“Is Ubuntu a Debian fork? Or spoon? What sort of
silverware are you, man?“Yes, Ubuntu is a fork. No, it isn’t. Yes it is! Oh,
whatever.“In short, we are a project that tries hard to collaborate with
many other projects–such as upstream X.org, and Gnome, and of
course Debian. In many cases, the code we ship is modified or
different to the code shipped by those other projects. When that
happens, we work hard to ensure that our changes are published as
widely as possible, in a format that is easy for other project
maintainers to understand and incorporate into their own working
tree…”
Related Story:
Ubuntu:
FAQ’s: Why and Whither for Ubuntu?(Oct 04, 2005)