However at times the business of basing one project on an existing one does tend to cause some friction. And this is more so when the projects are as visible and high-profile as Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu.
Debian is a free software project that began in 1993 - it has its own guidelines, a social contract, and puts out a high-quality distribution. As the developers are all volunteers, there is no fixed timeline for releases. While several other Linux distributions have used Debian as their base, none has gained so much prominence as Ubuntu, a project that began in 2004 and is now arguably the most popular among beginners and intermediate-level users.
The Ubuntu developers are all paid for their work. Some of them are former Debian developers; there are some who contribute to both distributions. The Ubuntu project is owned by Mark Shuttleworth, a former Debian developer who made his pile by founding Thawte, a company which provided digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold the company to VeriSign in 1999.
Ubuntu is based on the unstable branch of Debian; one of its advantages has been that with paid developers, it has been able to promise and put out a release every six months. Shuttleworth has made no secret about the fact that while Ubuntu will be free, the company behind it, Canonical, will provide support at a cost. By contrast, Debian's release schedule is based on the principle that something will be released when it is ready; the last release, Sarge, came out in mid-2005, nearly 3-1/2 years after the previous release.
At least some Debian developers appear to think that Ubuntu takes more than it gives; this led in part to some wearing T-shirts with the words "F--- Ubuntu" at the annual Debian conference in Mexico this year. Some of the common frustrations felt by the Debian crowd were outlined by long-standing Debian developer Martin Krafft in a long posting in his blog soon after the conference. And another Debian veteran Joey Hess has voiced fears that Ubuntu is reducing Debian to "a supermarket of components."
Elaborating on this, Hess wrote: "My main motive for contributing to Debian is to make Debian the best distro I can; I don't mind if others use that work, especially if stuff gets contributed back. But it's long been clear to me that the most important added value to Debian is not adding another package to the shelf, but finding new ways to integrate our software together."
He went on to say: "...contributing individual patches back to Debian is simply not enough for Debian to share Ubuntu's improvements. It puts Debian at best in the position of wasting a lot of time trying to play catch-up and figure out how a collection of patches to different packages fits together into a coherent overall improvement."