The Galapagos Philosophy

The philosophy sets both the tone and the atmosphere of Galapagos. Galapagos, like its parent meta distribution, strives for excellence in coding. However, it seeks to do so in a more informal tone than most open-source distributions.

We strive to achieve a strong community spirit in which members share both mutual trust and self-respect. We aim for an atmosphere in which all contributors may feel safe and unthreatened by audacious and impersonal figures by use of their rank and authority. This goes against the typical ambiance of most 'for-profit' corporate styles.

We aim to attract newcomers and retain them; not by deeming ourselves better and higher than them, but by offering them support to increase their skills and knowledge. We feel we can achieve this by combining their own efforts of self-learning with sharing of the knowledge already set and in practice by our established developers.

We aim to mirror the model from our parent distribution of the two tier layers of users and developers, however purely on a technical level. We openly welcome the input of our userbase to the developer community, with the standard hopes and expectations of solid technical merit and good sense accordingly.

We aim to allow for the practices of recruiting, and our testing of candidate developers - both technical and personal - to be open to review and critique.

We are of the view that the key processes of QA and recruiting cannot survive if 'set in stone', but require input both offered and received in a spirit of good will and collaboration between both user and developer communities.

The distro has an overall emphasis upon the health of the personal inter-activities rather than cold and sterile demands of the technical elements of the coding of its packages. The philosophy pertaining to the process responsible for scrutiny and maintenance lean towards rectification of mistakes and shortcomings over sanctions and punishments for breakages and lesser forms of misdemeanour. It is better to train a committed individual to better their craft, than to expel them for not immediately grasping difficult concepts.