LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

• The raw patchs numbers should be pondered by the size (number of employees) of companies, if one want to evaluate how good citizen a workplace is. Big corporations doing huge revenues from Linux mostly by selling proprietary components on top, having less than a few percent employees contributing f/oss and tons of marketing droids and devs on proprietary stuff, patenting everything in sight will produce more patchs than a 4-persons company of wich 3 are developers but that produce only free software. Which indeed don't mean the big corp is a better place to work for devs liking opensource.
  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.
• GKH has been pretty clear about what he was accounting. He said Canonical is not big Linux plumbing (kernel, xorg, gcc, ...) contributor. Since their distro sells itself (or is mostly perceived) as a usable and polished desktop, maybe their works would show up in higher level, "non plumbing" components (like gnome and so) ? It would be interesting to have contributions numbers on the high level, desktop components.
• The best effect this talk may have would be to reach Mark Shuttleworth ears. Then maybe he would think about those problems right at the design phase of his projects. That could prevent futures proprietaries launchpad like stuff, or their badly designed (wrt upstreaming contribution) online translation environment. Those are place where, imho, Canonical actual work with the community leave much to be desired. Mark had been deaf to that sort of comments on how Canonical work with upstream up to now. Thanks to such public bashing, he may eventually stop denegating problems.
• There's a few commercial debian derived distributions that seems to make huge deals and money from linux nowadays (with the rise of umpc), but are so scarce contributors that we don't even think about accounting hem here. I think Xandros is competing for the Great Leecher title.