W. Martin Borgert

Debian on Mobile Devices

After an exciting and incredibly well-attended BoF at DebConf 17 in Montréal, interesting developments regarding mobile devices continued (in no particular order and without any attempt of being complete or fair):

1. The Pyra, while still not released (as of 2018-02-07), nears completion of hardware and casing.
2. Purism announced their plans for the Librem 5, a Debian based smartphone. Their crowdfunding campaign was amazingly successful.
3. Another recent crowdfunding reached their financial goal in only one day: The plan to create a free Linux driver for the Allwinner VPU, started by Bootlin.
4. ZeroPhone has constant progress on both hardware and software side,

as well as many other projects.

Let us look, where we are one year later. Which ideas took off - more or less, which did not?

Debian & XMPP: packaging and infrastructure

This in mainly about

1. packaging XMPP software (clients, servers, libraries) both within the XMPP team (https://salsa.debian.org/xmpp-team/) and elsewhere.

2. the XMPP infrastructure of Debian itself (prosody on vogler.d.o).

Everybody interested in one or the other topic is invited.

Does Debian respect users privacy?

Long before the Snowden revelations or recent stirs about Cambridge Analyticas use of Facebook data, the Debian community was and continues to be very attentive about privacy aspects of using our operating system. Still, privacy is not a “core value” of Debian. It is not mentioned in our social contract nor in the policy manual.

Because privacy is important to many in the Debian project and probably most of our users, we might like to discuss privacy aspects of the Debian operating system and the applications we deliver, develop guidelines to improve on it, and help our users to understand how to protect their privacy when using Debian. This becomes also more relevant because of new data protection laws, like the EU GDPR.

This BoF should help us to clarify, whether we need to do something and what. Maybe develop a “Debian privacy manual”? Or create yet another team? Also, we can discuss whatever we like related to Debian and privacy.

There is already a team packaging privacy related software, and another team, that is responsible for privacy of Debian infrastructure. But here we like to discuss privacy implications of the Debian OS to its users.