Yes. (I fully agree with that assesment, @JWocky)
Besides I wanted to remember the first message of SHM on this board after he was permanently banned from King George III's FlightGear forum (A.K.A Curtis' Forum), was to cite Ubuntu's creator own words on the "Ubuntu is a hostile fork" thing, bugman proudly flags.
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=607&p=10589#p10586I Strongly recommend following the recommended read by SM, as a very well written and enlightening assay about the nature of opensource and its dining-table manners.
For what is Worth, I paraphrase almost the entire content below
Mark Shuttleworth wrote:Why is this important? Because passing patches around is not nearly as effective as working in a genuinely distributed revision control system. Many of the Ubuntu guys don't work on the distro, they work on tools like Bazaar, and HCT, which we hope will really accelerate the kind of collaboration that is possible in the open source world. Time will tell.
In summary: binary compatibility between Ubuntu and Debian is not a priority for us. We believe we contribute more to the open source world by providing patches to make Ubuntu (and Debian) packages work better, and providing a cutting edge (or bleeding edge, depending on your perspective) distribution for others to collaborate with. We invest a lot of energy in making sure our patches are widely published and easily available to developers of ALL other distributions as well as upstream, because that way we think our work will have the biggest long term benefit. And we develop tools (see Bazaar and Bazaar-NG and Launchpad and Rosetta and Malone) that we hope will make source code collaboration even more efficient.
What about forking the community? The Ubuntu community has grown very quickly, and that causes some people to worry that this growth might come at some cost to other open source communities, Debian in particular.
Given that patches can flow so easily between Ubuntu and Debian, it seems to me that the bigger we can make our total combined developer community, the better for both projects. Ubuntu benefits from a strong Debian, and Debian benefits from a strong Ubuntu. This is particularly true because the two projects have slightly different goals. Ubuntu gets to break new ground sooner, and Debian benefits hugely from those patches (just scan changelogs in Debian Sid since the Sarge release, and you'll see how many references to "Ubuntu" are in there. And that's only the cases where credit has been given. incentive If the Ubuntu and Debian communities worked in the same way, then I think there would be more truth to this concern, because we would attract the same sorts of people, which would mean that we were competing for talent. But the two communities are quite different. We organise ourselves differently, and we set different priorities. That means that we tend to attract different sorts of developers.
Now, there are certainly Debian developers who have started doing most of their work in Ubuntu now. There are also developers who work equally in Ubuntu and Debian. But the majority of the Ubuntu community is made up of newer developers, who are attracted to the Ubuntu way of doing things. There will always be some churn and movement between communities, and thats healthy because it helps to spread good ideas.
