Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 9th Aug 2009 19:07 UTC
Earlier this month, we reported that Debian had announced a new release schedule; a freeze during December, a release some time in the first half of the following year. After outcries from the Debian community, the December freeze aspect of the plan was reversed. Since most of the ire about this situation seemed to be directed towards Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth decided to step in and offer to put several Canonical employees to work on Debian instead of Ubuntu.
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Member since:
2006-01-01
Thom Holwerda wrote:
Actually, the initial criticism was that such an important decision was announced without any prior discussion on the Debian mailing lists, and that remained the main cause of discontent in the following discussion.
The discussion thread on the debian-project mailing list was started with this mail:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/07/msg00148.html
The discussion that followed can be read here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/07/threads.html
... and the discussion thread continues here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2009/08/threads.html
Mark Shuttleworth chimed in because, for some weird reason, he seems to believe that centralization and synchronization of the "free software industry" would be beneficial to everyone involved (and not just to the biggest distros). Personally, I believe that diversity and decentralization are vital to the free software community because they ensure that business-oriented corporations (like Microsoft or Canonical) cannot fully control the production and distribution of free software.
However, I'd expect Debian developers will find Shuttleworth's offer to put some Canonical employees to fix RC-bugs in Debian a most welcome gesture. A derivative distro like Ubuntu is actually helping itself most efficiently by helping its mother distro, since most of Ubuntu's codebase flows from Debian.