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Novell Engineer Blasts Ubuntu for not Helping Linux
- wheels 18y agoWhen I was at the last Ubuntu Developer Sprint I was at first a bit surprised that there weren't more prominent OSS people around. Comparatively, Canonical doesn't employ a lot of core developers for OSS projects. I got the feeling that it was a mix of: that not being part of their core strategy and them being honestly hard to hire. Most core OSS developers aren't out looking for jobs.
- halo 18y agoCanonical is a small loss-making company which has managed to expand their user-base and mind-share at a dramatic rate. Is it fair to compare directly their contributions with larger long-standing profitable companies like Red Hat or Novell? And is it fair to measure their community involvement on kernel contributions alone when they primarily focus on consumer-facing elements of their distribution?
- michaelneale 18y agoIts not fair when you put it like that, but then canonical are pushing ubuntu as being more important to linux then it currently is. That is fine if it raises the profile and helps linux on the user facing side (a rising tide lifts all ships) but they seem to want to rubbish all the others who are actually doing the work that they use.
- Herring 18y agoCrux of the article: If Kroah-Hartman is unhappy that Novell and Red Hat are doing the bulk of the work and Ubuntu is reaping the benefit....
- davidw 18y agoCrux of the problem: "free riding" is part and parcel of open source. And Ubuntu isn't really that bad - they do good work and promote software that's almost entirely free.
- Herring 18y agoUbuntu is by far the best thing to happen to desktop linux. Them & their free cds. Novell has no one to blame but themselves. They should have been paying close attention to Apple all those years.
- davidw 18y agoI'm a very happy Ubuntu user, but I can sort of understand the frustration. If everyone did what Canonical did, who would do the work? That's not an entirely solved problem with open source.
- Herring 18y agoI'd just leave it to the market. Clearly ubuntu's popularity proves that hacking the kernel is less valuable than cleaning up the UI & novell should have seen this. They're quite free to start selling ubuntu support contracts.
- 1gor 18y agoThat's a bad day to say "leave it to the market".
- davidw 18y agoFree software is in some ways a "public good", and markets tend to underprovide public goods. The fact that free software is created at all, and the economics of it, is pretty fascinating, and, IMO, far from a solved problem.
- rcoder 18y agoI actually think this is a key point: the Linux kernel only provides a small fraction of the utility a Linux user derives from the system as a whole. The work that Canonical does to insure that Ubuntu releases are stable, supported, and documented pays much higher dividends to most users, and does more to attract new users. Attacking Canonical for not contributing enough to the kernel sounds to me a lot like attacking the members of local Linux user groups for not including enough core kernel hackers in their membership.
- rgrieselhuber 18y agoIn my opinion, Ubuntu is doing a much better job of "helping linux" than any of the other vendors because they've managed to attract something approaching "mainstream" users.