Monday, February 12, 2007

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

After the news last week that Freespire and Linspire are going to be based on Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleweary announced today that Ubuntu will no longer drink from the Debian well. "We built our distribution on Debian because it was the best distro back then and Ubuntu has become simply the best distribution in the world. But now that Freespire is going to be based on the best distribution in the world, we're not going to let them steal the spotlight. Ubuntu is going to be based on Freespire and we're going to let them do the hard work." Mr. Worthashot also said that, since Ubuntu is going to become just a brown remaster of Freespire, Canonical will let the developers it poached from Debian go back to getting Etch ready for release next January. This incensing remark started a furious debate within the Debian community. Some members have even proposed basing Debian on DSL in order to have more frequent and better managed releases.

The Gentoo project also announced that their distribution will be based on Ubuntu: "We'll just take their source packages and slap them onto a LiveCD. You put it in the drive, you let 'er rip for 3-4 days, you spend a couple more days compiling codecs and all the goodies and you'll get an Ubuntu install by the time we release the next version." This attracted the attention of the Fedora developers, who invited their Gentoo colleagues to base their distribution on Fedora, provided they write release notes for test releases.

In related news, Mandriva has decided to reduce operating costs by basing their distribution on either PCLinuxOS or Ulteo, whichever realeases first.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Breaking news. The ULTEO founder just confirmed that his company merged with Pclinuxos: "PCULTEOS is the ultimate radical solution. Stay tuned."