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.
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.
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
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:
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.)
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.
Debian has a huge user base all over the world. Any project which is integrated in Debian has a good chance to becoming 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 fast was observed in the Debian-Med project which is well known in 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.
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.
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.
Custom Debian Distributions
9 April 2004tille@debian.org