LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem [LWN.net]

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Posted Sep 18, 2008 8:18 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem by Burgundavia
Parent article: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Greg is above all a kernel contributor. Ubuntu may have won the hearths of many users but Canonical's insistence on directing the entities that do the work while contributing little didn't earn it a lot of goodwill from people like him. After Launchpad's "let us manage your projects for you" Canonical's hubris has reached such ridiculous levels it seriously proposed that other distributions synch their releases with its own (and Greg's numbers show clearly it had precious little to contribute to such a project).

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.

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LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Posted Sep 19, 2008 17:09 UTC (Fri) by talisein (subscriber, #31829) [Link]

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

Posted Sep 22, 2008 8:17 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Well the real "offer" comes into sight when reading the full original:

"There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS:
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."

For me this sounds like: if the others do the coordination work of picking a date and the
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

Posted Sep 26, 2008 5:36 UTC (Fri) by turpie (guest, #5219) [Link]

"For me this sounds like: if the others do the coordination work of picking a date and the
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.

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.