LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
He started with an apology to Canonical, though. In earlier talks, he had said that only eight kernel patches had ever come from Canonical. In fact, he has been corrected; the proper number is 100.
So, Greg asked, why is he picking on Canonical? His answer came in the form of a table of contributors to the kernel. It looked like this:
Distributor Changesets Red Hat 11,846 Novell 7,222 MontaVista 1,074 Debian 288 Gentoo 229 Mandriva 237 Wind River 207 rPath 186 Canonical 100
Then Greg asked: does anybody from Canonical want to say anything? Nobody did.
![[GregKH]](https://static.lwn.net/images/conf/lpc-ks-2008/GregKH-sm.jpg)
Moving on to the Linux ecosystem. Greg put up a slide showing the larger
components of this ecosystem - the low-level stuff that makes Linux what it
is. Some of the largest components, beyond the kernel, were GCC,
binutils, X.org, and the man pages distribution. Looking at lines of
code, the kernel amounts to about 40% of the total. Other large components
are all significantly smaller.
It turns out that Greg has been doing repository data mining in a number of projects beyond the kernel. So, for projects like GCC, X.org, and binutils, he was able to put up tables listing the top contributors. The results varied somewhat, but there were a number recurring themes. Red Hat tends to be toward the top of the list on all of these projects; companies like IBM and Novell also appear regularly. CodeSourcery is a significant contributor to GCC and binutils. The U.S. National Security Agency contributes 2.1% of the patches into X.org; why is not clear. In all of these projects there are significant contributions from unpaid developers, but those contributions are overshadowed by those from paid developers.
And Canonical is always at the bottom of the chart - if it is there at all.
At this point Greg moved to a whiteboard to present his view of how the community works. At the development level, you have developers contributing to projects, which then release the code. There may be a few users at that level who feed back information (and maybe patches), but, in general, the biggest consumers of the project's releases are the distributors.
Distributors package everything and provide it to their users. At this point, another feedback loop comes into play: users feed their experiences and problems back to the distributor. Those distributors will respond to the user feedback, improving their products. The amount of feedback from the distributors to the upstream projects varies, but it tends to be small. For enterprise distributions, it is quite small; they are running ancient versions of everything and have little to do with current upstream. The community-oriented distributions, such as Fedora or openSUSE, tend to feed more changes back to their upstream sources.
Then, there is the matter of redistributors who base their products on another distributor's work; these are distributors like Ubuntu or CentOS. There are no contributions back to the community from that kind of distributor at all. They are not functioning as a part of the Linux ecosystem.
Greg finished up with what appears to be the message he came to the Linux Plumbers Conference to deliver: if you are a developer, if you want to be a part of the ecosystem, and if you work for a non-contributing company: quit. There are plenty of companies that understand the ecosystem and which need good people; at least one company, it seems, had wanted to set up a recruiting table at the conference. It is a very good time for people with community participation skills; there is no reason for anybody who wants to work in the community to stay on the outside.
[As a postscript, it is amusing to note that, while the conference did not
allow companies to set up recruiting tables, nobody has prevented
prospective employers from filling a prominently-placed whiteboard with
information about available positions.]
| Index entries for this article | |
|---|---|
| Conference | Linux Plumbers Conference/2008 |
Posted Sep 18, 2008 0:58 UTC (Thu)
by Burgundavia (guest, #25172)
[Link] (39 responses)
(Full disclosure: I have been an Ubuntu user since 2004 and sit on the Community Council)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 1:06 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (18 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 1:52 UTC (Thu)
by jengelh (guest, #33263)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 2:00 UTC (Thu)
by willy (subscriber, #9762)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 2:03 UTC (Thu)
by tseaver (guest, #1544)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:30 UTC (Thu)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 21, 2008 0:27 UTC (Sun)
by frazier (guest, #3060)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 22, 2008 0:50 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 2:03 UTC (Thu)
by mmcgrath (guest, #44906)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:40 UTC (Thu)
by mkflint (guest, #50223)
[Link]
Yes they do! But so does artwork, integration, innovation, documentation, marketing, blah blah blah.
The primary goals, as I see them, are to create a great quality product and to increase usage of Free Software. And the kernel is just one part of that whole experience.
While each individual kernel developer has a preferred distro, the project as a whole should be distro-agnostic. I hope Greg KH made it clear that he was speaking as "Greg KH", and not as "Linux Kernel Representative".
Posted Sep 24, 2008 0:02 UTC (Wed)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link] (2 responses)
Regards,
Daniel
Posted Sep 24, 2008 1:46 UTC (Wed)
by mmcgrath (guest, #44906)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2008 3:46 UTC (Wed)
by daniel (guest, #3181)
[Link]
Regards,
Daniel
Posted Sep 25, 2008 14:05 UTC (Thu)
by SEMW (guest, #52697)
[Link] (1 responses)
True, but I do wonder how many patches Canonical GregKH feels would speak loud enough.
Canonical has ~130 employees; Novell has ~4100. So, considering the table for kernel contributions at the top, this works out at ~0.77 patches per employee for Canonical, and ~1.77 for Novell; a touch under 2.5 times as many.
But now consider that SuSE Linux has been around since 1994*, and Ubuntu, since 2004. That's around... Well, 2.5 times as long.
So it seems to me that Canonical doesn't actually do too badly out of the comparison.
* I am assuming that the table at the top doesn't distinguish between contributions from Novell SUSE and S.u.S.E.
(I admit that that's a slightly dodgy calculation, in that neither Novell nor S.u.S.E will have had anything like 4100 employees in 1994 -- but then, neither will Canonical have had 130 in 2004. I'm not aiming for a scientific comparison, only pointing out that presenting the raw numbers with no context of company size, as Greg did, is rather disingenuous).
Posted Feb 1, 2011 14:09 UTC (Tue)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link]
Disclaimer: I work for SUSE/Novell.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:31 UTC (Thu)
by Burgundavia (guest, #25172)
[Link] (3 responses)
And for the record, I don't work for Canonical.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 6:51 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:15 UTC (Fri)
by nealmcb (guest, #20740)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:52 UTC (Fri)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 15:41 UTC (Thu)
by frazier (guest, #3060)
[Link]
I completely agree with another response to your comment, that it should have been obvious that the speaker works for a different distribution. In the future, please note who they're working for!
Also, I don't know if they were available at the time of article publication, but a link to presentation slides would be handy and appreciated:
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:36 UTC (Thu)
by mcopple (subscriber, #2920)
[Link] (12 responses)
"Canonical is primarily a consumer of the Linux kernel. It is one of the building blocks we need in order to fulfill our primary mission, which is to provide an operating system that end users want to use. It is, on the whole, a good piece of software which meets our needs well. We routinely backport patches from newer kernels, and fix bugs which are particularly relevant to us, but our kernel consists almost entirely of code we receive from upstream."
The Linux "ecosystem," whether that contains just a few pieces or every piece of software ever made for Linux, only works if everyone contributes. Eric Raymond spent quite a bit of time making this point in Cathedral and Bazaar. We know that in practice, only a small proportion of the user base actually contributes back to the community; therefore, it is even more critical that major distributors, of which Canonical is undeniably one, need to do their part to give as much back to the community as they take away from it.
Greg is saying, with a lot of justification, that Canonical is letting other distributors, especially RedHat and Novell, carry its water. The referenced blog post admits as much, but then goes on to try to cast it as a virtue, to opine that Ubuntu is about the whole operating system, not the kernel alone. Fair enough. But RedHat and Novell are in the business of putting together operating systems that "...end users want to use..." as well. What happens if, on Monday morning, they decide to follow the Canonical model, and become "...primarily a consumer of the Linux kernel...?"
Greg made it clear that, whatever your opinion on RedHat et al vs. Canonical, the majority of kernel hackers are doing this for a paycheck. If RedHat and Novell decide to pay their hackers to do something else, then the kernel process gets a lot slower and probably, a lot less functional.
It is time for Canonical to step up. I see claims all over the 'net that ubuntu is the most popular Linux desktop; it is time for Canonical to put some money behind that reputation. Step up, or shut up.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:06 UTC (Thu)
by gregwilkins (guest, #515)
[Link] (2 responses)
Canonical has put a huge effort into ubuntu and have made it one of the most easily consumable distributions of a vast amount of open source software. This exposure to users is the lifeblood of many projects.
It would be a fool who would try argue that the open source eco system would be better off without Canonical and ubuntu. If we are better off with them, then they must be contributing in somehow! So is the criticism that they are obliged to contribute more because they benefit from support contracts with users?
All users of open source software benefit from using it. We don't demand payment in cash or kind from our users, so why should we hold those that contribute in other ways to a higher standard?
To say that anybody is obliged to contribute back just devalues the gift that all contributions (code or otherwise) are!
To say that canonical is under some moral obligation to contribute developer time, is paramount to saying that we license our software freely so long as you don't get too big a benefit from it, in which case you are obliged to give in cash or kind! This is like the old ext.js license which was LGPL (unless you mades lots of money or were competative to ext.js)
That's not the deal! it's free! FREE F R E E !
Free as in freedom and that includes being freedom from moral obligations or guilt trips at the hands of those that think that only the kernel commits counts!
Canonical do contribute and even if they didn't it is wrong to say that they should.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:44 UTC (Thu)
by davidw (guest, #947)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 18:34 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link]
Clarification of the economic principle of comparative advantage: it isn't "concentrate on what you do best"; it's "concentrate on what you do most better (than others do it)"
So even if Canonical can submit kernel patches better than it can distribute Linux, and even if Canonical can submit kernel patches better than anyone else, and even if Canonical can't distribute Linux as well as others, it may still be best for everyone if Canonical concentrates on distributing Linux.
What you compare is the difference between Canonical's and others' patch-submitting ability and the difference between Canonical's and others Linux-distributing abilities.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 12:53 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (8 responses)
The Linux kernel and infrastructural stuff is very nice, but not everyone who uses it as a basis needs to enhance it, nor is there anything immoral or unethical about choosing to enhance non-infrastructural components instead.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 14:38 UTC (Thu)
by mmcgrath (guest, #44906)
[Link] (7 responses)
Yes, surely thats the ticket! Tell yourself whatever lies you have to, the work Ubuntu does, is for Ubuntu. If you think not... Go get the source and prove me wrong. Greg mentioned he looked at more then just the kernel but left it open enough that someone could tell themselves "Oh, they must just not work on the kernel."
I'd challenge anyone with Ubuntu/Canonical to post their own numbers _from an upstream repo_ and show where Ubuntu/Canonical commit count is at vs other distributions.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 16:43 UTC (Thu)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
But even I can see the value that Ubuntu (and Canonical, by paying the salaries of Ubuntu developers) provides to the Linux community: Packaging code into a coherent and *nice looking* whole, targeted towards desktop usage, that appeals to new users that have never used Linux before. And for that target audience their distribution is better than Debian or Red Hat, and arguably better than SUSE or Mandrake. In my book, this is a big win and a big contribution for the Linux community.
If they don't contribute code upstream to core infrastructure projects in addition, too bad. It mostly irks the developers in that projects; but other members of the rest of our community might see that providing packaging and user attraction (and also marketing) is a value in itself. At least, I do.
(To put that into context where I'm coming from: I use Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, and SUSE (in alphabetical order :), and almost all other Unix systems. As a developer, I belong to the TeX development community, and am active there since 1982.)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 19:14 UTC (Thu)
by lysse (guest, #3190)
[Link] (5 responses)
I appreciate that your feelings are running strongly here, but after that little outburst I can't take you seriously.
Back on topic: Slackware contribution count, anyone? And unlike Canonical, Slackware sell copies of their distribution. Yet nobody's slagging off Pat Volkerding for freeloading (have they ever done so, even when Slackware was the most popular distro out there?).
This is "tall poppy syndrome" at its worst; if I'm alone in finding it kind of disgusting, then so be it, but I do.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 19:44 UTC (Thu)
by mmcgrath (guest, #44906)
[Link] (4 responses)
And why would you. I've asked for someone to provide numbers, facts. Why do that when they can just attack the person requesting them. ad hominem anyone?
Posted Sep 18, 2008 22:37 UTC (Thu)
by lysse (guest, #3190)
[Link] (3 responses)
Maybe so, but the bit I quoted and responded to was
> Tell yourself whatever lies you have to
which is aggressive and rude, and makes your response of
> Why do that when they can just attack the person requesting them. ad hominem anyone?
amusingly ironic (although a little sad).
Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:18 UTC (Thu)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:48 UTC (Thu)
by chromatic (guest, #26207)
[Link]
In my mind, the question is *does* a project contribute upstream, not *how much* does a project contribute upstream.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:19 UTC (Fri)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link]
The difference between a company and a distribution is, well, key.
Maybe this
comes close to answering your question, maybe it is better to go here for the datamining
software, download the latest Gnome tarball and answer it yourself.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:18 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (3 responses)
Thus, of course there is a backlash. Canonical is behaving like it had lots of credits to spend, while doing precious little to earn them.
PS. On the exact count subject please remember that all the volunteers loosely affiliated to Fedora or OpenSuse don't contribute to Red Hat's or Novell's numbers either.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 17:09 UTC (Fri)
by talisein (subscriber, #31829)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 22, 2008 8:17 UTC (Mon)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (1 responses)
"There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS:
For me this sounds like: if the others do the coordination work of picking a date and the
Posted Sep 26, 2008 5:36 UTC (Fri)
by turpie (guest, #5219)
[Link]
It is fair enough to criticise the amount of code Ubunutu contribute to the wider community, but I dont think it is fair to twist Mark's words that way.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:23 UTC (Thu)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link] (2 responses)
In this article, he writes:
> our [Ubuntu's] kernel consists almost entirely of
(He goes on to list other potential reasons that he considers improbable)
I can't speak for Greg or anyone else. But I think that this reason is valid.
Ubuntu's users surely run into problems with, say, the kernel. They use some newer hardware, they do some unpredictable things. Being the "non-kernel-developers", they surely don't work out those problems directly with upstream. This is why you have a distribution. Some of them will report bugs. Ubuntu developers respond to those bugs and fix them. Some of them result in code fixes.
So if we see very few contributions from Ubuntu in the upstream kernel, what can it mean. I don't really know which of those is actually responsible for the problems.
(And note that Ubuntu != Cannonical)
1. Ubuntu's users run into relatively few bugs. Can't be. Where there are users, there are bugs :-)
2. Ubuntu's users don't report enough bugs. This would mean Ubuntu is very buggy. This is a problem for Ubuntu.
3. Users report issues, but the Ubuntu developers fail to solve most of them. If so, this is a problem of the level of support Ubuntu's users get from their developers.
4. Ubuntu's developers fix problems, but don't forward enough of the fixes upstream. If so, Ubuntu is not a good community member, and its developers create themselves maintenance issues.
We all agree on the impact of (1) and (2). We all do our best to increase the number of bugs (develop software) and help users report bugs. So let's focus on potential reasons (3) and (4).
If (3) is an issue, it impacts Ubuntu's name. Specifically, it impacts Cannonical's ability to provide professional support services on top of Ubuntu: if they do a bad job maintaining a distribution, why would I bother paying them for it?
(Note: that's an *if* there)
Posted Sep 21, 2008 9:40 UTC (Sun)
by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
[Link] (1 responses)
5) Ubuntu users report bugs, the ubuntu developers wait for upstream to
In this senario, bugs are reported and fixed, but few patches goes from
Posted Sep 22, 2008 4:00 UTC (Mon)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
That would just mean that they haven't got the manpower to give support to a "enterprise" distribution... You need engineers that know intimately what is going on upstream (i.e., are inmersed in its development) if you want to be able to fix problems in a reasonable timeframe (least of all, in the time your support contract promises).
Posted Sep 18, 2008 2:40 UTC (Thu)
by nwnk (guest, #52271)
[Link] (2 responses)
SELinux. Well, Flask really, since the goal is to be portable to other OSes too.
X's security model is pretty much wide open by default. Once you get an authorized connection to the server, you can touch any X object you want. Flask labelling lets you fix this: you can prevent copy-and-paste from Top Secret apps to mere Classified apps, and so forth.
It also turns out that to do this you have to modernize huge swaths of X's internal object model. The subsystem private data infrastructure got a complete rewrite, and we have an extremely powerful hook system around basically every interesting point in the server's execution. Beyond that, Eamon's been an absolute machine in terms of code quality, smashing compiler warnings and bad APIs all over the place.
The hope, as I understand it, is to have a basic security policy available in the next six months or so that fixes some of the obvious flaws in the X security model, with development on a serious lockdown mode to follow. Don't quote me on timeframe or anything, I'm not doing any of that work, but it's really good stuff and they're definitely one of my favorite contributors to X right now.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:03 UTC (Thu)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (1 responses)
(And, of course, cue rumors about sending all X events to a small room in Langley...)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:50 UTC (Thu)
by james (subscriber, #1325)
[Link]
A large room at Langley...
</tongue-in-cheek>
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:01 UTC (Thu)
by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:36 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 6:34 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (4 responses)
frankly, those projects are not where most of the work that Ubuntu has done shows up. they have been doing far more with tweaking configs and scripts to make a linux system do things that it could have done before, but nobody bothered to make it do.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 6:56 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (3 responses)
Looking at the biggest projects is only natural. If a distribution did "tweak" things to do stuff better and did not send it upstream, I would consider it as a net negative really and not a benefit to the community on the whole. If any considerable work has been done, it should show up *somewhere*. Lets see those stats.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:17 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
as for their other administrative and config scripts, where do you suggest that they submit them? there is no 'upstream' (other then possibly debian) for them to deal with. they do like every other distro does and provide the source of the scripts with the distro.
If one of the other posters is correct and that for their kernel they are almost completely upstream + backported fixes from upstream, then the main thing that they are doing is tuning the kernel and selecting config options, who do you suggest that they submit these configs to?
where they do have real development work going on I expect them to push things back upstream, if only in self defense (reducing their workload), but it takes people experienced in distro maintenance to really believe that. (just like it takes a experienced developer to really believe in code re-use, and some people never do learn and insist on always re-inventing the wheel)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:48 UTC (Thu)
by filipjoelsson (guest, #2622)
[Link]
Are the pesky Ubuntu developers twiddling their thumbs all day, or actually doing work? If they are doing work, it'd be a whole lot nicer of them to contribute. And since they are a Debian derivative, there is an upstream for exactly everything they do (including little scripts and exotic configs) - except inserting trademarked logotypes.
Then again, they may be very few, and already contributing exactly everything they do - but if that was the case; why the difference between Debian and Ubuntu?
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:22 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
Of course they do. If you had followed any major software projects you'd have seen default config fixes from Red Hat, Mandriva, Novell, etc
> so why should you expect Ubunto to do so?
That's Ubuntu's opinion and why it's getting a black eye now.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 3:17 UTC (Thu)
by pj (subscriber, #4506)
[Link] (15 responses)
Another interesting metric might be changesets per group-member. 'per capita' if you will. How may employees to Red Hat, Novell, Wind River and Canonical each have? How many developers do Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva have?
Posted Sep 18, 2008 5:01 UTC (Thu)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (11 responses)
If you are talking Debian produced software packages or packaging related changes that are distro specific... then it would be appropriate for Ubuntu to go through Debian.
So the claim that you can't see Ubuntu because they are go through Debian is just wrong. I don't think anyone from Ubuntu/Canonical nor Debian would claim that.
It is my understanding that LWN started doing this type of analysis on the Linux kernel some time ago, scripts that I believe GKH is using and has perhaps improved upon. I bring this up because LWN's findings have been exactly the same so far as I can tell. When Jon started publishing articles with his results I emailed asking why Ubuntu/Canonical and Debian didn't show up anywhere. If there was a flaw in the way he was gathering the data that was somehow excluding Ubuntu/Canonical and Debian... or if it was basically harder to identify them if some developers were using non-organizational email addresses. I believe Jon's answer was basically... no, I don't think I have a flaw and I don't think that their developers are being attributed to other catagories (like unknown or independent)... and that it just appears they do not contribute much to upstream kernel development. Now, I don't want to speak for Jon... so he can certainly clarify if he wants to. :)
Here is a clarification I want to make though... the blog posting protesting GKH's presentation says that his data is flawed and inaccurate with regards to Ubuntu/Canonical. It isn't that it is somehow flawed JUST toward them... but that it isn't perfect and is flawed in general. Measuring what he is trying to measure is quite difficult. Jon has pointed out near the beginning when he started reporting on the kernel... that there was no perfect way to measure... but that it was worth trying to measure even if flawed... and can certainly be improved over time. The methodology they use is the best they have been able to come up with.
I don't think adding meters like... how many patches per capita/employees... and is going to offer useful information... but if the consensus is to add such things, be my guest. It would probably be just as useful as adding patches as a percentage of userbase size.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 6:42 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (8 responses)
I also find it odd (as in, showing an agenda) that Canonical with 100 patches is considered the ultimate evil, but Debian with <300 isn't mentioned at all.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:33 UTC (Thu)
by filipjoelsson (guest, #2622)
[Link]
Perhaps comparing users / patches is a better statistic? Well, different distros attract different types of users. I'd guess that the communities of Debian and Gentoo are more technically inclined than the community of Ubuntu. Besides, Ubuntu has a pretty large user base - so that'd be neither better nor more flattering for Ubunto, I think.
So, what is there to compare? I suppose what's left is patches from companies generating revenue selling Linux. And if purely community driven distros show up on the charts, let them stay as a reminder to those who actually pay salaries to developers. Wind River, rPath and Mandriva may find themselves similarly challenged.
This does not imply that I agree with Greg. I think it was shortsighted to not include Gnome/KDE/XFCE in the comparison - not that I know if it would have made a difference.
It does imply that I think ubuntuers are whining, however. A more suitable reaction would have been: "Shit! Are we at the bottom? Well, we'll overtake rPath before the next time he gives a talk. And, Mandriva's next after that!"
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:36 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
It is possible to be more accurate but at the cost of privacy which is not a good balance but more details at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics/Ideas
I am sure there is a agenda involved in getting commercial vendors involved to participate more which I think is a good thing. If there are accusations of anything else. being explicit is (somewhat) courteous. I don't see anybody mentioning "evil". Debian contributing as many patches as it has as a volunteer based organization seems pretty remarkable to me neverthless.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:36 UTC (Thu)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link] (4 responses)
I don't. All it says is a purely volunteer based effort like Debian still submits more patches than the more widely used and commercially funded Ubuntu.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 16:43 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (2 responses)
...which is fantastic, and shows that Debian is a large, mature and relatively healthy community of developers. The most significant group of contributors to Linux, Greg tells us, is still individuals who don't acknowledge corporate sponsorship of their work.
Debian has very successfully enabled thousands of developers to contribute, and has grown into a very successful and independent project. I hope that Ubuntu is in such good shape when it's 15 years old.
For now, however, Ubuntu has a relatively small developer community which is highly dependent on Canonical. The Debian kernel team is larger than the Ubuntu kernel team and has been active for a much longer time.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:16 UTC (Thu)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link] (1 responses)
IIRC Google got similarly picked on at last years OLS and I think their stats have improved this year. I'm not sure if it's cause and effect though...
Posted Sep 23, 2008 19:56 UTC (Tue)
by chema (subscriber, #32636)
[Link]
I think Google stats enhancement is called Andrew Morton ;)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 14:20 UTC (Fri)
by hmh (subscriber, #3838)
[Link]
Debian kernels are really, REALLY close to mainline kernels. They sometimes contain backports of patches that are not in mainline yet, but have been already accepted for eventual inclusion. And the rare Debian-originated patch is almost always sent upstream nowadays (I am not sure it was like that a few years ago, and sometimes the patches are not ACCEPTED upstream but still remain in the Debian kernel).
Ubuntu kernels have a lot more custom changes inside than Debian's as far as I know (they certainly used to), and you WILL get a major black eye when you do that and don't send your changes upstream. I am not sure if Ubuntu still deserves it, but they DO have a reputation of not bothering to send any of their kernel changes upstream in LKML (and that reputation obviously falls on Canonical shoulders).
Also, most Debian people I know that happen to also work on the kernel (and that includes myself!), do it directly *upstream*. Our work almost always gets into Linux mainline well before it ever makes it to any Debian kernel. Since Debian simply doesn't pay anyone to do any work (it is 100% volunteer-based), that work is NOT credited to Debian by most (any?) of us kernel developers that are also Debian developers.
For reference, you could credit something like 200 commits from me alone to Debian's name (I didn't check the date of the earliest commit, so some of those might be too old for the time-frame GregHK is using)... and I am not even one of the most prolific Debian developers that do upstream kernel work, AFAIK.
In the end, we Debian developers [that don't do kernel work in paid time by someone else] work upstream in the kernel without crediting Debian, and Debian nowadays doesn't have much to send upstream that is not in mainline. The obvious result is that Debian has a low patch-count.
THAT is why nobody is on Debian's case for a low patch-count. It isn't low at all, if you consider the "Debian developers doing work in the kernel the same way they do work for Debian", and that it is all unpaid work.
On the other hand, I *expect* Canonical to have a rule that anyone doing upstream work of any sort during paid time by Canonical, must do so using an email that credits it to Canonical. I am certain that RedHat, SuSE, Novell, IBM, Intel, and all others HAVE such rules in place.
So one really can't compare the Debian patch-count to the Canonical patch-count in any way that is even remotely favorable to Canonical...
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:37 UTC (Thu)
by harinath (subscriber, #47697)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 16:34 UTC (Thu)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 22, 2008 21:03 UTC (Mon)
by niv (guest, #8656)
[Link]
Yes, Ted works for IBM.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:34 UTC (Thu)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link] (1 responses)
Debian and Ubuntu maintain to separate kernel versions with different sets of configuration.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:47 UTC (Thu)
by maks (guest, #32426)
[Link]
one: debian/patches/features/all/export-gfs2-locking-symbols.patch
very easy question as the Ubuntu kernel team has never even tried to cooperate. Packaging is different and diverged a lot. There is near *zero* communication.
Also they don't care to contribute their patches upstream! For 2.6.26 I wanted to make sure to have the interesting ones upstream merged. Some of them were found irrelevant by now, but other merged (df0bcab2c66ac876d5e80864fca5cce944a44540, 292d73551d0aa19526c3417e791c529b49ebadf3,
Also it is true as all good people left Ubuntu (mjg59, kylem,..) their patchset is no longer that huge compared too earlier acpi hacks and so on.. You still find atrocities that would never find their way in a davej managed fedora kernel.
Posted Sep 25, 2008 14:21 UTC (Thu)
by SEMW (guest, #52697)
[Link]
Just sticking to the companies (I agree with filipjoelsson in that comparing companies with volunteer organisations like Debian in this is meaningless):
Canonical has 130 employees; Red Hat, 2200; Novell, 4100; Wind River, 1507; Mandriva, 80.
Patches per employee, then, are: Canonical, 0.77; Red Hat, 5.4; Novell, 1.77; Wind River, 0.14; Mandriva, 3.0.
This is still lowish on Ubuntu's part, but when you additionally take in account that Red Hat and Suse Linux have both been around 3.5 times as long as Ubuntu, and Mandriva 2.5 times, the numbers start to look somewhat less drastic than Greg presents them.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 4:15 UTC (Thu)
by drosser (guest, #29597)
[Link] (13 responses)
Speaking for myself, I'm a bit more ambivalent. The developer community Ubuntu must keep happy over all others is the Debian developer community, just as Red Hat and Novell must keep the ecosystems around Fedora and OpenSUSE alive and vibrant. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server feed off of their open communities, one could argue that Ubuntu has a stronger base from which to start and, given their desktop focus, not as far to go when building their distribution.
We should also keep in mind that Canonical gets press in far greater proportion to the size of their company. I would guesstimate that Red Hat has between one or two orders of magnitude more engineers on salary than Canonical.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:45 UTC (Thu)
by Lovechild (guest, #3592)
[Link] (12 responses)
That being said, seeing as the first line of defence against Greg's stats were that they didn't include contributions before they consolidated on the @canonical emails for contributions to the kernel. He corrected that, now mdz still complains about the statistics. The best way to prove that they are indeed providing patches would be to point them out. This time the complain didn't even have a point of correction attached, it was just that the stats might be wrong. Sure if they are, let's fix them. If you want glory and fame for your contributions as well as once and for all dispell the "Canonical doesn't give back" accusations then just prove that you do give back in measure.
One good thing that has come out of this whole debate seems to have been Canonical pledging to provide more work upstream. Just the other day they announced the hiring of a team of designers to help with interaction design. I can't wait to see who is on there and what they can do to help us. Aside that their Apport service is pure awesome, I wish though that it could be made more of an upstream project. As a feature it is vastly better than any other bug reporting tool and it helps make Ubuntu very pleasurable to use during their development cycle.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 9:43 UTC (Thu)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link] (4 responses)
This view is not uncommon in the business ecosystem.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:53 UTC (Thu)
by Lovechild (guest, #3592)
[Link] (3 responses)
If your business depends on Free Software, then as a business it is in your best interest to help shape it. If you work for one of these companies and they prevent you from participating then quitting is a sensible option - for you and for the company. Eventually brain drain will force these companies to reevaluate their position and take a more active role, till then good fortune has it that the sector is booming, jobs are not far between so quitting is not neccesarily a bad choice. That is if you, the developer, enjoy being part of the Free Software community and participating actively, if not then by all means enjoy your job.
Not once has the Canonical developers been blamed for Canonical' lack of contributions, that is a business decision, as such the business is the one with which the problem is debated.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:31 UTC (Thu)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link] (2 responses)
The way I understood it, is that not a single distributor of (free)
software is required to do anything, except adhere to the
license(s) under which the software is distributed. Confusing this
kind of clarity with more or less meaningless statistics and emotional
pleas is business as usual.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 14:50 UTC (Thu)
by mmcgrath (guest, #44906)
[Link] (1 responses)
This is the difference between the spirit and the letter of open source software. The letter must be followed, and is. The spirit should be, otherwise high profile developers will crap all over you for not being part of the ecosystem.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 20:08 UTC (Thu)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 18:04 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (6 responses)
If you consume upstream projects, you should value for your own sake contributing to them.
This is a popular meme in this discussion, but I think it misses the point. About half of the people in the room raised their hands during Greg's talk to indicate that they were running Ubuntu on their laptops. Does that mean that they should be expected to provide packaging and integration patches for Ubuntu? Of course not. It's free!
Many of them contribute to projects which are upstream of Ubuntu, and thus benefit it indirectly. Ubuntu, by creating a system that they want to use as their development platform, provides an indirect benefit as well. A lot of people use Ubuntu and don't contribute anything, directly or indirectly. This doesn't make them unethical or shortsighted.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 19:35 UTC (Thu)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (4 responses)
I don't know one way or another... so I'm not going to assume they don't... as long as you don't assume they do.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 5:50 UTC (Fri)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
Ubuntu works just fine as a development system - it's basically Debian with a nice UI and more polish, so lots of development tools are just an apt-get away.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 14:46 UTC (Fri)
by bboissin (subscriber, #29506)
[Link] (2 responses)
I would really prefer if ubuntu did less hacks to "fix" stuff, but instead worked with upstream to find the proper fix. I know it's harder and it takes more time but it benefits more people (and there are less chances for the fix to create a regression).
Posted Sep 19, 2008 21:18 UTC (Fri)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2008 23:22 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
Are the problems you see systemic in to the entire Ubuntu contributor base. Or are the problems you see associated with only the manhours that Canonical as a corporate entity has direct influence over how they are spent?
If you think the problem is systemic you should see if you can start a discussion inside Ubuntu to look at reforming at the package maintainership model that is being used. A systemic problem could be addressed by adjusting the team concept Ubuntu is using to add more individual accountability. For example teams could grow a specific tasking to just deal with upstream patch submission and sheparding and make a specific individual accountable for that in some way...if that sort of thing isn't there already. I'm thinking some sort of public flogging for failure to push patches upstream... or maybe a form of gladiatorial combat. Lot's of options really.
-jef
Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:22 UTC (Thu)
by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
[Link]
In that vein, I don't see why developers working for a Linux company should not be expected to have the ability to work with upstream.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 4:19 UTC (Thu)
by jbailey (guest, #16890)
[Link] (6 responses)
I'm curious about the Debian/Ubuntu numbers in relation to one another.
My experience in doing stuff for Ubuntu was that the people contributing to
Ubuntu hasn't managed to grow a culture of contributing upstream, even when
Posted Sep 18, 2008 12:06 UTC (Thu)
by maks (guest, #32426)
[Link] (2 responses)
> Ubuntu hasn't managed to grow a culture of contributing upstream, even when
easy they prefer to employ people who waffle all day long like the guy whose title is Community Manager, but can't write a single line of code.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:03 UTC (Thu)
by crimsun (guest, #13750)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2008 5:53 UTC (Fri)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
So the Community Manager is actually one of the most important people at Canonical, on a par with the gnarliest kernel hackers...
Posted Sep 18, 2008 12:07 UTC (Thu)
by mbanck (subscriber, #9035)
[Link]
That is hard to say without looking exactly at how they did come up with the numbers. However, I think in general one can say Canonical employees who are also Debian Developers tend to be careful not to mix up their email accounts when doing stuff with their respective hat on; so I would be surprised if a lot of patches had been submitted to the kernel by Canonical staff on company time with a @debian.org address.
Michael
Posted Sep 18, 2008 14:51 UTC (Thu)
by jmm (subscriber, #34596)
[Link] (1 responses)
Beyond what people post with their debian.org address, there´s quite a number of Debian developers working on the kernel in their regular day job.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 21:57 UTC (Thu)
by jeffm (subscriber, #29341)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 7:07 UTC (Thu)
by fcrozat (subscriber, #175)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:25 UTC (Thu)
by pkern (subscriber, #32883)
[Link] (4 responses)
So if at all they'd need to contribute back to Linux upstream...
Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:08 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 15:38 UTC (Thu)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link] (2 responses)
Now do you see why Ubuntu and Debian can't share kernel packages?
Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:25 UTC (Thu)
by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 13:05 UTC (Fri)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Also, Ubuntu and Debian have different policies about what is allowed to
Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:25 UTC (Thu)
by pointwood (guest, #2814)
[Link] (2 responses)
Canonical has clearly focused a lot on the desktop (where Redhat and Novell have been more focused on the server side), particularly a desktop based on Gnome and they have no doubt been pretty succesful in that regard. A lot of what they have done is polish and making things "just work", stuff that I think can be hard to measure.
To get a better picture of how much or how little Canonical have contributed to the ecosystem, you need to include all the software that's part of Ubuntu.
Canonical isn't exactly a big company so there are limits as to how much they can contribute. I think part of the reason they are in focus is because they have been quite succesful on the desktop and gotten a lot of users. Would the critic be different if it was for example Slackware?
Posted Sep 18, 2008 12:14 UTC (Thu)
by mbanck (subscriber, #9035)
[Link] (1 responses)
Sure, however if you would compare patches/lines of code contributed to GNOME for Redhat, Novell and Canonical, I am pretty sure there would be again a difference by several orders of magnitude between the first two and Canonical.
Michael
Posted Sep 21, 2008 10:36 UTC (Sun)
by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
[Link]
But even if it is a difference of, say, two orders of magnitude, that is probably about the difference in size between Canonical, Canonical's relevant dev teams, and Canonical's revenues in comparison to Red Hat and Novell's corresponding figures.
Once Canonical is profitable (which Red Hat and Novell already are), I will be very critical if it doesn't step up collaboration. Until then, I would encourage it but I won't be critical regarding that matter.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 9:03 UTC (Thu)
by herodiade (guest, #52755)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 9:39 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
Ubuntu/Canonical is the first to insist it should be given precedence because of its number of users. It can not ask to be considered as a small entity when there is work to do, and as a big entity when there are objectives to set. If Canonical wants to be taken as a big player, it must assume big player responsibilities.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 18:24 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (2 responses)
A great majority of Canonical's work shows up in Ubuntu itself, not in upstream projects. Most of what we do is packaging and integration, making the whole mess actually work for end users, not writing it in the first place. Sometimes this involves writing patches. Some of those patches are appropriate to contribute back, either to Debian (packaging patches) or further upstream (code patches). We try to do that, and we do a better job with some projects than with others. Some of the patches actually belong in Ubuntu and don't make sense anywhere else. We've actually gone out and asked upstream projects for feedback, via a survey, and are working to improve collaboration with them based on that. This all comes down to having a personal relationship where both sides understand what to expect from each other. Greg, unfortunately, prefers a different approach, which involves telling people with no influence over the situation how bad he thinks it is.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 8:16 UTC (Fri)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link] (1 responses)
But this leads to people also expecting Cannonical to be in the top-three in terms of upstream contributions. And no matter how you put it, it is not.
This discrepancy tends to be very annoying to other organizations who are less visible, yet do more in terms of code contributions.
You could say Cannonical/Ubuntu simply does a better job at advertising its work. This is not in a small part due to the way it communicates and works - a rather revolutionary way (which has been copied by the Fedora and OpenSuse concepts). That's a good thing, don't get me wrong, but it creates a sense of unfairness in some minds, and rightly so.
A good solution would be to communicate more honestly about the amount of contributions Cannonical does. The general public will hardly notice it, and it won't hurt Cannonical in terms of marketing, but it will alleviate the percieved unfairness.
At the same time, Cannonical should obviously do whatever it can to increase upstream contributions. Putting the upstream work in numbers somewhere on the Cannonical/Ubuntu site would help in this regard, as it would make it one of the priorities in the Ubuntu community (and make the whole discussion more transparent at the same time).
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:16 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
If you have a hard time understanding where that quote came from, you should probably read this blog post, it is an excellent read:
And this video is really nice too:
-jef
Posted Sep 18, 2008 10:59 UTC (Thu)
by dag- (guest, #30207)
[Link] (2 responses)
----
CentOS is different than a normal distribution (at least for the core OS) in the sense that our aim is to be 100% compatible with RHEL. That of course means we cannot change anything (except the things we legally have to). Bug-reports and patches go up to Red Hat and we wait for them to be accepted and pour down again.
Now, I don't think CentOS in itself is a big contributor to patches, much like the article already explains why RHEL is not in itself a big contributor. But saying CentOS functions outside the Linux ecosystem is probably one bridge too far and depending how you interpret "ecosystem" it is wrong or intentional :-)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 11:25 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html
"The "enterprise" release lasts a long time. These packages that were taken is a snapshot in time, that is slowly maintained and updated with bug and security fixes by the developers working for the distros. Those changes and fixes flow back into the original projects for inclusion in their main releases when possible, but for the most part, the majority of changes that go into these releases come from newer releases from the projects, so changes flow predominatly one way into the distro."
Given this, I don't think it was meant as a slight against CentOS. Just a general statement about the nature of enterprise distributions one of which CentOS is based on.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 13:20 UTC (Thu)
by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
[Link]
For the most part, patches and fixes that CentOS devs make goes up one step into Red Hat bugzilla. Others go all the way upstream.
The proper counter to all this is the size of the team of people. I think CentOS has 5-8 people who are considered core devs.
Having such numbers/size might balance more of the fixes that Canonical, etc make upstream.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 15:27 UTC (Thu)
by tle@holymonkey.com (guest, #47821)
[Link] (4 responses)
All Ubuntu components are released under an open source license. Patches and bug reports are actively pushed upstream. They should be praised for the contributions they make to the kernel and other projects, and encouraged to contribute more.
Instead of putting down organizations who contribute only a little, please focus your energies on praising those that contribute more. Any contribution should be gracefully accepted.
Cheers,
Posted Sep 18, 2008 16:12 UTC (Thu)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link] (2 responses)
A I pointed out elsewhere in this thread: I don't think Ubuntu is required by some ethical standards to contribute. It should make sense for Ubuntu for economical reasons to do so. While I appreciate RedHat, Novell and others, I don't suppose they employ so many developers just for the PR value.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:37 UTC (Thu)
by tle@holymonkey.com (guest, #47821)
[Link]
I agree that the discussion should focus on a distribution's _process_ of bug reporting and submission of patches to upstream.
Ubuntu does all of their bug reporting, patch submission, and upstream reporting in the open. Just like any open source project, don't just complain about something not working. At the VERY least, look at the process, and point out where it is failing.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 18:55 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link]
We focus primarily on fixing integration and packaging problems (which are our unique responsibility), followed by the most critical problems we inherit from upstream. This is similar to how Debian works, though the scales involved are dramatically different.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 20:44 UTC (Thu)
by hppnq (guest, #14462)
[Link]
See this Linux foundation paper and you will notice that Greg and your editor cooperated on the research that (very probably, no specific source is mentioned) produced these statistics.
It surprised me to not see a reference to this paper, I must admit. Especially since it raises a specific point that many here seem to miss in their eagerness to shoot from the hip: that Linux kernel development does not really need the contributions of even more companies.
So why the commotion? We could be having a nice discussion about whether we had not better call this ecosystem "GNU/Linux". ;-)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:07 UTC (Thu)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link] (3 responses)
In total, there were 131 DDs who had committed a change to the kernel, and the total number of changes committed by all DDs was 3127.
Here are the top DD kernel committers, limited to the ones who have more commits than Greg's numbers say Ubuntu has. ;-) Just for kicks, I've included the organization they have in their email address too.
502 Roland Dreier (cisco.com)
Note 1: I suspect that the stuff Jon developed and Dave is using is much better than my stupid shell script. This is more of a back of the envelope calculation to see how a different approach can yield significantly different results. These numbers should not be trusted, used in presentations at confereneces, or used to tell people to quit their jobs. (If you do, don't put my name on the slides.)
Note 2: No attempts were made to deal with the issue that different DD and kernel committers could easily have a name collision.
Note 3: Most of these large committers are not on Debian's kernel team, which seems like Debian is missing an obvious opportunity to have a better maintained kernel.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:17 UTC (Thu)
by joey (guest, #328)
[Link]
Posted Sep 18, 2008 23:07 UTC (Thu)
by dilinger (subscriber, #2867)
[Link]
...which won't happen until the politics and headaches involved in being a kernel team member are gone. Having a benevolent dictator who is able to communicate with others would be a good start.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 0:20 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
There aren't very many active free software developers who started as many
Posted Sep 18, 2008 17:27 UTC (Thu)
by crimsun (guest, #13750)
[Link] (6 responses)
I feel Greg's keynote was a bit heavy-handed, but certainly a "better job" could be done to contribute more visibly. That said, Ubuntu, as a distribution, is doing a fairly decent job of getting novice users interested in tinkering with the plumbing. While, as a distribution, it is certainly not unique in that regard, I'd like to emphasise one thing:
We're missing the point, which is that it matters not which company is contributing "the most", because Ubuntu is also "about" enabling its users/consumers to become familiar with the plumbing so that they can contribute.
In the end, we're all consumers.
I've mentored several people (and continue to do so). We start with smaller things, like adding quirks to various HDA codec patches in ALSA, and progress to debugging interoperability concerns in the entire audio stack (e.g., why does GNOME's mixer applet throw an error? Oh, because it lacks an HDA codec patch. Let's fix that then figure out why this legacy audio app is abusing the ALSA API, etc.).
Enough already with assigning blame. It's time to demonstrate how "ordinary people" make a difference. In fact, I'm giving a talk at this year's Ohio Linux Fest on just how to empower users to fix their audio stacks.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 18:59 UTC (Thu)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (5 responses)
It's about which companies are contributing "enough." Is Canonical contributing enough? When Shuttleworth talks about Canonical's business needs, and how Canonical needs to see upstream projects change how they are doing things to better serve those business needs... is Canonical contributing "enough" to those upstream projects to have their business needs seriously considered? Shuttleworth has been very public about challenging core upstream projects like the kernel and X.org to do things differently for Canonical's benefit. It's only fair that Canonical be challenged to pony up the manpower to make that happen.
A significant amount of the heat being generated now is in direct response to public statements Shuttleworth has made. Which other company in that list of companies has a CEO which likes to publicly blog about how he feels upstream projects should be doing things?
If you just stick with actual corporate entities who are paying developers to do open development... is Canonical doing their fair share to re-invest in the open source infrastructure that everyone is using?
Right now, at this very moment in time...
I'll let you in on a little secret. The pacing item in the continued advancement of the open ecosystem are upstream developer manhours.... not downstream integrator manhours...nor even users. The real work and challenges are in front of the upstream projects themselves. As downstream integrators, we should work on increasing the available upstream development manhours, or else we we'll run out of new things to integrate.
-jef
Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:33 UTC (Fri)
by grantingram (guest, #18390)
[Link] (1 responses)
It's about which companies are contributing "enough." Is Canonical contributing enough? That is a good point but Canonical is currently a loss making Linux start up. A well funded and high profile start - but it still is not turning a profit. How much contribution do you expect from them? What level of contribution and where would satisfy you? Shuttleworth has been very public about challenging core upstream projects like the kernel and X.org to do things differently for Canonical's benefit. Well the idea of coordinated releases is not just being sold on the basis that it is good for Canonical but also good for everyone.... The real work and challenges are in front of the upstream projects themselves. As downstream integrators, we should work on increasing the available upstream development manhours, or else we we'll run out of new things to integrate. Here I disagree! The remarkable success of Ubuntu demonstrates that applying large amounts of "polish" to existing software can have an enormous effect on the success of the free software ecosystem as a whole. Clearly we need upstream development efforts but "polish" is also very valuable!
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:37 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
By doing these sorts of things, Shuttleworth has himself raised expectations on Canonical's own participation in the upstream process.
You don't see him singling out other companies by name, no Tivo, or Linspire or Nokia or YellowDog or whomever. There are probably a ton of companies out there trying to build a business around some sort of linux "distribution" in some shape or form and making small but targeted contributions to upstream projects. That's not the issue.
The issue here is is that the very outspoken CEO of Canonical is out making public statements, challenging upstream projects to change how they are doing their work to benefit Canonical...without providing additional resources to those projects.
If Tivo's CEO decided to be as public as Shuttleworth about seeing upstream processes changes, I would fully expect Tivo to be challenged to provide manpower as well. It's really as simple as that.
Canonical is in the spotlight, because Shuttleworth put Canonical in the spotlight.
-jef
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:36 UTC (Fri)
by AJWM (guest, #15888)
[Link]
It seems to me, from crimsun's message above, that he and Ubuntu are doing that by providing a training ground for developers new to Linux. Sure, not everyone who tweaks an audio stack or whatever will go on to be an upstream developer, but some will. Not everyone who goes to school goes into research to discover new knowledge, either -- that doesn't mean we should berate schools for not doing enough.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:54 UTC (Fri)
by markshuttle (guest, #22379)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think you must be referring to my call for syncronization and coordination in the stabilisation and release of diverse components in the free software stack. That's based on my belief that it will make all of free software more effective in the battle with proprietary software, not based on any specific advantage to Canonical.
Of course, Ubuntu is best known for our commitment to a firm cadence of releases - we do them every six months, and it works well for us and our users. We took that up from GNOME, who pioneered the approach in large aggregated projects. Other projects, like the kernel, are already converging on a regular cadence of releases. There are lots of examples in nature and in economics that demonstrate the gains in efficiency that come from such syncronization. And every participant, include Canonical and its competitors, would benefit.
I'm not trying to tell anybody what they should do, to benefit Canonical. I'm pointing out that we will all be more successful if we think systemically, and do what nature does.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 17:29 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
You start out with components, with random phasing and even frequencies somtimes. But through their own natural weak coupling, these components spontaneously reach a state of synchronization for long periods of time,until such time that the weak non-linear coupling interactions takes the system back to an unsyncronized state.
Here's the coolest part, if you try to force these sorts of systems from the outside, you end up breaking their natural cyclic nature by enhancing one of the weak non-linear coupling processes. Your driving force finds some sort of destructive resonance.. and you break the system.
So here's my suggestion to you. Be a weak non-linear coupler. Don't be a strong driving force. Help the naturally complex non-linear system do its thing and find its own stochastic syncronization. Don't break it.
-jef
Posted Sep 18, 2008 19:55 UTC (Thu)
by sbishop (guest, #33061)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 20:02 UTC (Thu)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (7 responses)
Canonical!=Ubuntu
-jef
Posted Sep 19, 2008 2:28 UTC (Fri)
by sbishop (guest, #33061)
[Link] (6 responses)
If flat out telling a distribution's core developers to quit isn't an attack on that distribution, then I can't imagine what _would_ qualify...
Posted Sep 19, 2008 5:31 UTC (Fri)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (5 responses)
He did say that if your current employer discourages you from contributing your work back upstream that you should quit, yes. Is there anything wrong with this sentiment? It applies to Via, TI, and all these other pseudo-open-source sweatshops that dump an unlicensed almost-working ball of code on some FTP server and disappear. Is this an accurate description of Canonical? Probably not.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:05 UTC (Fri)
by grantingram (guest, #18390)
[Link] (4 responses)
Did GregKH "flat out tell" Canonical employees to quit? Well almost... I was quite astonished when I read his slides! The whole thing strikes me as really rather unpleasant. I'm really not sure what the aim of the talk was other than to generate heat. Perhaps it was cold....
Posted Sep 19, 2008 11:48 UTC (Fri)
by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 15:19 UTC (Fri)
by grantingram (guest, #18390)
[Link]
I'd forgotten about that - suddenly it all starts to make a bit more sense... a sort of flame war conducted over twenty three months.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 15:46 UTC (Fri)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link] (1 responses)
And in this specific case, it could be chalked up to a "reap what you sow" moment.
That was a pretty aggressive move on Shuttleworth's part. Taking negative public sentiment, and using it to bolster your own company's interests by calling out another company for taking advantage of thousands of programmers and contributors. Who would have thought that other entities would replicate Shuttleworth's aggressive tactics at community manipulation. Mark should have patented that idea, then he wouldn't have to worry about competitors doing the exact same thing to him on down the line.
I think if Shuttleworth decided to take a step back from the public eye, and let the technical leads at Canonical who are actually doing the work do the bulk of the communication about any Canonical activity...that could help reorient relations. He would be better of letting the technical people inside Canonical lead with action, and following up on that technical leadership by talking about it publicly. Instead he spends a lot of time talking about what Canonical will do or what Canonical is thinking about. He primes the pump, he stokes the flames...he just doesn't realize whose pumps and flames he's priming and stroking.
-jef
Posted Sep 19, 2008 21:45 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2008 6:06 UTC (Fri)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
Overall, I think Canonical does need to contribute more, particularly around the kernel where I've encountered some annoying bugs. However, they first need to get more revenue - unlike Red Hat and Novell, they don't have a significant revenue stream from enterprise support agreements. In fact the ratio of paying customers to non-paying users is far, far higher for Red Hat / Novell than Canonical/Ubuntu.
Personally I find the Ubuntu stance on free software and particularly patents infinitely preferable to Novell getting into bed with Microsoft. If Novell's upstream contributions really depend on the Microsoft deal, it would be a lot better in the long-term if they scaled back upstream work and tore up the Microsoft agreement.
Posted Sep 18, 2008 20:53 UTC (Thu)
by leoc (guest, #39773)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2008 21:23 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link]
Posted Sep 19, 2008 0:18 UTC (Fri)
by tpo (subscriber, #25713)
[Link] (2 responses)
So Ubuntu doesn't contribute as much as Redhat and Novel. How come? RH and Novel have lots of developers that contribute "upstream", Canonical doesn't. How come? RH has a *lot* of industry clients. A RH license sells in the range of a $1000 per seat. Is such an amount for a free OS frivolous or amoral? Now how much does an Ubuntu license cost? Does that fact give RH moral superiority over Canonical? I can't argue about Novel, since I don't know about them.
After many years I went to a LUG meeting recently and I was absolutely overwhelmed by the fact that half of the Linux enthusiasts (!) there had absolutely not _any_ command of the shell. Never ever touched a shell in their life. They were _not_ running RH of course and this feat was _not_ the achievement nor of Novel nor of RH.
The command of a shell and contributing back what "upstream" seems to percive as worthy could be correlated.
A last thing. Let's assume Mark Shuttleworth would get sick and tired of the flames, finally realize, that the other companies are in it for the money (are they?) and not for trying to serve humanity, shut his company down, fire all the Debian devs getting paid by him and thus /dev/null Ubuntu from this world. Would that be a desirable evolution? Weren't Canonical only freeloading anyway?
*t, from the shoulders of ancient giants
[1] It seems making money off Linux is a pill that has been swallowed a long time ago.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 8:05 UTC (Fri)
by seyman (subscriber, #1172)
[Link]
Please read the studies that Novell and Red Hat have done of the usability of the Linux desktop, the patches that both have contributed to GNOME and KDE and go look at the hosting they've provided for the two projects.
Posted Sep 23, 2008 18:05 UTC (Tue)
by dag- (guest, #30207)
[Link]
For a 24/7 support contract, you pay $1500/year for SLES, $2500 for RHEL and $2750/year Ubuntu LTS.
Even though Ubuntu LTS is also available for free, and RHEL has a free CentOS spinoff, prices are not that much different and Ubuntu LTS is not cheaper than RHEL or SLES.
Source: https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
Date: 23/09/2008
Posted Sep 19, 2008 7:54 UTC (Fri)
by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
[Link]
I'm thinking that Ubuntu is something that shakes us techie nerds to realize there is more than code in the world. There is helping, community, friendship. You may think 'ubuntu' is marketing bs, I think it's the thing that makes Ubuntu what it is. Also, it's marketing, but maybe in addition to accepting "money" in Linux world we should not hate "marketing". They are all part of this world, anyway, and not evil by default but means to achieve something. I love Fedora's infinity etc. thing, too, it has a touch of also some non-technical in it.
This comment is as much to Greg KH (who has partially a point and partially is just offensive) as some of the other commenters. I'd hope for Greg and others also to read through Ubuntu's Code of Conduct and maybe even agree to it.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 15:26 UTC (Fri)
by MattPerry (guest, #46341)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:24 UTC (Fri)
by alex (subscriber, #1355)
[Link]
* intentional quotes, the community is vague amorphous blob of anyone with an opinion of FLOSS and there is no real membership.
Posted Sep 19, 2008 18:17 UTC (Fri)
by jikos (subscriber, #43140)
[Link]
He just says (as far as my undersntading goes) that they don't contribute to the "ecosystems" as much as would be appropriate with respect to how large userbase they have. Nothing more, nothing less, just a simple feeling/opinion statement.
Posted Sep 21, 2008 22:49 UTC (Sun)
by boog (subscriber, #30882)
[Link]
Posted Sep 21, 2008 23:14 UTC (Sun)
by Felix_the_Mac (guest, #32242)
[Link]
My message would be if: If you care about free software and you work for Novell: Quit.
Posted Sep 22, 2008 16:47 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
I'll try to be brief:
* Yes it is true that Ubuntu takes the work of others and uses it.
* This is how it is _suppose_ to work. Debian fights tooth and nail for good licensing for the expressed purpose of letting other people use their software and redistribute it without worries. Ubuntu is really just doing what they are suppose to be doing.. reusing, redistributing. Kernel developers do the same thing for 'software freedom'.
(Greg is one of those hugely outspoken pro-Freedom sorts, but yet when somebody else takes advantage of this freedom he takes a shit on them?)
* Making userspace better and improving graphics and UI is MORE important then hacking on the kernel nowadays for a very very large number of users. The sort of users that Ubuntu caters to.
* Making software usable is significantly harder then making software.
---------------------------------
Ultimately it's all just petty jealousy. People don't like that Ubuntu isn't doing most of the work, but is getting all the credit. So they are overly critical of Ubuntu. Instead they should just be asking Ubuntu to help users understand the software and positive (and negative) experiences come from far more then Ubuntu.
Look at this way....
Would Dell be supporting Linux on the desktop and improving support for their hardware without Ubuntu? Would Intel be interested in supporting Linux heavily on their new embedded systems if the only user experience their customers would receive would be the generic Redhat-style shit desktop experience?
Ubuntu, for very good reasons, is able to push the popularity of Linux and this has had very significant and positive effects on the whole Linux 'ecosystem'
Ignoring this fact is just expressing a form of willful ignorance.
Posted Sep 22, 2008 19:53 UTC (Mon)
by polar (guest, #51861)
[Link]
Posted Sep 23, 2008 13:41 UTC (Tue)
by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406)
[Link] (1 responses)
A company full of people writing kernel code or some guys doing desktop integration?
Posted Sep 23, 2008 18:49 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
if you are talking about a unix greybeard, you want to pay the company doing the software development
if you are talking your parents/grandparents/etc you may want to pay the company doing the desktop integration, since that's what makes the system usable for them (and keeps your phone from ringing off the hook with their questions)
Posted Sep 23, 2008 22:42 UTC (Tue)
by frankie (subscriber, #13593)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Sep 23, 2008 22:49 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Of course if one considers GCC, the binutils and Python to be
Posted Sep 23, 2008 22:54 UTC (Tue)
by frankie (subscriber, #13593)
[Link]
Posted Sep 25, 2008 6:44 UTC (Thu)
by dkite (guest, #4577)
[Link] (2 responses)
As for it being a bit impolite, come on. Kernel people don't do polite. It
I think it does the universe some good to knock Canonical and Ubuntu down a
Derek
Posted Sep 25, 2008 12:20 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 2, 2008 12:43 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link]
Posted Sep 25, 2008 15:12 UTC (Thu)
by obi (guest, #5784)
[Link]
- Redhat seems to invest a lot of effort into "Linux Plumbing" and as a non-Redhat user I'm very grateful for it.
There's clearly a market of users out there that only started considering Linux when Ubuntu appeared. Increasing userbase is very important. New Linux developers are a subset of the total Linux users after all; mindshare matters.
Linux Plumbing is important but not the only thing that needs work, just take the MacOS X example for instance.
Apple's iPhone is another example of a different focus - the hardware is more or less the same as all those Palm, WinCE, Pocket PC, Symbian devices. The plumbing didn't really make a difference. But the UI, integration, infrastructure (appstore) mattered a lot. Now everybody else learned their lesson, and we'll all get phones with better user interfaces (modulo some bad rip-offs too). What Apple did could in theory have been done by us Linux people or other proprietary companies years ago - but they went out and JFDI.
Ubuntu has a similar role IMHO - it tries to focus on something else; it could be an evolutionary dead-end, or it could pay off, in which case the other distros will also have learned something in the process. All good.
Posted Oct 1, 2008 13:56 UTC (Wed)
by pyellman (guest, #4997)
[Link]
Peter Yellman
Posted Oct 8, 2008 23:23 UTC (Wed)
by calc (guest, #22286)
[Link] (3 responses)
Its fairly easy to find this information via launchpad.
Posted Oct 8, 2008 23:26 UTC (Wed)
by calc (guest, #22286)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 9, 2008 4:30 UTC (Thu)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link]
So maybe not so easy as all that :-)
Posted Oct 9, 2008 4:19 UTC (Thu)
by calc (guest, #22286)
[Link]
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Of course it's controversial. I was just reporting on what he said, though. What else do you think I should have done? I have expressed other opinions about Ubuntu elsewhere; I didn't feel the need to inject that into Greg's talk.
Controversial
Controversial
Controversial
Controversial
First slide
First slide
First slide
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Re: Controversial
Controversial
Controversial
Controversial
That's not quite correct either. Pete Graner now leads the Canonical Kernel Team.
Controversial
Controversial
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Comparative advantage
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
OK. I will then politely ask: can anyone provide statistics on how much Ubuntu employees have contributed to Gnome, as compared to other contributors like Red Hat, Novell, and Sun?
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
RE: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Ubuntu employees
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Canonical's hubris has reached such ridiculous levels it seriously proposed that other distributions synch their releases with its own...
I mention this only for the sake of the facts, but I'm afraid you have this backwards. The offer was to change Ubuntu's own release schedule to match up with others.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major /
minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian
are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a
combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions,
and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign
Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that."
corner stones of the distribution, Canonical may want to use the results. In other words:
offloading their core work. I wouldn't call that a nice offer.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
corner stones of the distribution, Canonical may want to use the results. In other words:
offloading their core work. I wouldn't call that a nice offer."
Be fair, that is a rather biased way of interpreting Shuttleworth's statement. What he said is that if the other major players agreed on a schedule, he would be willing to change Canonicals to match theirs. I'm sure that if the other distributions expressed an interest in his idea he would be willing to work with them on organising the synchronised schedule.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
> code we receive from upstream.
>
> Why, then, does Greg feel that Canonical should be
> expected to make more changes to the Linux kernel?
>
> Is it because Ubuntu is a very popular system, with a
> lot of users? It is that, but most people who use Linux
> arent kernel developers, so a large user population
> doesnt translate to a lot of Linux kernel patches.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
experience).
solve them, and then backport the fixes to the ubuntu packages.
ubuntu to upstream.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
The U.S. National Security Agency contributes 2.1% of the patches into X.org; why is not clear.Why the NSA contributes to X
Why the NSA contributes to X
Come on, it's still X!
Why the NSA contributes to X
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
> files (and nobody expects those distros to submit their default config
> files upstream),
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
I also find it odd (as in, showing an agenda) that Canonical with 100 patches is considered the ultimate evil, but Debian with <300 isn't mentioned at all.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
needed to build gfs1 module needed for redhat-cluster irc.
3b9408870757bd9e07fd03ac6318258f22b8dfa3,
a4fa7ef037b17f2a3b9b393cb924e571fc04e784, e1fefea9cc4bc231b5c23fe19e3682fe061dc097, a4fa7ef037b17f2a3b9b393cb924e571fc04e784).
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
According to the article this is what Greg was trying to say:
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
if you are a developer, if you want to be a part of the ecosystem, and if
you work for a non-contributing company: quit.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Indeed, why didn't Greg make his point in the Novell canteen instead of at
this relatively high profile public conference?
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Has it started already?
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Ubuntu is quite a nice distro but I'm not really happy with their relations wrt upstream. In fact for the packages in universe/multiverse, I prefer reporting the bug directly to debian otherwise I'm not sure if it will land in debian or upstream.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Does that mean that they should be expected to provide packaging and integration patches for Ubuntu? Of course not.
If you're a user, you can contribute back by testing and reporting bugs (and perhaps provide patches for packaging bugs).
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Dev)
How many of the Ubuntu contributors were contributing upstream before, and
are now simply associated with Ubuntu instead; How many of the Debian
contributors or contributions are paid for by Canonical.
upstream tended to be the people who were doing it anyway, so made it a
part of the work that they were already doing. Those who weren't already
contributing upstream rarely started to do so.
they tried directly to do so. It just somehow never worked out. Having
been there, I don't know what the right way to do that is.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
> they tried directly to do so. It just somehow never worked out. Having
> been there, I don't know what the right way to do that is.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
How many of the Debian contributors or contributions are paid for by Canonical.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
> Canonical
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Ubuntu-Debian shared kernel
Ubuntu makes a major release every six months.
Debian makes a major release about every 18 months or so.
Ubuntu-Debian shared kernel
Now do you see why Ubuntu and Debian can't share kernel packages?
No. Why can't the kernel package be stabilized the same way other packages are stabilized? Base it off Debian's unstable distribution rather than the stable release.
Ubuntu-Debian shared kernel
go into the kernel. Ubuntu allows "binary blobs" that Debian does not.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Canonical has clearly focused a lot on the desktop (where Redhat and Novell have been more focused on the server side), particularly a desktop based on Gnome and they have no doubt been pretty succesful in that regard. A lot of what they have done is polish and making things "just work", stuff that I think can be hard to measure.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Think Adobe vs. Tresys, or Oracle vs. Hwaci, or Google vs. Linuxtronix.
If Canonical would be found contributing an average 10 patches per employee
while Novell would contribute, say, 5 patches/employee, then the GKH conclusion
should be reversed: it would mean Canonical would be a better place than Novell
for a developer that want to work with the community; it would mean they
do a better job given their size/ressources.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
> employees) of companies, if one want to evaluate how good citizen a
> workplace is.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
http://gregdek.livejournal.com/32787.html
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/09/16/video-the-histor...
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Then, there is the matter of redistributors who base their products on another distributor's work; these are distributors like Ubuntu or CentOS. There are no contributions back to the community from that kind of distributor at all. They are not functioning as a part of the Linux ecosystem.
----
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Tim
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
The editor (who usually isn't afraid to inject his own opinion) is being unfair by reporting on the "picking on Canonical" without pointing out that it is plain wrong.
debian-specific numbers
339 Matthew Wilcox (wil.cx)
310 Roland McGrath (redhat.com)
236 Nathan Scott (aconex.com)
209 Henrique de Moraes Holschuh (eng.br)
178 Kyle McMartin (mcmartin.ca)
113 Brice Goglin (myri.com)
112 Mark Brown (sirena.org.uk)
debian-specific numbers
debian-specific numbers
debian-specific numbers
commit counts for other projects too (glibc, GNU make...)
core projects as Roland (although part of that was that he started doing
GNU stuff back in the eighties...)
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
If you are a skilled open source developer, with intimate knowledge of one of the critical subsystems that make up a linux desktop, looking to get a pay check for your work, is Canonical's commitment to supporting the ecosystem strong enough for you compared to other potential employers looking to hire you?
What is enough?
What is enough?
As downstream integrators, we should work on increasing the available upstream development manhours, or else we we'll run out of new things to integrate.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
a bad precedent?
a bad precedent?
a bad precedent?
a bad precedent?
a bad precedent?
Not exactly unheard of in the other direction, though ;)
a bad precedent?
The Lightbulb Moment!
a bad precedent?
He's very outspoken. That can have a downside. Trust me, I know intimately all about the downside of being too outspoken.
a bad precedent?
a bad precedent?
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
Other contributions than code, too
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
miss the point
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
Dear Greg ...
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
An alternative view
An alternative view
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
and Guido van Rossum to name just two: a random grep of the changelogs of
any major plumbing component will find more although I suppose it's hard
to find many people who have the same sort of influence on anything that
Guido does on Python).
insignificant or not plumbing enough, then maybe one can avoid this: but
any definition of 'plumbing' that excludes GCC and GNU ld in particular is
a silly definition.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
to go towards supporting the ecosystem, this is an important data point.
could be worse (or better). Al Viro could have said something.
peg or two. Restores some equilibrium.
Canonical does not, and will never, change for Ubuntu. There is no "subscription" version. It's free.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
- Ubuntu seems to invest a lot of effort into integrating, launchpad, translations, "community", evangelising (like with their "shipit" - cds sent for free), etc - and as a non-Ubuntu user I'm also grateful for all that.
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
organizations/companies contributions to rancor, discord and ill will
within the community?
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem