What is enough?

Here is what I expect from Canonical. I expect Canonical's CEO to spend far less time publicly speaking about what he thinks upstream projects and contributors should be doing with their time. I think the vast, vast majority of the criticism that Canonical is getting, and why Canonical is being singled out, is because Shuttleworth has made it a point to go to the press and to conferences and talk about interactions with upstream projects as the CEO of Canonical, to better meet Canonical's business interests.

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