Am on mobile so will be brief. Not trying to incite a religious war or anything. Knoppix was launched & took the web by storm in 2002. Klaus Knopper was the first guy to think & launch a live cd. He used a combo of hwsetup (from Redhat), a whole bunch of stuff from Debian. There's actually an interview of him in May 2002.
Ubuntu meanwhile for all their resources launched in/around mid 2005. I remember both as both also came in lfy couple months later. IIRC lfy had also shared distrowatch interview.
So Klaus Knopper took stuff from rh, Debian & later even bsd (security tools). The above mentioned hwsetup is still used while installing Debian.
That alone should tell you. Btw one way or another Debian did get influenced & started carrying the same tools.
Ubuntu on the other hand, has deviated a lot. How good or bad I leave to other's judgments.
Till later.
Fwiw, wayback archive machine could be used to authenticate the data, I might be wrong by few months but definitely Ubuntu came much much later.