Debian Vs. Ubuntu

But at the same time, if they are moving away from the Debian core, it will become increasingly difficult to give back. Incompatibilities between the two platforms will arise, and patches might not work correctly between the two.

I suppose you could say that ubuntu are giving back to the community, what with various distributions such as Mepis using Ubuntu as it's engine. If you wanted to, you could take all of the best bits of ubuntu, and use them for your own ends.

Why is it that Xandros and Linspire never get pulled up on this? After all, they take all they can from Debian and never give anything back. I don't even think Xandro's website mentions debian once.
IMO, I think it's down to the jealousy of the Debian developers - and who can blame them. Debian has been around for a long time, and i'd consider it to be THE MOST important Linux distribution ever. But then this new distribution comes along, and in the space of two years becomes the most popular Linux distribution.

 

Agreed, but they have stuck very rigidly to Debian Testing since the beginning. As of right now, they are still a Debian distro. As for other Deb-based distros, from what I've heard from Deb devs, they contribute more code than Ubuntu back to the Debian tree. The exception is Mepis, who contributes even less than Ubuntu.

All I'm saying here is that it'd be a good thing if Ubuntu contributed at least a bit, since they owe a lot, and have a lot of reources to give. Google has been faulted in the past for not pushing code contributions for their unique search capabilities back upstream to the Linux kernel (they don't have to under the GPL, since they are only using the code in-house, and not redistributing the binaries). However, Google does sponser the Summer of Code and other OSS-friendly stuff ...and Google's a 100% for profit company!

 

Which is fair enough

From the looks of this artical though, I get the impression that ubuntu want's to become the next debian. The platform for which most other distributions are based. This would explain the lack of patches heading upstream. Which, if that was the case, would not be very sportsman-like