Conversion to Linux

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Jeffrey Watts <jeffrey.w.watts at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of the USB kernel subsystem.  His views are
> clearly more from a Linux kernel perspective, but they're interesting
> nonetheless.  There were some surprising statistics in regards to the
> Canonical contribution - they make me wonder if perhaps something was
> missed.  Perhaps the Canonical folks use Debian email addresses?


It's a fairly common complaint that Canonical only looks after
Canonical, rarely contribution to new projects, or contributing to
upstread projects at all. Just patching as necessary to make things
"perfect" on Ubuntu. One can contrast that with Fedora's policy of
patching "locally" on on exceptions, having all packages adopted
upstream instead.

One arguement in favour of this behaviour of Canonical is that they
are doing plenty of good for the community by making the experience
very user friendly. Personally: this contribution of theirs is not to
be ignored, but code doesn't write itself, and user friendliness
doesn't generally go along with encouraging users to submit bugs
whenever something breaks.

I have never heard anyone argue that the actual development effort by
Canonical's staff is greater than reflected by the statistics --
little to none. So I would say the numbers are correct. Whether or not
you consider their other contribution equal is a different arguement.

-- 
Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin
( www.pembo13.com )