Leading items [LWN.net]

Ubuntu and Debian look forward

The Ubuntu 5.10 release is out, and the initial reviews are good. The Ubuntu team, however, is not taking time out to drink beer and relax before pondering its next release. Well, OK, maybe they are taking a little time. But, when the hangovers wear off, they are still putting some thought into their next release, which will break some new ground. Meanwhile, the Debian Project is looking forward to its next release as well. In both cases, the planning process gives us a hint of what to expect from these distributions in the near future.

Ubuntu's approach has been to crank out a distribution every six months, integrating a great deal of bleeding-edge software each time. This process has been through three cycles now, with obvious success. The next release (6.04, or "Dapper Drake") will be different, however: Ubuntu has stated that 6.04 will be supported for three years on desktops, and five years on server systems. That is quite a promise for such a young company to make, but, if Ubuntu can live up to it, the popularity of this distribution could grow. Thus far, five-year support has come with a hefty price tag; the prospect of free updates from Ubuntu for that long could make a number of companies wonder just what they are paying for. The fact that Ubuntu's security response time tends to be excellent can only help in that regard.

All this depends on Ubuntu being able to make a credible promise of long-term support. This week, Ubuntu's Jeff Waugh took some steps in that direction with these thoughts on the Dapper release process. If this proposal becomes policy, Dapper will, indeed, be a different sort of release.

The core of the proposed Dapper process is this: the upstream version freeze which was imposed for the 5.10 release will remain in place. Essentially, the distribution will be frozen for the next six months, with the bulk of development effort going into ensuring that it is the most stable, supportable release possible. Another way of looking at it is that all of those users happily downloading the Breezy release now get to be the beta testers for 6.04. This is a major change for Ubuntu, but, as Jeff put it:

We can't just follow the same release process and expect to be able to ship a long term supportable system. 6.04 will be different, so we need to think about it differently.

Of course, too much stability would be contrary to the Ubuntu spirit, so the developers are leaving themselves a bit of room to toss in some newer packages. So 6.04 will have a few, small upgrades, including:

GNOME 2.14 (and whatever is the current KDE)
Firefox 1.5
The modular X.org 7 release
OpenOffice.org 2.0
A newer kernel, probably 2.6.14

The list of exceptions is expected to be discussed at the upcoming UbuntuBelowZero gathering. The picture coming into focus now suggests that 6.04 will include some major upgrades, but much of the infrastructural code, especially that used on server systems, will remain at the version shipped with 5.10.

The Debian Project got its Sarge release out the door last June. By normal Debian timelines, it is thus quite early to be thinking about pulling things together for another release. Instead, Debian developers should be busily testing the patience of sid users by filling it with unstable, incompatible, major package updates. Well, the developers have indeed been on top of that task, but release manager Steve Langasek is trying to ruin the fun with this plan for the next Debian release, called "etch."

That release will be put together by Steve, along with new co-release manager Andreas Barth. They have a timeline, which involves a toolchain freeze at the end of next July, a general freeze in October 2006, and the etch release is planned, with great precision, for December 4, 2006. July seems like a distant prospect, but Steve notes that this deadline does not leave a whole lot of time for big changes:

What's not spelled out in the above timeline is that this basically leaves people until around the end of the year to to implement any dastardly plans they have that require sweeping changes to the archive, followed by another half a year of comparatively minor changes (you know, the kind that *don't* render half the libraries RC-buggy in a single upload...)

If this timeline holds, we should see the shape of the etch release by the beginning of next year. Looking at the current plan, it seems that etch will have made the switch to gcc 4.0 and (finally) X.org. Another long-delayed advance will be support for the amd64 architecture as an official Debian port. Then there is the crucial business of purging the distribution of non-free documentation, and non-free firmware as well. Tasks on the wishlist include full SELinux support, a default UTF-8 locale, multiarch support, and more.

The following eleven months of stabilization seem glacial by Ubuntu standards, but it is an optimistic timeline for Debian. One interesting change that the project is considering is to continue to allow non-maintainer updates to all packages throughout the etch cycle. Debian developers have historically been the lords of their particular bits of package turf, so non-maintainer updates have always been a sensitive issue. The release managers believe, however, that non-maintainer updates speed the release process - and make Debian a better distribution as well.

Both distributions have a lot to gain if they can make their plans stick. Ubuntu will have produced a stable distribution which it can credibly promise to support for five years, all while keeping its six-month release cycle. Debian, meanwhile, will be able to get a stable distribution out in a timely manner without compromising its high quality standards. In both cases, the end result can only be good for Linux users.

[Update: Ubuntu patron Mark Shuttleworth has posted his position on freezing for 6.04; he is inclined to be more permissive - for a while at least - on what gets into that release.]

Comments (19 posted)

Europatents to return in 2006?

One problem with governments is that, unsurprisingly, powerful interests try to direct governmental power toward their own ends. Those who would fight power grabs quickly learn a hard lesson: those pushing for more power usually need only win once, while those who oppose them must win over and over again. This dynamic can be seen, for example, in the current broadcast flag debate in the U.S. This flag has already been defeated once, but nobody doubts that it will return, perhaps repeatedly.

In Europe, the debate on software patents is likely to go the same way. Those who have a substantial amount to gain if software patents are adopted throughout the EU are unlikely to simply give up just because they lost the battle last July. So software patents in Europe will almost certainly be back. Now it is starting to look like the vehicle for the next attempt to impose software patents might be a process called the "Community Lisbon Programme."

This program is part of an effort to improve the health of European economies by making the EU as a whole more efficient and competitive. It is a large undertaking touching on many areas, including regulation, internal markets, environmental issues, global trade agreements and more. Deep within a recently-released document [PDF] on the implementation of the program is a section on intellectual property rights ("IPR"). It reads, in part:

Companies and their clients need IPR which stimulates innovation, provides a stable context in which to make investment decisions, and encourages the development of efficient new business models. The debate engendered by the proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions has demonstrated that framing IPR rules which balance the needs of all stakeholders is by no means easy. The Commission will therefore launch a dialogue with industry and other interested parties in 2006 to determine what more might usefully be done to provide European industry with a sound IPR framework.

It is not hard to imagine that the result of this process could be a renewed directive establishing software patents in Europe. This time, however, it could be buried within a much larger chunk of EU-level industrial policy legislation, and, thus, harder to defeat.

Clearly, the free software community needs to be among the "other interested parties" participating in this process. We have many thoughts on what makes up a "sound IPR framework," and they should be heard early on. In the later stages of this program, when it truly comes into public view, it will be too late to effect changes on issues like patents.

Comments (12 posted)

Bob Young leaves Red Hat

Back in 1993, Bob Young created a company called "ACC Corporation," which, among other things, dealt in early Linux distributions. In 1995, ACC acquired Marc Ewing's Red Hat Linux distribution; the combined company was then named Red Hat software. Over the coming years, Red Hat would transform the Linux business environment, become the first Linux-related company to obtain big-name venture capital, and the first to go public. Regardless of how one feels about the company or its distribution, it is hard to deny that Red Hat has had a big influence on the Linux community as a whole.

On October 18, Red Hat announced that Bob Young had resigned from the company's board of directors, with the intent of spending more time on his other endeavor: Lulu.com. Bob's role in the company had been shrinking for years; he had not been involved in day-to-day management for some time. Still, when one thinks of the names involved with the early Red Hat (Marc Ewing, Donnie Barnes, Michael Johnson, Eric Troan, ...), it becomes clear that they have all moved on. Bob was the last of the crowd which helped to set new standards for Linux distributions and showed that it was possible to build a business around Linux.

Bob's vision was not always perfect - remember that Red Hat went public with a business plan stating that its Internet portal was the key to its future profitability. Still, he clearly got some things right. Seeking an example of how he saw things in the early days, your editor spent some time digging through his mailbox. What turned up was this message on how Red Hat chose Linux over BSD, sent to the free software business mailing list back in 1998. It makes an interesting read:

When we launched Red Hat Software, Inc, we planned to sell an operating system. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that being in the OS business meant that we were competing with Microsoft.

While our ambitions at the outset were quite limited, we can drink as much beer as anyone, and on those occasions when our natural intelligence was at its most limited, we'd speculate on what Microsoft's reaction would be when we became a real threat.

They concluded that a GPL-licensed system would not be as vulnerable to the famous "embrace and extend" strategy as a system covered by the BSD license. Were it not for the licensing issue (and a couple of others, mentioned in the message) and adequate supplies of beer, Bob and Marc might just have gone into business with "Red Hat BSD."

Bob has been well rewarded for his role in the creation of Red Hat - he still owns about 5% of the company, according to the proxy information sent out for last August's board election. Still, it is worth a moment to say "thanks, Bob." Linux would certainly have succeeded without Red Hat, but it would have been a different, and possibly slower, path to success.

Comments (4 posted)

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