blog/archives/2011/03zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2011/03/zack's home pageikiwiki2011-03-11T12:21:31Zon the influence of Debian and derivativeshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/03/on_the_influence_of_Debian_and_derivatives/2011-03-11T12:21:31Z2011-03-06T21:49:44Z
<h1>Counting derivatives</h1>
<p>In the news, there's an <a href=
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3926941/Linux-Leaders-Debian-and-Ubuntu-Derivative-Distros.htm">
article</a> by Bruce Byfield discussing the influence of Debian and
its (transitive) derivatives on the ecosystem of GNU/Linux
distributions: <em><a href=
"http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3926941/Linux-Leaders-Debian-and-Ubuntu-Derivative-Distros.htm">
Linux Leaders: Debian and Ubuntu Derivative Distros</a></em>.</p>
<p>The article is a sort of review of what you can find in the vast
ecosystem of distributions rooted at Debian: from embedded to
supercomputer distro, from netbook to scientific computing distros.
The articles cites the Debian <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDesk">derivatives front
desk</a> and is a study similar to what we might tackle with the
<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census">derivatives
census</a> by Paul Wise. (By the way: did you check if your
favorite Debian derivative is already in? No? Do it!)</p>
<p>With this article, Bruce has made me quite a favor in harvesting
<a href="http://www.distrowatch.com">distrowatch</a> to refresh the
figures about the number of derivatives that I often use in
speeches. The need of doing that has been polluting my LaTeX "%
TODO" comments for a while now… Here they are:</p>
<ul>
<li>324 active distributions</li>
<li>129 of them are (directly or transitively) based on Debian</li>
<li>75 of the latter class are (directly) based on Ubuntu, i.e.
transitively based on Debian</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: update figures that Bruce
misinterpreted; <a href=
"http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active">
live data</a> are available, thanks to Loris (see comments) for
noticing</p>