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.While the idea sounds appealing, there are of course a number if issues that would present themselves, as Aaron Seigo, of KDE, pointed out in a few blog posts. An important complaint from Seigo revolves around the idea that a 6 month release cycle would have the downside of more features being pushed to the next release, especially in big projects. "For some apps this is a complete non-issue, but for more complex bodies of code that are in high development states a 3 month feature window is just too tight to fit in more than a few things," Seigo explains, "The first month of a release cycle is usually not spent on new features in my experience, and the last couple of months in a 6 month cycle are spent stabilizing."
A possible solution would be to make optimal use of branches, where development on specific features happens outside of the main tree; this way development on features that are not fitting for a 6 month release cycle can continue during freeze. Seigo has his reservations about this, as he explains: "This is where I get really uncomfortable, though: to solve the issue with an inappropriately sized cycle, I end up moving the development away from the KDE infrastructure which is totally counter productive from the perspective of shared development."
Shuttleworth decided to reply, addressing various problem points put forward by Seigo. On the issue of postponing features because they don't make it in time for the release cycle, Shuttleworth states:
He goes on to explain that Free software projects are not like proprietary projects in that while the latter needs to push out features despite them being ready or not, the former has the advantage of being able to postpone features. "We can choose to slip a particular feature in order to get a new round of testing and feedback on all the code which did make it."
Shuttleworth also explains that synchronising releases schedules should not mean that everyone releases their tarballs on the exact same day. Just as Aaron proposed, you would need a cascading release cycle, where certain projects release first ("Linux, GCC, Python, Java, Apache, Tomcat, etc."), followed by a second set ("applications, the desktop environments and other utilities"), and a third set ("the distributions - Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, possibly Debian, OpenSolaris").
Yesterday, the back-and-forth continued as Seigo addressed Shuttleworth's latest blog post. In Shuttleworth's post, there's a great deal about the benefits of branched development - merging features back in "when they are ready". Seigo counters:
Seigo then takes it all quite a few steps further, with an idea that he acknowledges is rather radical. "Why doesn't downstream take on producing releases? Why not cease waiting for tarballs to be delivered to your doorstep and start working on a release engineering service!" Seigo envisions "the system integration community" (which would be the distributions, mostly) taking care of the releases of the various projects involved. "Instead of hoping that upstream does what they want, why don't they rally a bunch of cohorts from Novell, Red Hat, Debian, Mandriva, the MacOS and Windows communities, Canonical and whomever else wishes to engage and start offering a real, serious release process for upstream development to filter into?"
Seigo finishes:
Related Articles
Technology White Papers
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
0 
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.