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LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystemLPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystemPosted Sep 18, 2008 18:24 UTC (Thu) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112)In reply to: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem by herodiade Parent article: LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem
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.
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LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem Posted Sep 19, 2008 8:16 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
You should notice that this is about appearances more than reality. Ubuntu appears to many users as one of the major distributions - the often-quoted top-three is Red Had, Novell and Cannonical. That is (and should be) surely something you can be proud off.
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).
LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem Posted Sep 19, 2008 16:16 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Correction... Fedora came first. In fact Fedora inspired Ubuntu's own effort to build "A better Fedora than Fedora."
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
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