Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.

Greg KH contends that because Ubuntu merely consumes the kernel and other elements of Debian, (effectively pushing it even farther removed from upstream development) they are not fully participating in Linux. His point is that if you are a developer you should use your skills with those companies who actively support upstream development.

Well, in either case, you're going to want to check out Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, latest desktop support offerings: Starter, Advanced and Professional.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about Canonical and it's contributions to upstream, mainly due to an off-the-cuff comment by GregKH on a google video, and mainly in relation to the Linux kernel. Greg's statement, while correct when compared to his data, was incorrect because of improper data collection.

Last week, Greg DeKoenigsberg, a former Red Hat developer on the Fedora community Linux project and now CTO of The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), ignited a firestorm by showing that, when it comes to code, Red Hat does far more for open-source projects...

It's easy to argue that Ubuntu's success is because there's an unlimited supply of investment from its super-rich parent company, Canonical. But Linux isn't like any ordinary software stack.

It's easy to argue that Ubuntu's success is because there's an unlimited supply of investment from its super-rich parent company, Canonical. But Linux isn't like any ordinary software stack.

The next release of the popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution may include a third Mono-dependent application by default, a spokesman for Canonical, the parent company for Ubuntu, told iTWire today.

If you need something fixed or done, then you make that contribution upstream. Doing everything upstream is the only way that Linux will remain un-fragmented. Without upstream there is no Linux community.