In defense of Ubuntu reproach [LWN.net]

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

Posted Aug 20, 2008 6:12 UTC (Wed) by interalia (subscriber, #26615)
In reply to: In defense of Ubuntu reproach by nevyn
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

Also, esp. as engineers, it's compelling to look at the end game ... what happens if all the Linux users are using Ubuntu? It's obvious that the huge amount of work that Red Hat funds can't happen if Fedora/RHEL don't have any users ... is IBM going to fund everything?

If the weight of so many users shifted to Ubuntu, then Canonical would be making money from support (as Red Hat does) and could afford to hire developers. Those Canonical developers would then be upstream, much as a number of Red Hat employees (and so have fewer problems pushing patches upstream since they are upstream). So while you're correct in that Red Hat could not fund so much work without the associated revenue, I would presume that such a scenario solves itself. If it happened, Canonical would employ developers to maintain its momentum and gain the same strategic influence over Linux/OSS direction that Red Hat currently possesses.

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Paid Engineers

Posted Aug 20, 2008 9:31 UTC (Wed) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I think this is the core issue. RedHat have a lot more engineering resources than Canonical so
make more of an impact upstream (after all it's in every packagers interest to push changes
upstream that make their life easier). If the balance of economic resources shifted I would
hope that would directly impact the number of developers in each distro and hence the
contributions upstream.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

Posted Aug 20, 2008 14:04 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

If the weight of so many users shifted to Ubuntu, then Canonical would be making money from support (as Red Hat does) and could afford to hire developers.

I could say the same thing about "Oracle Linux" (and it would be just as true), except Canonical already have way more users. You seem to imagine that you get to a point where you have an infinite amount of money or something, but that doesn't happen. If it's more cost effective to ignore the community and let them clean up your mess now, it'll be even more cost effective to do it when you are producing 2x, 10x or 100x the amount of changes.