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The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attractsThe reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attractsPosted Aug 20, 2008 17:17 UTC (Wed) by jejb (subscriber, #6654)Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu
Most of the opprobrium from the development community isn't really coming from distro envy, as has been suggested here numerous times. It's actually coming from deep philosophical differences. Canonical has made the strategic decision to include non open source technology in the Ubuntu distribution if such inclusion can be justified on the grounds of accelerating linux adoption. Their aim, therefore is to get linux adopted first and fully open sourced second (Mark will argue that the second naturally flows from the first). Development veterans at distributions remember the trying times at the end of the 2.4 kernel cycle when the distro kernel patches effectively equalled the kernel in size and became a complete support and maintenance nightmare. From all the burned extremeties in that final cycle, the "Upstream First" policy was forged (basically nothing goes into a distro kernel until it's on upstream track in the vanilla kernel). The key to making upstream first actually work is solidarity. Before upstream first, most vendors focused on trying to get their patches into distros (ignoring upstream entirely). The usual method was to find one willing to take them and then go around all the others saying xyz is shipping my product, you'll be left behind unless you do too. The solidarity now is that most vendors understand that unless a patch is actually in (or near) upstream, they can't get the time of day out of distros to discuss a backport. This is actually what's made the 2.6 driver development cycle much smoother. The problem Canonical and Ubuntu present is that their adoption first philosophy is incompatible with upstream first. This means that vendors can still focus on Ubuntu and ignore upstream. Worse (and this is where the high temperature reactions of people who work in distros come from) it means that certain vendors are now doing the rounds saying "our patches are in Ubuntu, you need to put them in your distro" ... after you've spent your morning as a distro kernel maintainer fielding these type of calls, your temper is naturally somewhat shortened. The debate over these two is obviously a worthy one to have. Is adoption of Linux more important than upstream development? (and would upstream development flow naturally from adoption?) Right at the moment, upstream first is a very hard fought and hard won strategy ... changing it doesn't go over well without considerable forethought.
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The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts Posted Aug 20, 2008 20:09 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] quote: Canonical has made the strategic decision to include non open source technology in the Ubuntu distribution if such inclusion can be justified on the grounds of accelerating linux adoption. Their aim, therefore is to get linux adopted first and fully open sourced second (Mark will argue that the second naturally flows from the first). there are other distros that do this and don't catch nearly the flack that Ubuntu does, so this doesn't explain it. as for the rest of your post that says it's due to the "publish now, don't wait to get it upstream" approach, there may be a little of that, but I don't think it's that much. Yes, ubuntu is worse than some of the other distros, but it's a matter of degree, not of kind. RedHat never caught this much flack and they were _far_ worse for a while. The "upstream first" approach is deemed to be an advantage for the distros as it lessens their labor of maintaining patches going forward. If this is really a win then we should see Ubuntu falling more in line with the other distros over time.
The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts Posted Aug 20, 2008 21:12 UTC (Wed) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link] > There are other distros that do this and don't catch nearly the flack > that Ubuntu does, so this doesn't explain it. There aren't any others that I know of with vendor device drivers. As I said, one reason for the flack is that Ubuntu inclusion is now a club that vendors who want to follow distos not upstream use to try and coerce inclusion in other distros. > as for the rest of your post that says it's due to the "publish now, > don't wait to get it upstream" approach, there may be a little of that, > but I don't think it's that much. Yes, ubuntu is worse than some of the > other distros, but it's a matter of degree, not of kind. RedHat never > caught this much flack and they were _far_ worse for a while. Well, I think I gave the historical introduction in the beginning of my first comment. Upstream first grew out of 2.4 distributors like Red Hat and SuSE being burned by several things including vendor specific patches. The point is that they learned from history and evolved the upstream first strategy (with a little help from others in the community). Unfortunately, the historical justification for current actions (X once did this so I should be allowed to) doesn't wash in a modern society otherwise we'd still be condemning and burning witches and indulging in all manner of unsavoury behaviour we're happy to have consigned to history. All distributions carry patches (hopefully just simple back ports from upstream, but some are features on upstream inclusion track). You can measure how upstream compliant a distro is by watching these patches. If it's truly upstream compliant, then they should be short lived as whatever they were there for passes upstream and the distro kernel version advances. It's harder to track this in enterprise distros: There you have to compare patches across multi year release cycles. There are still some fun features that all distros include (like squashfs) that still aren't on upstream track, but most violations are minor. > The "upstream first" approach is deemed to be an advantage for the > distros as it lessens their labor of maintaining patches going forward. > If this is really a win then we should see Ubuntu falling more in line > with the other distros over time. There are many other reasons why it's good. Even for vendors (having tried to get my particular patch set into the distros I support). Unfortunately it takes a lot of education to see the benefits. Like I said, Mark argues that adoption first drives upstream patches, so the ubuntu argument is that it's a temporary problem which will get better with time.
The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts Posted Aug 21, 2008 0:15 UTC (Thu) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link] Canonical has made the strategic decision to include non open source technology in the Ubuntu distribution if such inclusion can be justified on the grounds of accelerating linux adoption.Ubuntu made a strategic decision to make today's users happy AT ANY COST. Imagine what would have happened differently if Red Hat (as the largest Linux distributor) accepted binary-only drivers many years ago? Intel would likely have not become a true community partner in X and kernel development, which turned out to make them a technology leader as well as *the* favored for Linux hardware because their stuff just works. AMD and VIA would definitely not have followed Intel's example. Now you see all three releasing specifications, hiring full time employees to work with the community, and upstreaming drivers. Storage drivers: Remember the bad old days where many storage controllers had terrible add-on drivers made by manufacturers as a one-time engineering effort, without upstream inclusion? Now many of these hardware companies pay engineers full-time to work on drivers and improving underlying device-mapper and other kernel components in the upstream kernel. Wireless drivers:What if we accepted binary blobs, closed-source regulatory daemons and NDISWRAPPER as acceptable? Today most wireless drivers are open thanks to the refusal to accept this. Intel for a while has been great here. You recently saw ath9k released by the company for upstream inclusion. All of these examples are due to companies realizing the technical and market advantages of being a true community player. This refusal to accept short-term convenience of binary drivers has been painful at times. But liberty is not free, nor is it often comfortable. We would NOT have achieved most of today's driver liberty if Ubuntu were the dominant Linux distributor in past years, giving the hardware companies the wrong message that proprietary binary-only drivers are acceptable.
The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts Posted Aug 24, 2008 21:21 UTC (Sun) by cyfaill (guest, #42384) [Link]
What this means that somehow those who steward Ubuntu have a fundamental flaw in their understanding of how they got to were they are.
Liberty and the concept of freedom itself are tied at the umbilical cord of the mutual concepts of each.
I have been a long time Debian user and occasionally build desktop systems for sale to new Linux user clients... I do not install Ubuntu because I detect that at the core of its organization their is the hinting of a deviation of implementation of many of the core concepts that make a strong Linux build.
Perhaps they see gold in front of their eyes and are thinking of "trying to" sell the sole of Linux to try and reach for it.
And I am most sure that as Ubuntu becomes ever more popular... the ways of using Ubuntu which are deviations of proper Linux administration and use will have the inevitable corruptions of - How To - and - Why, To Do - become even more distorting of their already "different" users basic ways of understanding how to build a Linux.
Ubuntu uses much of Debian as its innards but one thing has always seemed to me to be also obvious...
Ubuntu sells its soul to the most common denominator, dependent on the work of many others of high caliber thinking to keep it glued together. However, its very human nature of inherent corruption will degrade its core concepts to the base of those goals, based on simple expediency.
That is the difference between those who understand how liberty works and those who do not but are very willing to exploit its existence to further their own goals to the point of the loss of liberty itself.
Ubuntu users are mostly from the migration from Windows and hence they know not what Liberty is or what it demands to keep it.
Sorry if this offends, but I believe it is what is at the core of the problem.
M
The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts Posted Aug 25, 2008 15:46 UTC (Mon) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]
Thanks for the party political broadcast, can we now return to regularly scheduled programming?
liberty really has very little to do with whether something's upstream or not. A vendor who produces an out of tree but GPL licenced module (and full source) is in full compliance with the GNU four freedoms (and hence with "liberty") but certainly not with upstream first.
Some vendors really get Open Source .. to them, upstream first comes naturally (it even came naturally in 2.4). Some have to be persuaded about the business merits, but get it in the end. Some firmly refuse to see there's any justification but do it anyway because their business model requires that they play in the Linux sandpit. This latter group stay with upstream first because they can't afford to ignore the Linux market although they complain bitterly about the burden it places on them. Finally there's companies who can't ignore the Linux market but decide they can ignore the conventions and address it with things like binary modules.
The only reason the latter two groups stay with us is because of the market size, nothing else. Mark and Canonical's argument is that increasing that market size will pull more companies reluctantly into these groups, plus it will bind their business models more tightly to linux to the point at which it's uneconomical to disengage. As that happens, companies can be moved from group 4 to group 3 because we effectively have them over a barrel.
Note that upstream first only works on the third group because of the market size ... they'd be very happy to dump Linux and what they perceive as it's attendant problems and costs were it not for all those nice, paying, customers using it.
One of the problems that Ubuntu's Adoption first policy is causing is that all the vendors in group 3 want out of upstream first and they use Ubuntu as a club to try to beat other distros into seeing their point of view.
This last is where I'm not sure the future gains promised by adoption first outweigh the current benefits of upstream first ... but it's certainly a valid debate to have.
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