The article claims that "Early 2004 is going to be make-or-break time for Debian... and if If Debian is going to continue to grow and develop, we're going to have to work on more than just technical innovation: we need to work on usability and visibility."
Does it matter? Debian seems different from many/most other distros. Commercial success is not the only success.
Ian Murdoch:
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3064611
"At LinuxWorld last week, a number of people asked me what Debian could do to make itself a more viable alternative to the commercial distributions in the enterprise market. That shouldn't be Debian's focus.
The focus shouldn't be on following the commercial distributions where they want to lead us, but rather on taking the lead--for example, by working with and strengthening existing vendor-neutral, community-owned standards efforts such as the Linux Standard Base (LSB)."
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/editorials/4959/1/
"People often ask me what I would identify as Debian's most important contribution to the world. I believe it's Debian's decision to adopt a community-based development model. As far as I know, this marks the first time that a project intentionally set out to be developed by the community that used it.
This is a central and critical component of the power of the open source movement--after all, if you remove the community from open source software, it's just software."
Syd