
Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions - mgunes
http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/07/30/red-hat-canonical-and-gnome-contributions/
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td
These discussions are really tiring. First it was "Canonical is not
contributing to the kernel", now it's "Canonical is not contributing to
GNOME", ... Isn't the point of free software that people can take the code and
build whatever they want to build on top of it? The consequence: people can
use the code it without owing you anything. Apart from the strictly legal
side, there is of course the question of moral behaviour, but even there I
don't see the point of the complainers, since

* AFAIK, canonical never claimed to be the driving force behind GNOME development.

* Even if they could be doing more for the upstream development, what is the net harm that canonical is doing to linux? What is keeping people who don't like ubuntu from ignoring it, and going on with their business the way they did back when ubuntu didn't exist?

Constructive criticism is ok, but the belligerent tone of the accusations
gives the impression that this is ultimately about hurt egos.

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ciupicri
You are right about the tone used in some of these discussions, but on the
other hand I think that the public should know who's really doing more for
GNOME, the Linux kernel etc.

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xpaulbettsx
This might be true, but I personally find it pretty embarrassing that
Microsoft has made more contributions in terms of code than Canonical to the
Linux kernel tree (as of a few months back when GregKH gave a talk at MS).

Don't get me wrong, Canonical is within their rights to do all of this, but
from a moral perspective I think they owe it to be doing more towards
contributing back to others' work instead of always promoting their own
projects in Launchpad

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leif
To be fair, citing upstart, launchpad, and bazaar as "upstream" is pretty
disingenuous.

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tuxychandru
Why can't upstart and bazaar be called upstream? Fedora has used upstart and
bazaar is in use outside Ubuntu and Launchpad.

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leif
Because they were started by, and are still mostly (unless I'm gravely
mistaken) developed only by the same people that develop for Ubuntu. If they
were more autonomous, I'd be more willing to consider them "upstream".

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gphil
If Red Hat has contributed 16% and Canonical contributed 1%, isn't that about
equal when you normalize for the size of those organizations? I don't have a
good sense of how big Canonical is, but Red Hat is a ~6 billion dollar company
and quite likely 16 times (or more) bigger than Canonical. Even if that ratio
doesn't quite hold up it's still pretty unfair to compare two organizations
operating on different orders of magnitude.

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junkbit
Not long ago they said Cannonical was 200 employees, with about half of them
in Taiwan working on netbooks and other embedded devices

They probably only have a couple of dozen programmers. Although they are
growing all the time.

