Hmm; I&#x27;m puzzled by a contradiction between this and another recent article. From this article we learn that we shouldn&#x27;t do this:<p>&quot;Secondly, they are mixing their own binary packages with binary packages from Debian and Ubuntu without rebuilding the latter. This creates something that we in Debian call a &quot;FrankenDebian&quot; which results in system updates becoming unpredictable &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.debian.org&#x2F;DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.debian.org&#x2F;DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...</a>. With the result, that the Mint developers simply decided to blacklist certain packages from upgrades by default thus putting their users at risk because important security updates may not be installed.&quot;<p>while from &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11131081&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11131081&gt;</a>:<p>&quot;Nobody else requires that you rebuild every package before you can redistribute it in a modified distribution - such a restriction is a violation of freedom 2 of the Free Software Definition, and as a result the binary distributions of Ubuntu are not free software.&quot;<p>I appreciate that the latter one is discussing a hard requirement as a result of Canonical&#x27;s IP licensing. But the former seems to indicate that it would be bad practice to just copy all of Ubuntu&#x27;s (or Debian&#x27;s) binary packages and build a new derivative distribution on top of it. Is the latter piece arguing in part for a freedom that would be a really bad idea in practice?