People commonly forget, in FOSS, people don't really compeate for developers. Any improvements made by Ubuntu developers can be used by Debian developers. The ability to borrow code is the benifit of the GPL. Any improvements that someone makes to one project are also useable by other projects. That is why linux eventually surpassed Unix. Linux started out inferior to most commercial Unix based OS's but because they were close sourced, they became fragmented. One developer would create a feature for one Unix distro, and others would spend all their time trying to catch up. With FOSS if one developer adds a feature, the developers of other projects are perfectly able to take advantage of it, and don't need to spend all their time reinventing the wheel and can improve on the new feature if desired. If Ubuntu gets more developers, Debian can still benifit from it. That is how Ubuntu got started, it used Debian code but built on it. Debian can do the same, the situation is just sorta backwards now.
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It isn't like Ubuntu and Debian compeate
Posted by: Monsuco on September 02, 2006 09:00 AM#