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Thread: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

  1. #11
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by FoolsGold_MKII View Post
    Ubuntu is the whole experience, which isn't just about the software itself, but also includes this community and forum.
    I also like the "software for the people of the world" theme.

  2. #12
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    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.

  3. #13
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by az View Post
    Good question.

    Upstream is a moving target and often, the individual pieces don't fit well together without help. A distro is a community of people who maintain a bunch of packages. The software itself is in source form. To run it, you need to compile it. The distro takes care of that and provides the end-user with a binary version of the software.

    They take one version of each piece of software, fix it up, release it and support it.

    To make all the apps work together, they often need tweaking. Along with tweaking, there needs to be a clear line of responsibility to keep an eye out for upstream bug fixes and security issues. Can you think of what a nightmare it would be to have to keep track of all the bugs and security issues for all the packages by yourself?

    So that's what maintaining and supporting the software is. The distro team also can contribute to upstream development. Ubuntu's installer was headed by Colin Watson, who was also the person who wrote (mostly) the current installer for Debian. Improvements made to the installer were brought to both distros at the same time.

    Lot's of fun things are happening with Apt, too. Those improvements will be brought back to Debian as well.

    Very nicely explained sir , Iam also grateful to the OP for asking this question.

    Once again thank you AZ

  4. #14
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    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...

  5. #15
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by Erunno View Post
    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.
    ummm....BS
    Linux Registered User #401979
    Ubuntu Registered User #14181

    Minds are like parachutes, dangerous if kept closed!

  6. #16
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by az View Post
    Good question.

    Upstream is a moving target and often, the individual pieces don't fit well together without help. A distro is a community of people who maintain a bunch of packages. The software itself is in source form. To run it, you need to compile it. The distro takes care of that and provides the end-user with a binary version of the software.

    They take one version of each piece of software, fix it up, release it and support it.

    To make all the apps work together, they often need tweaking. Along with tweaking, there needs to be a clear line of responsibility to keep an eye out for upstream bug fixes and security issues. Can you think of what a nightmare it would be to have to keep track of all the bugs and security issues for all the packages by yourself?

    So that's what maintaining and supporting the software is. The distro team also can contribute to upstream development. Ubuntu's installer was headed by Colin Watson, who was also the person who wrote (mostly) the current installer for Debian. Improvements made to the installer were brought to both distros at the same time.

    Lot's of fun things are happening with Apt, too. Those improvements will be brought back to Debian as well.
    That's nice and all, but there's one thing I want to say :
    at the beginning of development of each release, doesn't Ubuntu take all the packages from Debian first? I've read about that a lot, can't remember where though :/

  7. #17
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by mdsmedia View Post
    ummm....BS
    I'm glad you took your time for this well thought out rebuttal. I hope you didn't overstrain yourself.

  8. #18
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by Erunno View Post
    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.
    Utter BS....


    Edit:Missed mdsmedia's post, I agree

  9. #19
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by Erunno View Post
    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.
    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.

  10. #20
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    Re: What exactly is Ubuntu if everything's done upstream?

    Quote Originally Posted by Extreme Coder View Post
    That's nice and all, but there's one thing I want to say :
    at the beginning of development of each release, doesn't Ubuntu take all the packages from Debian first? I've read about that a lot, can't remember where though :/
    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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