On Sat, 2012-10-13 at 20:35 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > No. However, Debian is an upstream to many other distributions, just as > upstream developers are to us. Don't think that's true. When Debian takes software from upstreams, it's majorly a case of making a collection (of course with adaptions). When a derivative take Debian, it's - compared to single software - more like forking it. Now forks can have benefits for (free) software, but they also can have disadvantages, especially if there's no good reason for forking. Some of Debian's forks may do so because they want to add modifications which they wouldn't get into Debian easily. E.g. for policy/DFSG reasons... I guess that's ok,... but one can already question whether it wouldn't be better if it was tried to bring these changes into a state where they fit the quality of Debian. Some of course are special ones like rescue disks or so... no problem with them. In the case of *buntu... well to be honest I don't really see a reason unless someone wanted to create a company behind his distro, which wasn't possible with Debian. And IMHO, making it more "desktop/user" friendly (actually I don't think that Debian would be not) would have also been possible in Debian itself. > On the whole, commercial entities cooperate better with other commercial > entities than they do with volunteer organizations, just as much as > volunteer organizations cooperate better with other volunteer > organizations instead of other commercial entities. That's true... but wrt Ubuntu it sounds rather like an excuse, because many projects show that it's well possible to build up commercial support without making a fork. > I don't think Debian is losing ground to Ubuntu. Well we'll see... I'm quite sceptical... and truly hope I'm wrong and people can look back in some years and laugh what that Mitterer jerk wrote about ;) > If anything, Ubuntu is > gaining ground on non-free software. You can't be angry about that. That's a tricky question... ask yourself what RMS would probably answer. Making opensource more open for proprietary stuff is sometimes simply necessary... but this may ultimately also become a big threat for the free software world, namely then when that non-free stuff plays such an important role that we couldn't get rid of it anymore. When you followed that recent discussion on lkml, where some Nvidia guys wanted to remove GPL from some kernel source files (for their evil deeds ;) )... you may see what I'm thinking about. Cheers, Chris.
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