My take on the "rapid rise of Ubuntu"

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

...which will probably end up blogged at some point soon.

At LinuxTag, I watched Benjamin "Mako" Hill defend Ubuntu against a room
full (and I mean full by the dozens) of angry Debian developers who
believe that a billionaire has hijacked years of their hard work and taken
the credit for it.

Frankly, he didn't do a very good job of this defense.  Kind of a tough
defense to mount, actually, since the Ubuntu folks put together a tool
that pulled in Debian patches and inadvertently (one hopes) stripped the
names of the original contributors out of the change logs.

Oops.

"We need the Debian community," he said.  "There's ten of us, and
thousands of you.  But hey, is a fork really such a bad thing?"

Good luck, Mako.

After the talk, I spoke briefly with Martin Michlmayer, former head of the
Debian project.  He was soliciting Fedora folks for our knowledge on "how
to get a release out the door every six months."  Not that we're brilliant
at it ourselves or anything, but we manage to get the job done, and get
new stuff in release after release.

There are, without doubt, things that we can learn from Debian/Ubuntu, and
I fully intend for us to do precisely that.  But bear in mind, gentlemen,
that there's a great deal that Debian/Ubuntu -- and everyone else -- can
learn from us.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan