The two events (leaving Debian and joining Canonical) are completely unrelated.

I remember when you were actively maintaining dpkg in Debian. I remember that, along with many other developers, you stopped dedicating your time to Debian when Ubuntu hired you. All in all, this left some key areas in Debian stagnating.

Of course, there’s absolutely no problem with that. As volunteers we decide how much time we want to spend on it, don’t we? I regret you lost interest in it, just like I regret due to personal reasons I had to put aside most of my work in Debian. But nobody is to blame because of that.

Things are as they are, but let’s put it clear: when there’s money around, you can’t easily just say you moved to Ubuntu just because Ubuntu is nice and Debian isn’t. I think the primary question you should ask yourself is: would you be working for Ubuntu if Debian was a company and you previously had been a Debian employee? Even if you believe that, it’s quite difficult to make it credible to others.

Surely NOBODY commits a package to SID “because” it’s bug-ridden. Committing a package is part of the process. I believe packages go into SID pretty soon after they’re committed, then they automatically promote to Testing if nobody has found a serious problem in a set amount of time (two weeks?).

I believe Ubuntu snapshots are generally based on Testing, though individual changes to packages bypass the Debian process when they’re important to a release.

Surely the situation is similar in MEPIS or Linspire or Knoppix or any other Debian “child” distro.

Perhaps we should consider that if it were not for the decision made by Stallman based on morality and ethics, free software would not even exist in the first place. So our opportunity to have fun and make use of free software owes a debt to the struggle to do the right thing.

Then of course we can throw morality and ethics out of the window and go buy Microsft software. Thats quite useable and people have lots of fun with it.

Even though conflict in itself is a bad thing, I cannot help but admire people who stand up for doing the right thing – even if they might have made a mistake and actually be doing the wrong thing.

My biggest issue with Ubuntu is I dont see how you can make a reliable distro out of unreliable (SID) software. By definition its in SID because its bug ridden. Can someone explain how that works?

I can totally understand why you are upset at those things. I’m a Debian developer, though not an Ubuntu one, and I agree that there are things from Debian’s side that haven’t been as they should.

I would also add, though, that these small handful of developers are not representative of the larger project. I appreciate the work Ubuntu has done. I know that communication between Ubuntu and Debian has not been the best, from either side, and both sides have already acknowledged that and seem to have been working to improve things.

To Howard Coles, Jr., I would say that please remember that Debian developers are responsible for a lot of what makes up Ubuntu, and as a Debian developer who tries to be responsive towards bug reports, to write useful software, and to make things Just Work for users, you are making an error by lumping thousands of Debian developers in single bin.

I really like Debian’s apt functionality, and their emphasis on stability, (even if it is a double edged sword ie distro stays up but by the time its’s released its too freaking old). However, their stubbornness and bloated egos are just too much to bear. they act as though they contain the universe and every one should bow to them. Crap on the users, its us developers who are important is the way they act to me. I’m not a developer, just a lowely user. I was exceedingly glad to have found Kubuntu as it provided apt functionality, and user focus.
Good luck, and thanks for the stand. There are many of us users who are voting for Ubuntu, which is why the Debian snobs are so ugly toward your distro. And, by all means keep the documentation IN the distro.