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Ubuntu debuts its Upstream ReportUbuntu debuts its Upstream ReportPosted Oct 1, 2008 22:45 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report by kragil Parent article: Ubuntu debuts its Upstream Report
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
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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.
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