Still no class? [LWN.net]

Still no class?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 2:12 UTC (Thu) by kragil (subscriber, #34373)
In reply to: Still no Canonical? by gregkh
Parent article: Who wrote 2.6.32

I think that is just petty tbh.

So MS dropped a big pile of code to improve Linux as a guest on their platform.
Canonical just fixed a few real problem linux users had.

I'll prefer Canonicals contribution to MS' any day.

Only when Linux has reached world domination we can really tell who contributed most to its success.

I wouldn't bet on Novell to win that prize though.

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Still no class?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 5:12 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> I think that is just petty tbh.

I went and looked up the linked article, an official blog by Novell's Chief Marketing Officer:

Of course this announcement is about much more than 20,000 lines of code Microsoft is committing (which by the way once accepted into the Linux tree will far surpass those contributed by Canonical).

Wow, yes, that really does seem petty.

Microsoft's contribution is just a driver for improving the speed of linux guests hosted on their proprietary virtualization platform. I'm sure it's nice for Windows users, but it doesn't matter whether that's 20 kLOC or 2 LOC: it's still an isolated driver for virtualization on top of proprietary OS. And I have no doubt that it helps further Windows sales and deployment way more than it helps further Linux deployment...

I'm certain that if Canonical has contributed even one line of code to Linux, it will have been a more valuable contribution, to me, than the 20kLOC that Microsoft contributed. (...which they only did under duress, I'm led to believe).

That said, it would of course be wonderful for Canonical to do more kernel devopment...

Drop staging from the statistics?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 9:17 UTC (Thu) by w_sang (subscriber, #52415) [Link]

I agree and would again vote for excluding staging from these statistics (or make it a seperate list). Most people here probably know how to read these rankings, but most not involved in kernel development won't. IMHO it's just too easy to make 'big headlines' out of nothing this way. The ultimate nightmare would be some "Let's dump a driver and get famous"-tourism getting popular within marketing areas ;)