This has nothing to do with capitalism and I support capitalism. I didn’t bring it up because it doesn’t matter. This has to do with efficiency of creating two organizations doing the same thing. Please re-read this post.

Through out the whole article and the subsequent comments, I haven’t found a single instance of the word that seems, to my layman sensibilities, to be the crux of the matter. No one’s said the word “Capitalism” yet. asmiller-ke6seh has said marketing. maxstirner talked about the “commercial perspective”. Both are hints at it but stop short of the prime argument for me.

What I see is a community based product that’s free for use with the the Linux-Good-Faith-Expectation: that any improvements made by someone should be made for the good of the community by being returned to the product’s source.

What it sounds like is that Mark Shuttleworth has done a very capitalist thing. He’s taken something that was freely and legally available, poured money and resources into it to make it better, and built a business around his investment. There’s no stipulation in capitalism that he has to feed that work back to the community he originally sourced from, where as there’s almost a requirement that he to take what he can and make it as proprietary and branded as possible.

Indeed, maxstirner pointed out that a very capitalist monopoly has been made for support of the Ubuntu branded products.

Pardon me for a moment, and allow me to phrase this in a grossly black and white way, but it sounds to me like this is an argument about whether what’s best for Linux is capitalism or socialism.

If you feel the former is better, then naturally it follows that Ubuntu is a healthy, normal progression of the Debian OS, driven by the supply of a marketable demand.

If you feel the latter is better, then no, Ubuntu is nothing more than a parasitic abuse of the Good-Faith-Expectation of Linux.

The third option is of course that my take on the argument is completly a false dilemma, but I submit it any way for comment:)

Thanks for this information.

I would be curious to know what features you require of Debian, and why you can’t do those features in their codebase. Debian works with FreeBSD and Hurd. I realize those are just different kernels, but it does demonstrate that plugging in all kinds of different things are possible.

So to with Ubuntu. It is just not politically possible.

So like Ubuntu we embedded types have our own packaging systems like bitbake, ptxdist etc. etc. our own repo’s that pull kernel.org, debian then patch them and our own bug tracking systems.

So if Debian was serious the thousands of Embedded Linux developers would be able to use pure Debian and build our embedded castles. We even more than ubuntu need our apps, kernels and build systems to work. Look we contribute code to the Kernel on a regular basis as a group and have to.

Android will be the next gate crasher to the party. Why did Google not choose to code in Debian? Simply because there just is not enough time in ones life. Linus dropped Android patches from the Kernel and quick like a bunny Google made nice.

If Linus dropped ARM patches from the Kernel all manner of support would be forthcoming. It should be Debian’s goal to be at least as relevant.

Interesting idea. Thank you.

However, I’m not sure if it makes sense to tutor someone twice, once in Ubuntu, and again in Debian.

I’ve not seen places where Debian people are snobs. However, I do think that having a meaningful set of standards for the people who join is a good thing. If that is considered snobbery, that is not exactly correct. If you aren’t a “programmer” comfortable with the command line, then you shouldn’t be a DD. Some people in MOTU might not realize that.

As more Debian people join, they can improve the process for others. The new people will have enthusiasm and bring in other new people. I’m sure Debian people are frustrated with the current situation which makes them less welcoming. Why mentor people when the ship is sinking? If every DD got a useful assistant, meanwhile, that would be a very interesting situation. But Debian needs people ready to contribute. The interesting thing is that Debian seems to encourage those types of people to join in and even stay. The collective wisdom of the DD community is enormous. Let’s focus on growing it!

Yes I agree completely with these points.

I wouldn’t care about Ubuntu, except because I feel that it hurt Debian because it dropped Debian’s quality.
Ubuntu and Debian will sooner or later become incompatible. I think there are already some signs of this.

We already see this with Mandrake and RedHat; they became so different that less and less packages are compatible, and that now only compatible things are .rpm extensions of packages. The juice of Mandrake/Mandriva is over despite their successful enterprise/government business at some point. SuSE also did the same, they were sold to Novell, last month there were attempts of selling Novell.

Distributions come and go, but the history shows that Debian stays not because of money thrown there, let’s see how much juice Mark has. Even with Canonical’s big resources (read money) they cannot keep maintaining the huge Debian sets of packages/architectures – see only one arch and recently working on ARM. On desktops only Gnome (yes I know about [k,e,x]buntu but they are jokes). They only scratch the surface, but they are in fashion now.

Even so, with a larger team, they could have made it better. Creating a separate team is social engineering and damaging. Imagine if Mark had hired 10 desktop developers and put them on a better Debian desktop? Do you know what we would have achieved in the last 5 years? Instead he has spent a lot of time rebuilding what Debian already had. Debian was setup to take lots of volunteers, whereas Ubuntu was not. Existing Debian developers have been waiting for years for the volunteers to show up.

I’ve come to the realization that something like canceling MOTU would be a useful thing.

THE BEST DAMN DISTRO MARKETING PAGE I HAVE EVER SEEN….

http://www.elivecd.org/

WOW!

Check out that video!

Their logo at the end sucks a little though because the “e” is so bad it looks like “olive” instead of Elive.

Probably lose a lot of recommendations to “olive” if that is a distro.

I agree that Linux needs further polishing. As more geeks join in, it will get better: users -> developers -> users.

My article is mostly for developers to remind them that it is best if they use and contribute to Debian. It is what made Ubuntu and Mint even possible. Check out my book if you want to learn much more.

Here is the latest Debian artwork. I think it is not too flash, but nice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution