In response to recent concerns expressed by Matthew Garret, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has written an insightful about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian.

Debian Etch will be < http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?src=rss&id=1076 released > in December 2006. Etch is the first Debian release to include official AMD64 support. Other notable improvements include XOrg, GCC4, and Secure APT.

At the Debian conference, some developers < http://www.alobbs.com/news/1125 proposed >creation of an OpenSolaris Debian distribution. I am not a very big fan of Sun, but the availability of moderately current software via APT on the OpenSolaris platform sounds appealing. Unfortunately, Sun's CDDL license doesn't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. If such an endeavor is predicated on Sun's willingness to dual license OpenSolaris < http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060130-6074.html under the GPL >, we may be waiting a very long time.