Ubuntu and Userlinux

[Benj. Mako Hill]

<quote who="Matthew Garrett" date="2005-03-24 16:15:06 +0000">
> > I've witnessed some antagonism towards Ubuntu as a whole from
> > certain individuals in the Debian UK community and their
> > bitterness seemed much more personal than anything else.  Perhaps
> > it's simply a story of sour grapes?
> 
> Really? Which ones? I can understand people not wanting to do things
> like hand out Ubuntu CDs at Debian stands (after all, there's
> non-free software on them), but beyond that I've seen no significant
> antagonism at all.

There have been a number of people who have been unhappy about the way
that attribution has happened in changelogs and the way that certain
changes (especially feature additions and changes that are not bug
fixes) have not made it back to Debian maintainers as fast as the
Debian maintainer would have liked. There have also been many many
cases where things worked well but the one unhappy person makes more
noise than 100 happy folks. :-/ This isn't unique to Ubuntu or
software.

It's a difficult problem. Ubuntu hackers are going out of their way to
give back to our upstreams and in most situation are succeeding. But
things sometimes fall on the floor and people, reasonably or
unreasonably, have griped about it on their blogs and on Debian
lists. I've seen it at least half a dozen times.

I think that Ubuntu has a *very* good (and well deserved) reputation
in the Free Software community and in the Debian community for that
matter. I think that these sorts of complaints can be read as cues
toward a way that we can work, within Ubuntu and in some cases within
Debian or the larger Free Software community as well, to build a more
productive and collaborative Free Software community! :)

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at canonical.com