It's interesting that this Rowe fellow cites Debian as being uncooperative, when Shuttleworth in 2005 clearly wanted nothing to do with the proposed DCC Alliance, whose goal was greater cooperation, that Ian Murdock wanted to form.

I totally agree with jdkaye, debian has build some character in me, figurative speaking, i only use it in my home since i'm a programmer (not by choice) and not a sysadmin, so everything i tried has been small, no big server, no high traffic and a lot of virtualization with vmware, its my little datacenter.

I learned a lot and learned so well that i was talking to a friend of my wife who is a actually a sysadmin and i was giving him some tips, recommending apps and exchanging few commands to help him with the day by day.

People say debian is hard, because they don't want to learn and wanted things solved without understanding why that happened, i bought some debian books after i was running it because i want to learn more and deeply,Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Debian System: Concepts and Techniques and Linux in a Nutshell and some others, but if you never had problems, you will not learn.

Every distro have their function, target a specific audience and is great, that's the power of open source, the power of choice. And my choice is debian

I never once said Debian was being uncooperative. Read the blog.

It's stuff like this entire thread that makes me wonder why I even bother with Open Source. Honestly, nothing personal to any one person here, but I think as a collective whole, the entire Open Source community, including all of the Debian and Ubuntu developers and users need a collective "go outside and play" day. Seriously - get up, move away from your computer, expose yourselves to some sunlight and fresh air.

We are talking about software - a computer operating system. You'd think someone had insulted your Mother or dissed your Religion or something.

I couldn't imagine taking ANY piece of software THAT seriously.

The community will always react to a perceived attack, no matter what your intention when you (and by you I mean anyone) write an article, unless it is either glowing about <enter distro/decision here> or follows a known line you will always be attacked back. All dates back to the time when *nixers were seen as extreme/geeks/nerds/outsiders for not using Apple or Microsoft products.

Shuttleworth's offer makes sense - he has money, time and people. If he can use any or all of these to help Debian get releases out of the door faster then the *buntus benefit because they will gain by the stability and maybe not have to release versions that Debian would consider Testing at best.

That said, Debian and the Deb community do have a long history of doing things their way - and this isn't a bad thing, it is part of the flavour of Debian.

Anyway, stop attacking Jayson Rowe - he wrote an article on his blog giving his thoughts and opinions. If you do want to get an idea of his thoughts, read the rest of the blog and then come back more informed (I haven't, by the way. Sorry Jayson ) but don't assume a stance based on just one article and then decide he hates F/OSS. Doing that does him, you and the rest of LQ a disservice.

IMHO, it only makes sense for Ubuntu, not Debian.
Shuttleworth's proposal (I wouldn't call it an offer as it only benefits himself and Ubuntu) is about the "freeze" date, not the release date.
This freeze date has never been a problem (unlike all release dates).

now ill admit, there have been a number of really good points made in this thread already, but i think id like to point out a few more just for the record:

(1) i really dont care what ANYBODY says...linux really IS user friendly. its just really picky about who its friends are.

(2) debian and its derivatives (knoppix, ubuntu, etc) are noticably easier to manage than so many other distros (ie RH, and espically gentoo) due to the superior package management (thank you apt!) and the diligence of so many developers out there who invest and donate their OWN time to the debian project, and have made it what it is today.

(3) for all of those of you out there who may wanna slam ubuntu, please realize that, like windows, it DOES have its own place in the world today. ubuntu's primary goal/focus (at least as far as I can tell) is to work toward bringing a linux desktop and server platform into the mainstream to finally give the typical user something that is as easy to install as windows, and that doesnt take an outright linux geek like us to learn to use efficiently. and honestly, i think ubuntu is still moving in the right direction toward that goal. is ubuntu the most awesome linux distro ever? of course not. after my own experimentation with ubuntu server, i went right back to debian lenny, and dont intend to look back. I will admit though, I started using ubuntu desktop as an experiment back when 8.04 was released, and Ive stuck with it through 2 release upgrades and still like it so far (except for the piss poor ATI support, of course)

so for those of you out there who may want to diss one distro or another, keep in mind that everything does still have its place and purpose, and though you may be right in that one may be better than another for a particular task, that doesnt necessarily mean the other guy (or girl) using the lesser OS is up to the challenge of tacking the good stuff.

Come on. To characterise an entity as being not willing to "work together to achieve a common goal" is the same as characterising them as being "uncooperative".

It's not a big deal to me, though. I'm an end user who enjoys Debian. I occasionally try to help out other Linux users here, regardless of which distro they are using (which often is Ubuntu). What's happening behind the scenes between the businessmen of Canonical Ltd and the Debian community is not really a concern to me*.

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*Unless, of course, they screw it up like they did with Impi Linux.

What I would like to clerify is they DO go towards a dumb user... They just release slower than Ubuntu because of their beliefs. They have easily 20x the developers that ubuntu does... When you have so many different teams developing movement sometimes gets slow... That's the beauty of it all though, we have 3 different branches. Really Ubuntu is more like a branch of debian such as Lenny/Squeeze/Sid. You would compare Ubuntu to unstable, just a modified version. Debian can be just as advanced and user friendly, I started with debian 6 years ago and easily prefer it over Ubuntu.

I don't see much of a difference at all, other than luxuries. But I didn't go to linux for luxuries, I came to linux because I wanted something that ran, and ran quick.