Ubuntu is mostly a marketing machine which doesn't really contribute awfully much to upstream or Linux in general. At least RedHat and Novell pay a lot of upstream developers (Kernel, GNOME, KDE, X, etc) while Ubuntu mostly develops for itself and leeches other distributions effort.
AZ answer is correct, but he missed one tiny part which is choice. Every distro has what the developers think is the right way to go, I mean, in Linux world it's not strange that you have 2 or 3 projects (sometime even more, way more) to do the same thing and the developers choose what they think is the propper technology to go; for example, sme of the older guys remember that 3 years ago was a debacle about X system management, and some distros had Xfree system and other would load with the X.org technology, and it didn't matter they were Debian based. Packaging is the difference that everyone notice, but under the hood there's ton's of little changes, for example, not so long ago most of the Distros came with OpenOffice 1.X and very few with OpenOffice 2.X or they had Koffice, little diferences like that makes a big diference, from using the stable release of the kernel or having the unstable, using xorg or xfree, having propietary drivers or not, using the 2.6.22 kernel with a Xfree system or the 2.6.20 with xorg. The combinations are practically endless, that's why every distro performs different, plus the tweaks that the devs have to make to put it all together.
Free your mind...
Is that so?
http://akademy2007.kde.org/sponsors/
http://www.guadec.org/sponsors
I could continue searching but saying the canonical doesn't fund free software is BS and FUD.
Well, the topic was not really about Ubuntu's relationship with Debian. Ubuntu is a Debian derivative. As such, they start off with packages from Debian unstable, pick a subset of them (a very small number in comparison to what is in all of Debian) and support them - which means all the work that you would expect to tweak and fix up the package.
Ubuntu can release a lot faster than Debian because they only support a small number of packages. Ubuntu gives back the work they do to Debian. For example, most of the work to transition from Xfree86 to Xorg was done by Ubuntu. Lots of work on the debian installer was done by Ubuntu. Gnome is up-and-running in Ubuntu before Debian. There are plenty of other examples. It's not a one-way relationship.
I lost a "z". Anyone seen it around here?
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