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Custom Debian Distributions
Chapter 5 - Distributions inside Debian


5.1 To fork or not to fork

There are many distributions which decided to fork from a certain state of Debian. This is perfectly all right because Debian is completely free and everybody is allowed to do this. People who built those derived distributions had certain reasons to proceed this way.


5.1.1 Commercial forks

If Debian should be used as the base for a commercial distribution like Lindows, Libranet or Xandros. etc. there is no other choice than forking because these companies normally add some stuff which is non-free. While Custom Debian Distributions might be interesting in technical terms for those commercial distributions to make it easier to build a separate distribution these non-free additions are not allowed to be integrated into Debian and thus integration into Debian is impossible.


5.1.2 Non-commercial forks

Custom Debian Distributions are a solution for derivatives from Debian which are as free as Debian but had certain reasons to do a fork. Most of these reasons existed in the past but are vanished now because Debian was becoming more flexible regarding to adaptations for special purposes. To increase this flexibility the Custom Debian Distributions approach was invented. Some examples of forks from Debian which probably are able to integrate back into Debian:

SkoleLinux
Mentioning SkoleLinux in the category of forks is more or less history because the SkoleLinux people did a really great job to enhance Debian for their own purpose (debian-installer) and now the Custom Debian Distribution Debian-Edu (see above) is equal to SkoleLinux. This is the recommended way for forked distributions and the reasons for this recommendation are given below.
DeMuDi
The Agnula project which is founded by European Community (in fact the first Free Software project which was founded by the EU at all) did a fork for the following reasons:
Technical
Some special requirements for the kernel and configuration stuff. This is more or less solved in the upcoming Debian release
License
When DeMuDi started not enough free programs of this field did exist. This situation is better now.
Organisational
Because of the founded status of the project an extra distribution has to be developed. To accomplish this requirement Custom Debian Distributions plan to build common tools to make the task to build separate CDs with the contents of only a single distribution.

This shows that there is no real need for a fork any more and in fact the organiser of the DeMuDi project is in contact to bring back all the necessary start. (That is why DeMuDi is mentioned in the list of Custom Debian Distributions above.)

LinEx
LinEx is the very successful Distribution for schools in the Region Extremadura in Spain. The work of the LinEx people perhaps made Debian more popular than any other distribution. The project was founded by the local government of Extremadura and each school in this region is running this distribution. While this is a great success the further development of LinEx has to face the problems which will be explained below. So it might be worth considering to follow the path of SkoleLinux to integrate the needed stuff back into Debian. The LinEx people just did the first step for instance to try to get a free license for the very nice program .

If developers of a non-commercial fork consider to integrate back into Debian in the form of a Custom Debian Distribution it might occure that there topic is covered by a Custom Debian Distribution yet. For instance this would be the case for LinEx which has absolutely the same target like Debian-Edu. On the other hand some special adaptations might be necessary to fit the requirements of the local educational system. These specific changes which might be necessary would be called flavours of a Custom Debian Distribution.


5.1.3 Disadvantages of separate distribution

In general a separate distribution costs extra effort. Because it is hardly possible to hire enough developers who can double the great work of many volunteer Debian developers this would be a bad idea for economical reasons. These people would have to deal with continuous changes to keep base system, installer etc. up to date with the current Debian development. It would be more sane to send patches which might be solve some special requirements to Debian instead of maintaining a complete Debian tree containing these patches.

Debian is well known for its strong focus to security. Security is mainly based on manpower and knowledge. So the best way to deal with security issues would be to base onto the Debian infrastructure instead of inventing something new.

New projects with special intentions often have trouble to become popular to the user group they want to address. This is a matter of the critical mass which was explained in General problem, Section 3.4.

Larger Free Software projects need certain infrastructure like HTTP-servers, FTP-servers (both with mirrors), a bug tracking system etc. Normally it is hard to build up an infrastructure which is available for free in Debian.

Forking would be a bad idea.


5.1.4 Advantages of integration into Debian

Debian has a huge user base all over the world. Any project which is integrated in Debian has a good chance to become public on the back of Debian if potentially interested people just notice that there is something which enables them to solve their problems. So there is no need for extra research on the side of the users and no need for advertising for a special distribution necessary. This fact was observed in the Debian-Med project which is well known for many people in medical care. It would not have gained this popularity if it would have been separated from Debian.

You get a secure and stable system without extra effort for free.

Debian offers a sophisticated Bug Tracking System for free which is a really important resource for development.

There is a solid infra structure of HTTP-servers, FTP-servers with mirrors, mail-servers, LDAP directory of developers with a strongly weaved web of trust (GPG-key signing) for free.


5.1.5 Enhancing Debian

By making changes to some packages to make them fit for the target user group the overall quality of Debian can be enhanced. In this way enhancing Debian by making them more user friendly is a good way for the community to bring back something to Debian. It would be a shame if somebody would refuse all the advantages from keeping a project inside Debian and tries to cope with the disadvantages because he just does not know how to do it right and that it is normally easy to propagate changes to Debian. For instance see How to ask for packages which are not yet included, Section A.1 how you can ask for including a certain piece of software into Debian. The next section describes the reason why Debian is flexible enough to be adapted to any purpose.


5.2 Adaptation to any purpose

Debian is developed by about 1000 volunteers. This means that most of the Developers are flexible enough to care for their own interests. So Debian is not bound on commercial interest.

Who is afraid about this amount of freedom of every single developer should know that there are very strict rules (the policy) which glue all things together.

There is one common interest of each individual developer to get the best operating system for himself. This way people with similar interests and tasks profit from the work of single developers and if those users work together with the developers by sending patches or bug reports for further enhancement Debian can be prepared also for special tasks.

For instance developers have children in real life or work in some special fields of work and so they try to make the best system for their children (Debian-Jr / Debian-Edu) or their field of work (Debian-Med, Debian-Lex, ...).

In contrast to employees of companies every single Debian developer has the freedom and ability to realize his vision. He is not bound to decisions of the management of his company. Commercial distributors have to build their distribution to gain a big market share. It is hardly possible to earn much money by targeting at children PC at home and distributions comparable to Debian-Junior will not be built by commercial distributors.

Thus single developers have influence on development - they just have to do it which is a very different position compared with employees of a commercial distributor and is the reason for the flexibility of Debian which makes it adaptable for any purpose. In the Debian world this kind of community is called "Doocracy" - the one who does rules.


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Custom Debian Distributions

28 July 2004

Andreas Tille tille@debian.org