LWN: Comments on "LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem"

Re: Controversial

jospoortvliet — 2011-02-01T14:09:15+00:00

Those numbers don't make much sense - most of Novell doesn't have anything to do with SUSE. The SUSE labs have about 500 employees, I believe - then there is some marketing and sales. That is surely 5-6 times what Canonical has, in total - but far from 130 vs 4100.

Disclaimer: I work for SUSE/Novell.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

njs — 2008-10-09T04:30:47+00:00

"Membership: You are not allowed to view this team's membership."

So maybe not so easy as all that :-)

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

calc — 2008-10-09T04:19:28+00:00

I see now where the 130 number came from it was on Dustin Kirkland's blog about Canonical employee numbers from 2007. So yes the company is growing very fast at least percentage-wise but is still quite small.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

calc — 2008-10-08T23:26:37+00:00

If you want to know roughly how many employees Canonical has overall see:

https://launchpad.net/~canonical

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

calc — 2008-10-08T23:23:42+00:00

I keep seeing the number of employees for Canonical being touted as 130 people. However, Canonical definitely has more than 130 employees in total but the number of people actually working on Ubuntu is only about 50.

Its fairly easy to find this information via launchpad.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

mdz@debian.org — 2008-10-02T12:43:48+00:00

I meant "charge", of course, not "change"

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

pyellman — 2008-10-01T13:56:06+00:00

I wonder where Novell would rank if someone were to do an analysis of
organizations/companies contributions to rancor, discord and ill will
within the community?

Peter Yellman

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

turpie — 2008-09-26T05:36:21+00:00

"For me this sounds like: if the others do the coordination work of picking a date and the
corner stones of the distribution, Canonical may want to use the results. In other words:
offloading their core work. I wouldn't call that a nice offer."
Be fair, that is a rather biased way of interpreting Shuttleworth's statement. What he said is that if the other major players agreed on a schedule, he would be willing to change Canonicals to match theirs. I'm sure that if the other distributions expressed an interest in his idea he would be willing to work with them on organising the synchronised schedule.

It is fair enough to criticise the amount of code Ubunutu contribute to the wider community, but I dont think it is fair to twist Mark's words that way.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

obi — 2008-09-25T15:12:24+00:00

I don't see why every distribution out there should invest its resources into the same areas.

- Redhat seems to invest a lot of effort into "Linux Plumbing" and as a non-Redhat user I'm very grateful for it.
- Ubuntu seems to invest a lot of effort into integrating, launchpad, translations, "community", evangelising (like with their "shipit" - cds sent for free), etc - and as a non-Ubuntu user I'm also grateful for all that.

There's clearly a market of users out there that only started considering Linux when Ubuntu appeared. Increasing userbase is very important. New Linux developers are a subset of the total Linux users after all; mindshare matters.

Linux Plumbing is important but not the only thing that needs work, just take the MacOS X example for instance.

Apple's iPhone is another example of a different focus - the hardware is more or less the same as all those Palm, WinCE, Pocket PC, Symbian devices. The plumbing didn't really make a difference. But the UI, integration, infrastructure (appstore) mattered a lot. Now everybody else learned their lesson, and we'll all get phones with better user interfaces (modulo some bad rip-offs too). What Apple did could in theory have been done by us Linux people or other proprietary companies years ago - but they went out and JFDI.

Ubuntu has a similar role IMHO - it tries to focus on something else; it could be an evolutionary dead-end, or it could pay off, in which case the other distros will also have learned something in the process. All good.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

SEMW — 2008-09-25T14:21:36+00:00

> How may employees to Red Hat, Novell, Wind River and Canonical each have? How many developers do Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva have?

Just sticking to the companies (I agree with filipjoelsson in that comparing companies with volunteer organisations like Debian in this is meaningless):

Canonical has 130 employees; Red Hat, 2200; Novell, 4100; Wind River, 1507; Mandriva, 80.

Patches per employee, then, are: Canonical, 0.77; Red Hat, 5.4; Novell, 1.77; Wind River, 0.14; Mandriva, 3.0.

This is still lowish on Ubuntu's part, but when you additionally take in account that Red Hat and Suse Linux have both been around 3.5 times as long as Ubuntu, and Mandriva 2.5 times, the numbers start to look somewhat less drastic than Greg presents them.

Re: Controversial

SEMW — 2008-09-25T14:05:37+00:00

> "patches speak louder then words"

True, but I do wonder how many patches Canonical GregKH feels would speak loud enough.

Canonical has ~130 employees; Novell has ~4100. So, considering the table for kernel contributions at the top, this works out at ~0.77 patches per employee for Canonical, and ~1.77 for Novell; a touch under 2.5 times as many.

But now consider that SuSE Linux has been around since 1994*, and Ubuntu, since 2004. That's around... Well, 2.5 times as long.

So it seems to me that Canonical doesn't actually do too badly out of the comparison.

* I am assuming that the table at the top doesn't distinguish between contributions from Novell SUSE and S.u.S.E.

(I admit that that's a slightly dodgy calculation, in that neither Novell nor S.u.S.E will have had anything like 4100 employees in 1994 -- but then, neither will Canonical have had 130 in 2004. I'm not aiming for a scientific comparison, only pointing out that presenting the raw numbers with no context of company size, as Greg did, is rather disingenuous).

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

mdz@debian.org — 2008-09-25T12:20:11+00:00

Canonical does not, and will never, change for Ubuntu. There is no "subscription" version. It's free.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

dkite — 2008-09-25T06:44:04+00:00

If I'm going to spend money on a lts subscription from someone, and want it
to go towards supporting the ecosystem, this is an important data point.

As for it being a bit impolite, come on. Kernel people don't do polite. It
could be worse (or better). Al Viro could have said something.

I think it does the universe some good to knock Canonical and Ubuntu down a
peg or two. Restores some equilibrium.

Derek

Re: Controversial

daniel — 2008-09-24T03:46:01+00:00

I am saying you are wrong to applaud that sort of antisocial behavior.

Regards,

Daniel

Re: Controversial

mmcgrath — 2008-09-24T01:46:39+00:00

So you're saying he's right, he's wrong or that he just shouldn't be expressing his opinions / organizing metrics?

Re: Controversial

daniel — 2008-09-24T00:02:48+00:00

I find GregKH's statement overtly offensive with no possible excuse. And just to be clear, I am not aligned with any Linux Vendor. However, such ill considered public behavior reflects poorly on Suse, not just GregKH.

Regards,

Daniel

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

frankie — 2008-09-23T22:54:22+00:00

Of course, Greg was pointing the kernel at the time of that talk.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

nix — 2008-09-23T22:49:59+00:00

There are plenty of free software contributors at Google (Ian Lance Taylor
and Guido van Rossum to name just two: a random grep of the changelogs of
any major plumbing component will find more although I suppose it's hard
to find many people who have the same sort of influence on anything that
Guido does on Python).

Of course if one considers GCC, the binutils and Python to be
insignificant or not plumbing enough, then maybe one can avoid this: but
any definition of 'plumbing' that excludes GCC and GNU ld in particular is
a silly definition.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

frankie — 2008-09-23T22:42:57+00:00

In a past google talk, Greg expressed the same observations about Google contributes. The only true Google contributor is Andrew Morton, which is quite peculiar. So I think it is not a specific issue with Canonical: if you look at figures, indeed the main part of contributors are not sponsored by the big actors. This is a fact, not a personal attack.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

chema — 2008-09-23T19:56:36+00:00

"IIRC Google got similarly picked on at last years OLS and I think their stats have improved this year. I'm not sure if it's cause and effect though..."

I think Google stats enhancement is called Andrew Morton ;)

An alternative view

dlang — 2008-09-23T18:49:40+00:00

that depends who you want to have using it.

if you are talking about a unix greybeard, you want to pay the company doing the software development

if you are talking your parents/grandparents/etc you may want to pay the company doing the desktop integration, since that's what makes the system usable for them (and keeps your phone from ringing off the hook with their questions)

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

dag- — 2008-09-23T18:05:46+00:00

For a normal business hours support contract, you pay $349/year for RHEL or SLES, and $750/year for Ubuntu LTS for similar class of hardware.

For a 24/7 support contract, you pay $1500/year for SLES, $2500 for RHEL and $2750/year Ubuntu LTS.

Even though Ubuntu LTS is also available for free, and RHEL has a free CentOS spinoff, prices are not that much different and Ubuntu LTS is not cheaper than RHEL or SLES.

Source: https://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid

Date: 23/09/2008

An alternative view

cyperpunks — 2008-09-23T13:41:31+00:00

If I wanted a Linux distro with support, which would I a prefer?

A company full of people writing kernel code or some guys doing desktop integration?

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

niv — 2008-09-22T21:03:18+00:00

"Debian has several developers who do work on the kernel. Ted T'so comes to mind. Problem for this kind of study is how to categorize such a person. Does Ted work for IBM, or is he a Debian developer..."

Yes, Ted works for IBM.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

polar — 2008-09-22T19:53:07+00:00

Fair arguments, but he did make that talk at the Linux /plumbers/ conference.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

drag — 2008-09-22T16:47:58+00:00

It's pretty rude stuff coming from Greg.

I'll try to be brief:

* Yes it is true that Ubuntu takes the work of others and uses it.

* This is how it is _suppose_ to work. Debian fights tooth and nail for good licensing for the expressed purpose of letting other people use their software and redistribute it without worries. Ubuntu is really just doing what they are suppose to be doing.. reusing, redistributing. Kernel developers do the same thing for 'software freedom'.

(Greg is one of those hugely outspoken pro-Freedom sorts, but yet when somebody else takes advantage of this freedom he takes a shit on them?)

* Making userspace better and improving graphics and UI is MORE important then hacking on the kernel nowadays for a very very large number of users. The sort of users that Ubuntu caters to.

* Making software usable is significantly harder then making software.

---------------------------------

Ultimately it's all just petty jealousy. People don't like that Ubuntu isn't doing most of the work, but is getting all the credit. So they are overly critical of Ubuntu. Instead they should just be asking Ubuntu to help users understand the software and positive (and negative) experiences come from far more then Ubuntu.

Look at this way....

Would Dell be supporting Linux on the desktop and improving support for their hardware without Ubuntu? Would Intel be interested in supporting Linux heavily on their new embedded systems if the only user experience their customers would receive would be the generic Redhat-style shit desktop experience?

Ubuntu, for very good reasons, is able to push the popularity of Linux and this has had very significant and positive effects on the whole Linux 'ecosystem'

Ignoring this fact is just expressing a form of willful ignorance.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

niner — 2008-09-22T08:17:17+00:00

Well the real "offer" comes into sight when reading the full original:

"There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS:
the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major /
minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian
are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a
combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions,
and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign
Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that."

For me this sounds like: if the others do the coordination work of picking a date and the
corner stones of the distribution, Canonical may want to use the results. In other words:
offloading their core work. I wouldn't call that a nice offer.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

vonbrand — 2008-09-22T04:00:44+00:00

That would just mean that they haven't got the manpower to give support to a "enterprise" distribution... You need engineers that know intimately what is going on upstream (i.e., are inmersed in its development) if you want to be able to fix problems in a reasonable timeframe (least of all, in the time your support contract promises).

First slide

dlang — 2008-09-22T00:50:35+00:00

I agree, it's unusual for a LWN piece to be this one-sided.

Dear Greg ...

Felix_the_Mac — 2008-09-21T23:14:41+00:00

"Greg finished up with what appears to be the message he came to the Linux Plumbers Conference to deliver: if you are a developer, if you want to be a part of the ecosystem, and if you work for a non-contributing company: quit."

My message would be if: If you care about free software and you work for Novell: Quit.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

boog — 2008-09-21T22:49:34+00:00

Why so much hate? Ubuntu (which I don't use, but would recommend to new users) has been stunningly successful with a relatively small investment in a very short time, but surely Canonical has many fewer developers and much less money than Red Hat/Novell/IBM, and they have had less time to sort out their way of doing things. So mistakes in contributing upstream seem more like errors of youth. And the Ubuntu community educates and cuddles all those new users - something that lkml is not very good for.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

kripkenstein — 2008-09-21T10:36:11+00:00

Well, first it would be good to see some actual figures. However, it seems they aren't available at present.

But even if it is a difference of, say, two orders of magnitude, that is probably about the difference in size between Canonical, Canonical's relevant dev teams, and Canonical's revenues in comparison to Red Hat and Novell's corresponding figures.

Once Canonical is profitable (which Red Hat and Novell already are), I will be very critical if it doesn't step up collaboration. Until then, I would encourage it but I won't be critical regarding that matter.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

Jonno — 2008-09-21T09:40:03+00:00

You are missing one possibility (which is the most common one in my limited
experience).

5) Ubuntu users report bugs, the ubuntu developers wait for upstream to
solve them, and then backport the fixes to the ubuntu packages.

In this senario, bugs are reported and fixed, but few patches goes from
ubuntu to upstream.

First slide

frazier — 2008-09-21T00:27:40+00:00

If you saw the slides you'd seen the suse.de email on the first slide, but if you were an LWN.net subscriber who read the article and didn't read the comments, you wouldn't have known the rest of the story. I like to think that the comments section is additional info, and not a place to be visited for a notable piece of the story that is missing.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

jspaleta — 2008-09-19T23:22:25+00:00

Here's a question I have for you. How much of your discomfort over how "fixes" are handled in Ubuntu is there because of previous actions taken by Canonical employees specifically versus Ubuntu community volunteers or for that matter Ubuntu contributors who are employeed to work on Ubuntu packages by other companies.

Are the problems you see systemic in to the entire Ubuntu contributor base. Or are the problems you see associated with only the manhours that Canonical as a corporate entity has direct influence over how they are spent?

If you think the problem is systemic you should see if you can start a discussion inside Ubuntu to look at reforming at the package maintainership model that is being used. A systemic problem could be addressed by adjusting the team concept Ubuntu is using to add more individual accountability. For example teams could grow a specific tasking to just deal with upstream patch submission and sheparding and make a specific individual accountable for that in some way...if that sort of thing isn't there already. I'm thinking some sort of public flogging for failure to push patches upstream... or maybe a form of gladiatorial combat. Lot's of options really.

-jef

a bad precedent?

nix — 2008-09-19T21:45:26+00:00

Sounds like he's being a classic undiplomatic geek to me. :)

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

rahulsundaram — 2008-09-19T21:18:01+00:00

If you are not happy with your distribution's relationship to upstream, you should really express it to them especially if you are a upstream developer yourself. It is really important that distributions get the message that upstream contributions are the key to a healthy ecosystem and play a important part in it. Otherwise switch to a distribution which understands this.

Comparative advantage

giraffedata — 2008-09-19T18:34:28+00:00

Clarification of the economic principle of comparative advantage: it isn't "concentrate on what you do best"; it's "concentrate on what you do most better (than others do it)"

So even if Canonical can submit kernel patches better than it can distribute Linux, and even if Canonical can submit kernel patches better than anyone else, and even if Canonical can't distribute Linux as well as others, it may still be best for everyone if Canonical concentrates on distributing Linux.

What you compare is the difference between Canonical's and others' patch-submitting ability and the difference between Canonical's and others Linux-distributing abilities.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

jikos — 2008-09-19T18:17:03+00:00

Greg is not saying that what Ubuntu developers do (or rather do not) is illegal at all.

He just says (as far as my undersntading goes) that they don't contribute to the "ecosystems" as much as would be appropriate with respect to how large userbase they have. Nothing more, nothing less, just a simple feeling/opinion statement.

LPC: Fitting into the kernel ecosystem

jspaleta — 2008-09-19T17:29:33+00:00

See here's the thing. There's all sorts of ways to synchronize a set of systems. For a vast array of highly non-linear, weakly couple systems, you can get what is called stochastic synchronization. its a pretty fascinating process...very cool...easily demonstrated with a set of weakly coupled pendulums. One of the coolest demos is with a couple of metrones riding on top of a wooden plank which is rolling on top of a couple of full cola cans. Really its a really cool thing to watch happen.

You start out with components, with random phasing and even frequencies somtimes. But through their own natural weak coupling, these components spontaneously reach a state of synchronization for long periods of time,until such time that the weak non-linear coupling interactions takes the system back to an unsyncronized state.

Here's the coolest part, if you try to force these sorts of systems from the outside, you end up breaking their natural cyclic nature by enhancing one of the weak non-linear coupling processes. Your driving force finds some sort of destructive resonance.. and you break the system.

So here's my suggestion to you. Be a weak non-linear coupler. Don't be a strong driving force. Help the naturally complex non-linear system do its thing and find its own stochastic syncronization. Don't break it.

-jef