My writing compadre Bruce Byfield wrote that while “Ubuntu first appeared, the free and open source software (FOSS) community was delighted. But, “In 2011, that honeymoon is long past. Although Ubuntu remains the dominant distro, criticisms of its relationship with the rest of FOSS seem to be coming every other month.” To which, I can only reply, “So what else is new?”

Ubuntu started as a Debian fork almost seven years ago and I can still find Debian developers who are ticked off about it to this very day. Since then, as Byfield notes, Ubuntu, and its parent company Canonical has gotten into hot-water with one party after the other in open-source circles.

A short list would include Debian’s continued jealousy getting in the way of co-operation between the closely related Linux distributions; countless accusations that Canonical/Ubuntu is all about promoting Ubuntu and not Linux; and that Ubuntu doesn’t contribute its fair share to the Linux kernel and other up-stream open-source programs.

But this, this is all old news. Ubuntu has long endured these criticisms. So have the other Linux distributions.

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