Cited with little context from a post of Russ Allbery, regarding the decision to create Canonical:
Debian was then, and is even more today, a huge ocean liner of a project with a very bad turning radius.
Incidentally, are redi and badvogato the only members who are still posting unsyndicated diary entries as often as most months? Advogato's circle for turning out of the way of spammers can also be considered rather bad. I have a suggestion for a patch that should be simple enough to be feasibly applied that should fix the problem. I'll post an article shortly.