Debian and Ubuntu hold hands: A beginning of the worldwide Linux Community Collaboration

Inspite of the large and ever growing Linux community world wide, I always felt that we linuxers are a little scattered. We are part of a big Linux family but we still fight about whose Distro is better. Now, that I think about it, we do look like a family of brothers and sisters from different places, cultures etc. fighting over small things . I just read about the collaboration of maintainers of the two big distros, Debian and Ubuntu, and the Linux family seems to be coming together due to such efforts.

Now, about this Debian-Ubuntu Collaboration. The idea of different distros collaborating to ease out the life of both the users and the maintainers came up a few years back. But I believe the "Ubuntu-Debian" collaboration got a boost after this detailed and thoughtful mail from Mark Shuttleworth, explaining the benefits behind this noble idea.

One of the main points presented by Shuttleworth was to maintain universal equality of a software code that we provide to the user. e.g. If you are a developer/maintainer of a software you obviously want the users to like your software but users mostly get the code from various distributions Fedora, Debian etc. which are not always running the same version of it. This leads to difficulty in evaluating bug reports and applying patches. Every other distro has its own story and methods. You can't deal with all of them. But by keeping all of the distros in sync(it may look hypothetical), you will only have to contact on large community rather than many scatte

The plan was to actually formally align the upcoming freezes of Debian and Ubuntu, underlined by the foresight of achieveing a sync among the whole Distro family. But the freeze alignment didn't hold, although there has been some good collaboration among the maintainers of both distros, finally opening a path for the ultimate linux community collaboration.

A 2 years cadence has been selected. In words of Mark Shuttleworth,

Two years is a compromise between those who want 1 year releases for better support of cutting-edge hardware and those who want 7 year releases so their software stack doesn’t change before their job description does  .

The best part of this collaboration is that it shouldn't be looked upon as a deal between Debian and Ubuntu, it is open for all the distros, whoever wants to join. This is not a commitment, but if you are an upstream the least you can do is discuss the whole idea with the involved people, only then you will see the opportunities that lie here. Its good for small distros and upstreams. The collaboration is only going to give them opportunities to grow and prosper.

The idea of the collaboration when presented at first was looked upon as a capitalist strategy of Shutteworth which now looks more like a communist approach aimed at the ultimate goal of flourishing the ever growing Linux community, harmony for everyone .