In defense of Ubuntu reproach [LWN.net]

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

Posted Aug 25, 2008 21:47 UTC (Mon) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112)
In reply to: In defense of Ubuntu reproach by nevyn
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

It's important to understand that Ubuntu depends on a different economic model than, say, Red Hat. For Red Hat's commercial products such as RHEL, more users = more money = more opportunity to fund development. With Ubuntu, the (full, commercial, updated, supported) product is free, and Canonical only earns revenue from services.

The number of Ubuntu users does not translate directly to commercial success, and it doesn't make much sense to measure "contributions...roughly in line with the number of their users". In fact, it's to be expected that the user community will grow much earlier and much faster than the customer base.

The fact that Canonical is compared with competitors with an order of magnitude more developers was flattering once, but when it's used as justification for this type of criticism, it's discouraging.

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In defense of Ubuntu reproach

Posted Aug 26, 2008 0:21 UTC (Tue) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

For Red Hat's commercial products such as RHEL, more users = more money = more opportunity to fund development. With Ubuntu, the (full, commercial, updated, supported) product is free, and Canonical only earns revenue from services.

That's naive, at best. Yes, Canonical let's you download, for free, their brand specific bits thus. consolidating the non-paying for services and paying for services customers ... but with CentOS and Fedora etc. it's hard to swallow the argument that Red Hat is getting paid for anything but their services.

it doesn't make much sense to measure "contributions...roughly in line with the number of their users"

It makes perfect sense, how else should we measure them? As they get more users they certainly wield more power over the community, and thus. they certainly use more "resources" from the community. So if parts of the community speak out against a "tragedy of the commons", that seems more than fair and sensical.

The fact that Canonical is compared with competitors with an order of magnitude more developers was flattering once, but when it's used as justification for this type of criticism, it's discouraging.

The fact that Canonical is employing an order of magnitude less developers (and that's very conservative, IMO) than it's competitors was amusing once, but when it's semi-justified as a long term to just spend less it's discouraging.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

Posted Sep 3, 2008 9:45 UTC (Wed) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]

That's naive, at best. Yes, Canonical let's you download, for free, their brand specific bits thus. consolidating the non-paying for services and paying for services customers ... but with CentOS and Fedora etc. it's hard to swallow the argument that Red Hat is getting paid for anything but their services.

Fedora is a different product, with different source code, QA and release methodology. It doesn't compete with RHEL any more than Gentoo does. CentOS is a better analogy: who's complaining about not receiving enough contributions from CentOS?

It makes perfect sense, how else should we measure them? As they get more users they certainly wield more power over the community, and thus. they certainly use more "resources" from the community. So if parts of the community speak out against a "tragedy of the commons", that seems more than fair and sensical.

Hogwash. If a lone developer creates a new distribution which is used by millions, we don't suddenly expect them to contribute on behalf of those millions of users. This would be ridiculous. They aren't "using resources" from that community: on the contrary, that community is using their resources!

The fact that Canonical is employing an order of magnitude less developers (and that's very conservative, IMO) than it's competitors was amusing once, but when it's semi-justified as a long term to just spend less it's discouraging.

That may be your opinion, but opinions don't count for much where hard numbers are concerned. I can't parse the remainder of your sentence; I think there's a word missing somewhere.