
 Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1% contribution to GNOME - mapleoin
http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/red-hat-16-canonical-1/
======
wheels
There's an interesting point hiding in the virulence of this post:

Canonical engineers work on Ubuntu.

Red Hat and SUSE have historically hired swaths of "upstream" developers,
often just to work on their own projects and propel Linux along. When I
visited an Ubuntu Developer Sprint a few years ago, as a former KDE developer,
I was surprised at how few people I knew. It wasn't that they weren't
engineers; it was simply that they were working on _Canonical_ projects:
Ubuntu, Launchpad, Rosetta, etc., not j-random-OSS-project.

The interesting thing is that they've been _trying_ to hire more upstream
folks. Most core OSS developers don't have a problem finding a job. They've
also been at this a relatively short period relative to Red Hat (and SUSE), so
there's would be no surprise, even if the hiring practices were similar, that
the total commit count would be far smaller.

------
i386
I can never understand some elements of the Linux community to speak ill of
other community members success.

Ubuntu is probably the best thing thats ever happened to the Linux desktop -
its being installed by manufacturers the world over and thats years of
contributions that are actually being used by people.

I'm at a bit of a loss to what Greg feels Canonical should do about this. Stop
offering Ubuntu? Have Mark post a warm and fuzzy blog post? High-five Redhat
engineers every time their code works?

Canonical have done a monumental service to the open source community via
their Launchpad service. They provide space for documentation, VCS hosting,
issue tracking, repository hosting and build services. They enable
communities.

I'd also like to make a special mention to the thousands of hours Canonical
engineers and Ubuntu community members spend pulling patches from "downstream"
(other distributions including Ubuntu) and pushing them upstream (the kernel,
GNOME, KDE, Xorg, etc) - this sort of behaviour fosters better software for
the whole community - not just Ubuntu.

~~~
quadhome
I know of people who do push patches back to upstream. (I used to spend a lot
of time doing it.) But, last I checked, this wasn't really standard operating
procedure.

Am I wrong? I sure hope so.

But I can't help but notice the Utnubu [1] project still exists. And still
isn't Canonical supported.

[1] <http://wiki.debian.org/Utnubu>

------
yungchin
"If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization
masquerading as an engineering organization, then you’re either an
unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you’re not paying attention."

1\. Poisoning the well is an ugly debating trick. 2\. He's somehow implying
that marketing FOSS is not a useful contribution.

As for the numbers:

1\. "$SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase." ...
actually, no, it's the percentage of commits. I'm not refuting the value of
that metric, but misrepresenting what's measured is again a debating trick.
2\. Red Hat has about 10 times the number of employees that Canonical has.
Taking economies of scale into account, is the 16:1 ratio so bad?

Finally, given how well Red Hat's doing, should they really get into a fuss
over any supposed free-rider phenomena?

~~~
sliverstorm
> He's somehow implying that marketing FOSS is not a useful contribution.

Whether or not it's useful, the FOSS community does have some holy ground that
shall not be trod upon. The extent of that holy ground varies, but one of the
basic tenants of open source is Credit Where Credit Is Due. Generally
speaking, the community is very flexible, but don't be surprised if this is
where the gloves come off.

~~~
jberryman
I'm not a Ubuntu hater, but wrt to "Credit Where Credit Is Due", I was
recently at the Ubuntu homepage:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/>

NO mention of "linux" or "GNU" anywhere on the page. Click on the "How Can It
Be Free?" link, and no mention of GNU or the GPL.

In fact the reasons they give are "1. It's Open Source" and "2. It's Managed
and Funded by Canonical". Open Source is a side-effect of Free as in Freedom,
a concept that Canonical is agnostic about. And I'm not sure what point 2
means.

I can understand not wanting to turn people off with scary-sounding words, but
even Mac like to tout the "rock solid unix foundation" on which OSX is built.

~~~
nkassis
I think they view GNU and GPL explanations as not very friendly to their
perceived audience which is the common computer user. Branding it Ubuntu in
their view makes it simpler to understand. I think they want to be like OS X
and relegate discussions of BSD and Mach Kernel to some really hard to find
page.

At least that's how i'm interpreting their pr stuff.

~~~
jberryman
Yeah, I agree. But I think the branding of Ubuntu as this "immaculately-
conceived" OS is what annoys a lot of folks who know a bit about linux.

I think a simple mention on their front page would be enough.

------
drats
Red Hat abandoned the desktop community/didn't take it seriously and then are
surprised that someone who does gets all the mindshare and community goodwill?

It seems to me to be a miscalculation to say that the desktop hobby market has
no money in it. All those younger school and university students which Ubuntu
fosters will eventually be in positions where they get to choose what
distribution is installed on their servers at work and it will be Ubuntu or
Debian, and when GNU/Linux is rolled out on corporate or educational desktops
these people are going to choose Ubuntu most likely.

I'd say either take the desktop seriously or re-evaluate your spending on it.
Don't do a half-hearted job and expect people to love you. I understand this
is probably the engineers getting frustrated at decisions which have been
taken by the managers at RH.

~~~
mbreese
I remember when RedHat dropped their desktop version (ah, Redhat 9...). At the
time I remember thinking is was a dumb move. That having a good, well
supported enterprise desktop was too important to RedHat and Linux in general.
Then they did their half-hearted spinoff into what is now Fedora, and for a
while it seemed like it desktop Linux languished.

Now, I'm pretty sure it was the right move. Enterprise Linux pays the bills.
There are very few major installations of Linux desktops, and that's about the
only place where you could extract revenue.

I think that they decided that they couldn't make both the enterprise and
desktop users happy. Enterprise servers want to be stable and predictable.
Desktop users want the new shiny. They had to choose one. So they went out,
bought a suit, and went with the ones that gave them more money. Based upon
their current financials, it's hard to argue with that strategy. And the funny
thing is, they _still_ managed to contribute more code to Gnome than Ubuntu.

As a side note: I used to run all Red Hat servers... then dabbled in Gentoo
but recently I've used all Ubuntu. Just this past week I've run into some
issues with some very important software (to me), that seems to be related to
something in Ubuntu. It runs perfectly in the more conservative RHEL 5, but
fails on the more recent Ubuntu. This has made me think a lot about what I'll
be using for my servers in the future...

~~~
viraptor
You walked almost the same path as me then (re. distros), so I'll give you an
advice: Debian. Ubuntu was never a proper server distribution. With their lack
of own developers, majority of serious problems have to be pushed upstream as
Debian issues anyways. If you liked the "conservative" RHEL, just go for
Debian stable. It's the best of both worlds and it is what I'm happy to
recommend these days.

~~~
davidw
The problem with Debian in the past (and I say this as someone who formerly
maintained some packages and is a Big Fan) was that the release schedule was
unpredictable. I don't know what that's like these days - anyone care to
comment?

~~~
andrewf
According to <http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729> the current policy is
a two-year release schedule, with the next release expected in Q1/2 2012.

------
sp332
"If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization
masquerading as an engineering organization, then you’re either an
unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you’re not paying attention."

I didn't know Canonical claimed otherwise. All the way back to Launchpad Bug
#1: "Microsoft has a majority marketshare"[0], they've been about marketing
and sales. Most of the software I've seen coming out of Canonical has been of
the "hundred papercuts" variety[1] - little stuff that's easy to fix, but hard
to get developer attention for.

[0] <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1>

[1] <https://edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts>

------
Aegean
I won't know about Canonical's claims but it is sure that they're perceived to
have more impact on desktop than Red Hat, and that's a very fair perception
regardless of the number of commits Redhat does on one particular piece of the
desktop.

Linux has been starving of a good, stable desktop, and Ubuntu has provided
that. Regarding free-ride, sorry but that's how open source software works. If
Ubuntu credits itself for code that RedHat wrote that's not right, but if
Ubuntu claims they changed the Linux desktop they have a very reasonable point
regardless of who wrote what.

------
balac
Isn't the point of open source that people can fork and do what they like with
it? Canonical has made a major impact on Linux as being the gateway drug for
so many of us. I can honestly say I would not be using linux if not for
ubuntu.

Linux needs marketers, otherwise we just have cool software that no-one uses.

------
seis6
A comment by a dude called Simon on that page:

So: Red Hat employees 2 years ago: 2200. Canonical employees 2 years ago: 130.
(Source: WP history for both).

That’s a ratio of about… ummm… Just over 16 to 1! What a coincidence.

If this is a real fact, there is no point in this post.

------
sliverstorm
I learned several years ago that Redhat is probably the single biggest entity
I have to thank for Linux, besides Linus himself. Start using RHEL, and as you
begin to deal with bugs and such, you notice just how much is going on, and
just how much goes upstream.

This has not changed, and generally speaking I hope it won't change; I don't
spend much time browsing raw code, but they seem to produce the highest
quality results.

------
lazyant
This is a little off-topic but to me there's no significant differences among
the main general-purpose Linux distros.

I help manage a ton of a mixed RHAT, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu servers and the
day-to-day operations are the same; we just install apt in the RHAT-based
servers since it's nicer (sure, there's the chkconfig vs rc-update and
/var/log/secure vs auth or mail.log vs maillog, big deal).

I'd install or recommend one or the other based mostly on the versions of the
applications (apache, postgres etc) that are packaged, if anything. Otherwise
I say go with what you are familiar with or what your friends/staff are
familiar with.

That's on the server side. On the desktop distros (which I don't use much)
it's almost the same. I spent a few years moving from distro to distro and I
came to the conclusion that the difference between a new and a previous
release of the same distro can be bigger (for me) that the difference between
two current distro versions, so again it doesn't matter or rather any little
thing can tip the balance to decide one distro or another. It comes to a point
where I install say Ubuntu in my laptop and WiFi doesn't work and I just
install RHAT or whatever; it's faster to do a re-install with another distro
than to troubleshoot the problem.

------
fragmede
> If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization
> masquerading as an engineering organization, then you’re either an
> unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you’re not paying attention.

Call it what you will Ubuntu's success has everything to do with the default
install being quite usable by end users. So what _should_ we call that?
Neither marketing engineering sounds right.

------
thought_alarm
If you want people to use your software you have to invest in good engineering
and you have to invest in good marketing. They're both crucial. Engineering
alone doesn't cut it, nor does marketing.

Canonical's work is just as important, if not more so, in putting GNOME in the
hands of users.

------
patrickaljord
RedHat is a billion dollar company, Canonical doesn't make a profit yet.

~~~
mkr-hn
Canonical is a private company, and I don't recall any public mentions of
finances. Where did you find information on their profitability?

------
danbmil99
Ubuntu rocks, get over it

------
c00p3r
The business model of Canonical is very simple and clean - themed, non-
advanced-user-friendly version of debian (reuse) along with active promotions
(money).

Why they should write code if their main activity is decoration and
customizing?

Fedora people are the ones on the bleeding edge. RedHat is the second
recycling of their effort, CentOS - the third. ^_^

Debian (especially) and Ubuntu are famous for their conservative, slow-moving,
less-effort approach.

------
gcb
Yet I cry every time I'm at work, being forced to to use red hat enterprise.
The dated gnome desktop gives me shame.

Viva debian. And consequently Ubuntu.

------
dflock
Microsoft has hugely more code in the Linux Kernel than Canonical.

After MS got their 22Kloc of Virtual Machine related driver code up-streamed,
they massively outweigh Canonical's meagre to non-existent kernel
contributions. Canonical just don't do infrastructure work, more or less.

~~~
dmaz
Microsoft's code dump was later removed from the tree[1], while the Ubuntu
developers have with worked with upstream for years.[2]

[1] [http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Kroah-Hartman-
Remo...](http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Kroah-Hartman-Remove-Hyper-
V-Driver-from-Kernel)

[2] [http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2008/09/20/plumbers-conference-
retro...](http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2008/09/20/plumbers-conference-
retrospective/)

~~~
dflock
I'm sure that both of these things are true.

It's also true that Canonical aren't very good at persuading their various up-
streams of the value of accepting their patches. It's also true that they
don't really do much general linux/gnome infrastructure stuff - they mostly
concentrate on Ubuntu specific UI/UX stuff - which is very rarely adopted by
upstream projects, for various reasons. It's also true that litl
(<http://litl.com/>) a smallish, 40 person, single product start-up, has about
the same level of Gnome contributions as Canonical, a company ~10x their size:
(<http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/>)

I'm not sure of the wider meaning of these things is, really, if they have
any; especially considering that I've currently got Ubuntu installed on all my
computers.

