Posted Sep 12, 2013 17:18 UTC (Thu) by kiko (subscriber, #69905)
In reply to: Intel and XMir by ovitters
Parent article: Intel and XMir
> Canonical focusses within just one project solely on Ubuntu
C'mon Olav.. you of all people know that there is no such thing as a company contributing code to an open source project; open source is contributed to by people, and Canonical's engineers certainly do -- regularly -- contribute code to open source projects in general. It's a small company, though, with 600 employees and about 2/3 that of engineers. If you compare that population to the size of the RHEL engineering contingent, it's no wonder their contributions upstream have less impact.
If you were saying that a) Canonical prioritizes Ubuntu as its own product and b) focuses on integration and polish as opposed to upstream features, there is absolutely no contest there. You're right -- last-mile polish is the area where the biggest gap existed in open source when it was founded, and I think Ubuntu' s success and adoption confirm it was an effective goal to pursue. I truly wish the company had more resource to invest in upstream features -- I myself miss many -- but when you are a small and yet-to-be-profitable company, focus can be a good way to avoid failure.
I know Canonical has its share of policy problems. But as a key influencer, your criticism could help us fix them, as opposed to blending them all into a big Canonical Does Nothing For Open Source meme.
Posted Sep 12, 2013 21:23 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
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Your arguments about focusing and polish would carry much more weight, if Canonical actually focused and polished. But it much rather seems to invest huge amounts of resources into rewriting the whole desktop stack single handedly. From init system to display server to desktop, everything home grown. Seems like a huge task for a small company. I can very well understand that Canonical's engineers don't have time to contribute much to upstream projects. But is this actually helping the Linux desktop? I fear it's actually harming it.
As an application developer, I see for example systemd as a unifying force long overdue. I've never had the time to write init scripts for distributions other than the one I use, but I can be quite sure that my systemd unit files work just about everywhere (or at least will work). Well except for Ubuntu. And sadly they do not even have any good reasons. The same story now seems to be happeing with Mir.
Intel and XMir
Posted Oct 1, 2013 12:21 UTC (Tue) by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
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AFAIK there is no guarantee that your unit files will work (as intended) on every systemd-based distro?
Intel and XMir
Posted Oct 1, 2013 12:31 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
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Is there a guarantee? Probably not. But I never said I was guaranteed. I said I can be quite sure. For example the following few lines will probably work on every systemd distribution:
There might be some obscure system where this might not work. Maybe. Small chance.
Now write a SysV init script that does the same and works on at least the major distributions. After network's up, Xvfb should be started with the given parameters and if it crashes it should be restarted. It should by default be enabled in a multi-user runlevel. And to make things interesting: do it without having these distributions to test. Bonus points for not even having to try to find distribution specific documentation.
Systemd makes this so, so, so much easier. Finally.
