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Ubuntu debuts its Upstream ReportUbuntu debuts its Upstream ReportPosted Oct 1, 2008 20:55 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report by dlang Parent article: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report "why do you expect [Ubuntu] to submit a patch for every bug they report?" The expectation is that they (and all distros) will submit a patch upstream for every bug that they fix, as well as to communicate with upstream about any confirmed bug that upstream doesn't know about. The situation to avoid is where a distro (any distro) fixes bugs for its own users and doesn't work to get them upstream so that others benefit as well. Upstream might disagree with a given fix, of course. Sometimes this can't happen immediately, but if all distros do this, then all distros benefit.
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Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 20:58 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
that's not what people are saying.
they are complaining the ubuntu is making bug reports without also sending patches to fix them, they aren't claiming that ubuntu is making fixes and refusing to submit them.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 21:18 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]
No, they have said that Canonical/Ubuntu doesn't participate in upstream development. This says nothing about the number of bugs they send upstream, or how much development they do for themselves. I've heard that they do quite a bit of work on their packages and never bother pushing it even to debian -- but that is a side argument.
Personally I wouldn't care much if they did 10x the development they pushed upstream, locally, and 100x the bugs than they did fixes ... as long as they did their "fair share" of the upstream work, and generally stopped taking credit for the work Red Hat, IBM and Novell are doing for them.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 22:04 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
??? Logic ??? I really fail to see your reasoning.
Canonical isn't making money. They loose lots of money .. (on a pretty consistent basis so far)
So up until now Ubuntu is essentially a charity organisation that sends out CDs to everyone and develops a _very_ popular distro.
RH and Novell (mostly due to the help from MS though) are making lots of money on the other hand. So it is only fair that they do more development.
That is how the system should work IMNSHO.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 22:45 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Let's connect some dots....
Ubuntu is popular.... Canonical controls the core infrastructure that makes it possible for Ubuntu to be popular.... That infrastructure that Ubuntu relies on is not currently replicable without Canonical as it is closed source.... Canonical is not profitable, nor do we know for sure if its on a path to profitability....
Draw your own conclusions about the sustainability of what Canonical's approach to managing community interactions. The situation with translation handling continues to be a hallmark example. Ubuntu specific improvements such as translations are bound up in that closed infrastructure and are not flowing into upstream projects as smoothly:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/125/
And that's just upstream translations, which arguably is one of the lowest hanging fruit of community and upstream interaction that Ubuntu's popularity could be leveraged to help with. It stands to reason that Ubuntu's wide popularity translates into an army of volunteer translators across a multitude of languages.
But those volunteer efforts are not flowing easily into upstream projects because launchpad is specifically designed to aggregate contributions and not to redistribute them back to upstream. If Canonical was actually interested in helping create a conduit between community effort and the upstream projects this problem would have been solved as part of launchpad's design...years ago. Canonical has created this problem by deliberately designing launchpad to try to be a central service to everybody's workflow. To make use of downstream translations, upstream projects have to pull from launchpad and thus rely specifically on Canonical. Canonical could have designed launchpad to work with upstream projects directly and push translations into upstream's processing.
If Canonical was an actual charitable organization, they'd have no compelling reason to keep launchpad closed and Ubuntu community volunteers like their translators would be free to build the tools and the workflows they need without having to worry about Canonical's service based business model.
Speaking of charitable organizations...isn't there a Ubuntu Foundation on the books...does that organization do anything day-to-day month-to-month or was it just a PR stunt?
-jef
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 22:55 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Let's connect some dots.... Let's not. Let's ask for a release of the LWN site source code, so someone could say implement a reasonable comment filter.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 1, 2008 23:00 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there is a greasemonkey script that lets you do exactly that.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 6:05 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Not that I don't appreciate the effort that went into that GM script, but it is in no way a replacement.
Just as an example: I regularly use at least 3 different computers, with 3 different installations of FireFox, separate bookmarks, cookies, etc.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 8:56 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] To be honest I do not always pass my own filter. ;-)To this long time Red Hat user, the continuous Ubuntu bashing here is just becoming a bit boring, and frankly, it is looking pathetic. Talking a lot about what could be done distracts from the important stuff that is actually being done. People are of course free to determine whether something is important to them or not, and it is mainly the lack of respect for this important foundation of free software that annoys me. For people who remember the discussions about the test bed Red Hat created with Fedora and the way Novell is dealing with Microsoft, the whining about Canonical or Ubuntu not contributing enough to the community is a very bad joke. More on topic: to me it seems that the correct tooling is essential for getting the work done, so I welcome this very interesting contribution by Ubuntu.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 2:27 UTC (Thu) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link] Canonical isn't making money.Not true. They loose lots of money .. (on a pretty consistent basis so far) Possibly true, although as a private company only they know. So up until now Ubuntu is essentially a charity organisation that sends out CDs to everyone So you agree, they are spending money ... just not on development. and develops a _very_ popular distro. I think we've established that they mostly market a distro. ... and as to how popular it is, well popcon vs. smolt stats. are pretty close. So let's just say "one of the popular" distros. So you're argument (or "logic" as you say) is that it's fine for them not to participate, even though they are one of the popular distributions, because they are spending that money on PR/marketing ... but it wouldn't be fine for Red Hat or Novell to just stop paying developers to participate upstream and instead just spend that money on PR/marketing? Or maybe you're just saying it's fine if noone grows the pie but just spends all their money on trying to grab as big a slice of the current pie as possible? That's fine, I guess, you can have that opinion ... but given that I actually like Linux, and want to see it improve faster (and I'd kind of prefer having a job) personally I'll choose option B. Which is pointing out how Canonical are hurting the community and need to change. As did Greg, probably for the same reasons.
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 4:13 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
if you don't think that marketing a distro, especially to people who have trouble with existing distros isn't growing the pie then you are being blind.
it's not a zero-sum game, ubuntu's gain doesn't directly cause RedHat loss
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 4:39 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
" Canonical isn't making money.
Not true. They loose lots of money .. (on a pretty consistent basis so far) Possibly true, although as a private company only they know."
As of May 22, 2008 Mark was quoted in an interview as saying that Canonical was "not close" to breaking even. I can't imagine a more qualified opinion on the matter than Shuttleworth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/22/internet...
This interview is also interesting to note that because Mark talks about the future of software as "unlicensed" software. That is a bit of an odd way of describing FOSS if that was his intent. Everywhere else I see the phrase "unlicensed software" used it is used in the context of some sort of licensing violation. I'm pretty sure that Mark doesn't mean to imply that the future of software is going to be the use software in violation of the license that it is offered under.
-jef
Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report Posted Oct 2, 2008 8:21 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
> > and develops a _very_ popular distro.
> I think we've established that they mostly market a distro.
Who established that? you? Then you're part of a vocal group of people, but where others (me included) take objection to that opinion. Ubuntu develops a popular distribution by integrating different packages for a target audience of computer non-experts desktop users better than their competitors. This integration and smoothing work is *not* just marketing -- and it doesn't matter that you and others want to debase that important work that's part of our Linux eco-system.
For the record, I am not involved in Ubuntu and don't even use it. (I installed it once in a VM and recognized after a few weeks that it's not my style of distro.) But I've met many people who started to use Linux because of Ubuntu -- they tried RH and SUSE before, and Ubuntu was the first Linux distro that »did things right« for them. And just because of those newbies starting to use Linux, Ubuntu is a Good Thing(tm).
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