Bacon: Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME contributions

They try very hard to position Canonical led projects as "upstream" projects as a defence when they are called on on not contributing back. It's a bit of a slight of hand really. Building up projects on infrastructure you control and you hold sole copyright ownership of is not collaboration..not really. Yes technically they are upstream projects.. and yes technically they are open to collaboration. But the reality is they are Canonical owned and Canonical controlled. What people need to see is Canonical be willing to step away from some of that safe single entity controlled project work and make a significant effort to contribute and collaborate to projects as a peer among equals.. not as a controlling entity.

We could use Novell as a contrast. They do lots of their own stuff that..mono for example. People do get cranky about mono as it is a sort of walled garden that Novell has put together and sort of duplicative. They get their fair share of criticism for that. But at the same time Novell is in there doing the contribution up and down that stack to existing projects along side Red Hat and other entities. People are irked by some of their in-house work because its duplicative..but they are also contributing to a common baseline of technology in parallel with their in-house differentiation. I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that Novell is not pulling its weight when it comes to contributing to shared technology projects from the kernel up into GNOME.

Canonical isn't doing that give and take balance that Novell is. They are just doing the differentiated work...and not giving back in proportion.

And its not about size. There are other companies...smaller companies..up and down the stack..that beat the pants off Canonical in terms of giving back when just looking at the raw commit counts..without accounting for size. Just look at the companies ahead of Canonical in the GNOME census. Fluendo, Collabora, Litl... all of them ahead of Canonical in the census..and yet much much smaller than Canonical. Commitment to engage outside of the walled gardens you control in a collaborative way does. Other entities seem to understand that... Canonical...not so much.

Canonical suffers from the same problem Google does in this respect. Except Google actually has the manpower to just isolate themselves and fork an entire software stack and call it a fork and doesn't have to feel defensive about it. Is this a systemic problem for any vendor who wants to compete in the consumer device space?

-jef