
 project not being successful as Ubuntu or Fedora, but also it was the reason 
 that an open source project lived more than 5 years in Turkey. Community made 
 TUBITAK to organize such a workshop, a congressman was contacted by the 
 community members to talk about Pardus in the congress; these were amazing 
 achievements, but I don't think that anyone can make TUBITAK to heal Pardus 
 even with a supporter in the congress.

 Sorry for being so pessimistic, but that's what's going on.

 [0] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7363/full/477131a.html
 [1] http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090310/full/news.2009.150.html

-- 
 Bahadır Kandemir