Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 19th May 2008 18:40 UTC
GNU, GPL, Open Source Back in April 2008, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth pitched the idea of major open source projects synchronising their release cycles on a 6 month period. Projects like gcc, the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, as well as the distributions, would work out an acceptable release schedule. It would allow for easier collaboration between the various projects, and hardware vendors would be better able to support Linux since all major distributions would ship with the same kernel version.
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siride
Member since:
2006-01-02

I agree completely. I think Ubuntu is getting a bit too big for its breeches and thinks that just because of the buzz it's been getting lately, it can start pushing around the rest of the (established) community. The reality is, most of the work that Ubuntu benefits does not come from Ubuntu. It's not even really its own distribution, with Debian providing the base and a lot of QA and development work.

I think Shuttleworth is correct in believing that there should be more synchronization between the various projects and not just on a single distro level. He is wrong, however, to think that all the distros should just bend over because Ubuntu says so. If Shuttleworth and Canonical are serious about this, they could start by having Ubuntu sync with a few more core projects as well as putting more work into other projects that they find important. Since they have been serious about X stability, they should hire people to work full time on X development (God knows, X needs more serious developers) and then start talking about coordinating release schedules.

Just my $0.02.

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