Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."

Comments

Re:[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone

[portmapper]

> Ubuntu, on the other hand, is far more focused than Debian is. Starting with the general base
> (the plateau, as Mark called it), it builds a strong distribution targeted to only 3-4
> architectures (counting SPARC), which opens many more options.

Ubuntu's focus is to be the "market leader". Part of that is to encourage hardware manufacturers
to make binary-only drivers to be included in Ubuntu. This undermines efforts to get the
hardware manufacturers to release hardware specs.