Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration [LWN.net]

Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 5, 2009 15:55 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373)
Parent article: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

The elephant in the room is the definition of "freeze".

Debian freezes stable releases in Testing.

Ubuntu freezes from sid and adds a lot of newer alpha/beta/RC software (e.g. Kernel, Gnome, OO.org )

I will give Mark the benefit of the doubt and assume he wants to ship 10.4 with the same version of Gnome as 9.10 .. otherwise this will be a very hard sell for the Debian folks.

As we say in Germany: "The devil is in the details"

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Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 5, 2009 22:15 UTC (Wed) by davi (guest, #18853) [Link] (5 responses)

Mark Shuttleworth (mark @ ubuntu.com) wrote:
"We're already seeing a growing trend towards cadence in free software, which I think is a wonderful move. Here, we are talking about elevating that to something that the world has never seen in proprietary software (and never will). Collaboration is the primary tool we have in our battle with proprietary software, we should take the opportunities that present themselves to make that collaboration easier and more effective."

Ubuntu is only partially free software because it is made of many programs; some are free and some are not. So trying to convince us talking about "our battle with proprietary software" is ...

That guy is an idiot or think we are idiots.

Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 5, 2009 23:06 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

Not at all. He thinks the best way to win against proprietary software is to get more users running Linux today. If a non-free video card driver is what's needed to persuade people to run Linux instead of Windows or Mac OS, then it would be foolish to push people away from Linux by not offering that option. You don't have to be a purist on the RMS level to support free software.

Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 6, 2009 18:22 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Sure, you don't have to be a purist, but you do have to be a fairly large scale employer of kernel hackers in order to ship a kernel that's too far away from mainline. AFAIK the only place you can get real support for the full "Nvidiux" is from HP's workstation people.

Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 10:19 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (1 responses)

He may think that, though one might also reasonably not think that. It depends in part on what one's goals are. Having more users who are willing to install proprietary drivers will certainly increase the availability of proprietary drivers, but if one's principle aim is to increase the availability of free drivers, then one wants to give a sales advantage to those hardware vendors who do ensure that free drivers are available.

However, I don't see how this is relevant to whether the proposal is good or not.

Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 19:06 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it can be argued that allowing the use of proprietary drivers can increase the use of free drivers as well

remember that if someone wouldn't use linux due to the lack of a free driver for some component they aren't going to be using the free drivers for everything else in their system. so allowing for one proprietary driver can cause a dozen free drivers to be used that otherwise wouldn't be used.

Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 6, 2009 13:10 UTC (Thu) by RainCT (guest, #57473) [Link]

What you are talking about is the "Debian Import Freeze" which is completely unrelated to the whole topic, which is about "Feature Freeze".