Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 11, 2008 7:57 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

I commented on Mark Shuttleworth's blog (the first Alex there is me), and while it was great of him to reply, I do worry that their plan isn't going to be met with amazing success.

He's talking about doing heavy lifting in X.org, KDE and GNOME, but still expects that the developers will be forking stuff onto Launchpad and then later contributing the code back.

I appreciate that joining 200 Bugzillas isn't possible. But joining three or four for the key projects you want to do heavy lifting on seems reasonable to me.

I worry that going away, developing something, then sending it back generally doesn't work well. I can think of a number of times Novell has tried this, and I'm not sure it works more times than it fails. The more invasive the change, the more I worry that it won't be accepted.

I guess time will tell.

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Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 11, 2008 15:04 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link]

I think it will work if a key metric for the employees is "Integrate the
software upstream" - because then that's what they will be paid to do. If
being successful at the job isn't tied to this, it will be absolutely
discarded in favour of pushing the features into the next release. The
primary target has to be seen as upstream, not Ubuntu.

Quotes of the week

Posted Sep 11, 2008 17:47 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There is no one specific pattern or rule you can follow which guarantees upstream acceptance; you just have to try your best.

Hopefully this will be something that they will do. I was a little disappointed, for example, to see the Ubuntu Netbook Remix front-end not happen in the GNOME space, even though it's very similar to a number of other apps which people have already written: it would be cool to see the effort to "upstream" stuff extended there, as well.