<section>
<title>The Debian Project</title>
- <para>The Debian project is my counts the largest, in terms of both code
- and volunteers, free software distribution. It is the also,
- arguably, the largest free software project in terms of the
- number of volunteers. Debian includes more than 15,000
+ <para>The Debian project is by many counts the largest, in terms
+ of both code and volunteers, free software distribution. It is
+ the also, arguably, the largest free software project in terms
+ of the number of volunteers. Debian includes more than 15,000
packages and the work of well over 1,000 official volunteers
and many more contributors without official membership.
Projects without Debian's massive volunteer base cannot
customizing and deriving from Debian for specific groups of
users including non-profit organization, the medical
community, lawyers, children and many others.<footnote>
- <para>I spearheaded and help build a now mostly defuct
+ <para>I spearheaded and help build a now mostly defunct
derivation of Debian called Debian-Nonprofit (Debian-NP)
geared for non-profit organizations by working within the
Debian project.</para>
Information Canonical Limited can be found at <ulink
url="http://www.canonical.com">Canonical's
homepage</ulink>.</para>
- </footnote> It was released to the world in the fall of 2004.
+ </footnote> It was released to the world in late 2004.
The second version was released six months later in April
2005. The goals of Ubuntu are to provide a distribution based
on a subset of Debian with:</para>
<para>You can see that explicit statement on Ubuntu's
website here: <ulink
url="http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/relationship/">http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/relationship/</ulink></para>
- </footnote> More importantly, Ubutnu explains that it cannot
+ </footnote> More importantly, Ubuntu explains that it cannot
continue to provide the complete set of packages that its
users depend on without the ongoing work by the Debian
project. Even though Ubuntu has made changes to the nearly
<para>
<inlinemediaobject>
<imageobject>
- <imagedata fileref="picture-01.png" format="PNG"/>
+ <imagedata fileref="tfontf-picture-01.png" format="PNG"/>
</imageobject>
</inlinemediaobject>
</para>
<title>Derivation and Problem Analysis</title>
<para>The easiest step in creating a productive derivative
- software project is to break down the problems of deriviations
+ software project is to break down the problems of derivations
into a series of different classes of modification. Certain
types of modification are more easily done and are
intrinsically more maintainable.</para>
</orderedlist>
<para>By breaking down the problem in this way. Debian derivers
- have been able to approach deriviation in ways that focus
+ have been able to approach derivation in ways that focus
energy on the less intrusive problems first.</para>
<para>The first area that Ubuntu focused on was selecting a
control tools were less advanced than they are today. At the
moment, an incomplete list of free software VCS tools includes
GNU Arch, Bazaar, Bazaar-NG, Darcs, Monotone, SVK (based on
- Subversion), GIT (a system developed by Linus Torvlards as a
+ Subversion), GIT (a system developed by Linus Torvalds as a
temporary replacement for BitKeeper) and others.</para>
<para>Each of these tools, at least after they reach a certain
VCS evolve, they will become increasingly important tools in
the way that free software is developed.</para>
- <para>Because the problems of scale associated with buildling an
+ <para>Because the problems of scale associated with building an
entire derivative distribution are more complicated than those
associated with working with a single project, distributed
version control has not yet been widely deployed in the Ubuntu
using distributed VCS technology. As Linus Torvalds alluded to
in the quote above, the importance of technological changes to
distributed VCS technology is only felt when people begin to
- work in a different way — when they begin to employ differnet
- social models of developer interaction.</para>
+ work in a different way — when they begin to employ
+ different social models of developer interaction.</para>
<para>While Ubuntu's experience can provide a good model for
tackling some of these source control issues, it can only
redundancy and little duplication of work. In doing this, free
software will harness a power that proprietary models cannot
compete with. They will increase their capacity to produce
- better products and better processes. Ulimately, it will help
+ better products and better processes. Ultimately, it will help
free software capture more users, bring in more developers, and
produce more free software of a higher quality.</para>
projects / to_fork_or_not / blobdiff