I am not native english so maybe it's just me, but I think the title is misleading because it suggests that Debian could be struggling with a situation where developers would massively drift away (my first reaction was "what ?? is there really a significant amount of devs that are leaving Debian now, and why ?"), while actually it's more a discussion on how to bring awareness to a team and encourage developers to better communicate with colleagues when they have a life change that would lower their commitment (which can happen to anyone, and in any project), so that the project can better handle when a developer "drifts away".

I believe the problem with Debian and many open source projects is that communities outside the US, Greater China, India, and some advanced European countries are relatively weak, making it difficult for project leader-level figures to emerge. I was born and raised in South Korea, a virtual open-source wasteland. Listening to testimonies from developers working here, many say, “I was captivated by the GNU spirit and wanted to contribute, but the Korean community's operations were poor, and clique-based territorialism was severe.” Ultimately, many open-source projects paradoxically miss out precisely because of their idealism and open management culture. I'd like to summarize it this way:

- Combining open source developers outside the core development regions and major cultural spheres could potentially secure roughly as many contributors as the entire US. - Funding shortages for non-profit foundations are deeply entrenched. Denying or attempting to fix this immediately becomes greed. - It is possible to manage language barriers, cultural barriers, and guidelines for distant countries without becoming a greedy for-profit entity. - This does not mean holding DebConf in every country. However, if the awareness is simply that ‘there used to be no borders, but now it's different from the 90s’ regarding the shortage of personnel, then improvements should be more proactive. - The 2020s are no longer an era of romanticism where one flies from Angola to Germany just for the sake of romance. - Especially as Debian has established itself as an invisible system, becoming the backbone of countless cloud services, there is less room for romanticism to intervene.

I've used Debian since 2015 and have had no complaints during that time. Korea also had ‘administrators’ who spared no expense on plane tickets for GNU since the 90s, but most have now stepped down due to age, or, exhausted from trying to salvage communities torn apart by toxic members, have turned around and declared ‘BSD was right’. However, the project's sustainability deteriorating due to a ‘lack of administrators’ is definitely something that needs to be considered. If sufficient people cannot be recruited, and given that we cannot extend the freeze cycle like Slackware at present, communication between upstream and downstream and the active recruitment of multinational developers are important to resolve the complaints of ‘dependent families’ like Ubuntu.

Try making the term as a developer time limited, such as for a two-year period. The developer must actively renew the term. The point wouldn’t be to kick developers out after two years; there would be no limit on renewals and no requirement for approval. Rather, it makes the commitment a limited rather than unlimited one and forces the developer to periodically think: do I still want to do this? Then, passively taking no action causes the commitment to end, rather than the developer having to actively say “I don’t want to do this anymore.” This takes the shame out of it.

I once got rms himself reaching out to me, when my mails got stuck. Gmail probably dropping spam from unknown GNU accounts. That was quite a challenge! Hope it never happens to you.

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Debian's Data Protection Team was established back in 2018 for dealing with European data protection legislation like the GDPR.

perhaps nobody would waste their life volunteering on such crockery. this is not a task for a developer but a mindless apparatchik

When Debian is making decisions to abandon social media accounts which give them reach outside of their own bubble from the 90s consisting of mailing lists and irc it is hard to see there be a sustainable future for the project.