As announced earlier, I recently gave a talk on Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian and the process of derivation and the difficult process of balancing forking and collaboration in Manizales, Colombia. This talk ended up being more of an introduction to Ubuntu and to Debian and Debian derivation and I didn’t really get to dig my teeth into the key issues that the title might imply to the degree that I’d hoped. The talk was mostly a combination of my recent talks Customizing Debian given at NYLUG and BaDoPi and Introducing Ubuntu given at GULEV.
In addition to the fact that there was a packed gym of more than 1,500 highly receptive people, the talk will probably be most memorable for the fact that I managed to spill water onto and severely damage my laptop during the talk and for the fact that the power went out for 10 minutes in the middle of the speech.
For folks that are interested in a general introduction to Ubuntu and its relationship to Debian, or who want to give their own version of the talk, you can use all of the information I have:
- Slides in English in the following formats:
- Slides translated into (Colombian) Spanish in the following formats:
- Talk Notes (which I didn’t actually stick to very closely and was mostly recycled from the earlier talks) in the following formats:
I hope to revisit this topic again soon and do a small part to stimulate a productive discussion in Ubuntu on ways the relationship to Debian can be improved and reinforced and in Debian about ways that we can manage relationships with derivers more constructively.
Clearly, Ubuntu folks are learning a lot, through things done right and through things we can do better in the future, on how to collaborate in doing what I really believe has the potential to become a new, better kind of fork that — if we can pull it off — may have a lasting impact on the way that Free and Open Source software (and distributions in particular) and developed. The CDD folks are shedding light on the issue from another interesting angle.