iTWire - Debian and Ubuntu: uneasy coexistence

Debian and Ubuntu: uneasy coexistence

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 14 September 2006 23:45

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In recent days, the differences between the two groups has been brought into focus by the resignation of Mark Garrett from the Debian project. Garrett had been a developer for four years and was one of those who threw his hat in the ring for the post of project leader last year. (Australian Anthony Towns won the election for leader). Garrett made a public statement about leaving in which he praised the more rigid structure of Ubuntu; in his own words "having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases."

(The irony of Garrett's words is that here we have a developer of free software actually expressing a preference for the what appears to be more of a "cathedral" model of development. The word "cathedral" was coined by open source advocate Eric S. Raymond to characterise the way proprietary software development took place - he contrasted it with what he called the "bazaar" model. The best example of the latter, Raymond postulated, was the Linux kernel.)

Friction between Debian and Ubuntu has been developing for some time; last year, the founder of the Debian project, Ian Murdock, was concerned enough to call for timely release cycles by the Debian project. He also urged that an attempt be made to keep the growing family of Debian derivatives united around the common core of the distribution.
At least some Debian developers appear to think that Ubuntu takes more than it gives; this led in part to some wearing T-shirts with the words "F--- Ubuntu" at the annual Debian conference in Mexico this year. Some of the common frustrations felt by the Debian crowd were outlined by long-standing Debian developer Martin Krafft in a long posting in his blog soon after the conference. And another Debian veteran Joey Hess has voiced fears that Ubuntu is reducing Debian to "a supermarket of components."

Elaborating on this, Hess wrote: "My main motive for contributing to Debian is to make Debian the best distro I can; I don't mind if others use that work, especially if stuff gets contributed back. But it's long been clear to me that the most important added value to Debian is not adding another package to the shelf, but finding new ways to integrate our software together."

He went on to say: "...contributing individual patches back to Debian is simply not enough for Debian to share Ubuntu's improvements. It puts Debian at best in the position of wasting a lot of time trying to play catch-up and figure out how a collection of patches to different packages fits together into a coherent overall improvement."

How the differences will be resolved remains to be seen. But everyone who has any interest in either camp would surely be hoping that things will be worked out in a mature manner in such a way that both projects can move forward.

Disclosure: the author has been a user of Debian for the last six years.