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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Member since:2005-12-18
Member since:2005-07-06
Getting big in terms of users or consumers is very different from getting big in terms of upstream contributions. Unless you have a lot of upstream contributions, you can't really drive it strategically in the direction you would prefer. Red Hat only has the ability to support critical infrastructure for customers because it contributes heavily in that area
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
The more critical it is, the more contributors you need and that's why you see Red Hat as the largest contributor the Linux kernel and employing maintainers of glibc, gcc, many of the GNOME components etc. This isn't charity. It just makes business sense to do that if you are making your money selling services around Free and open source software. Since you can't lock in your customers, this is the real way to provide value (unless you want to mix and match with proprietary software in between which is rather tricky to do if you are building a community).
If Canonical wants to drive sync release schedules, it can't merely hope to float the idea and get everyone to agree. Contributions in the ground level is what earns the trust of the community to actually listen and help. Pick and choose what is considered as critical for your distribution and employ people or sponsor people already working on those areas.
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.
Member since:
2006-01-11
There are tons of people from Red Hat and Novell working on the kernel, Gnome, KDE, the compiler tool chain, and much else. Ubuntu/Canonical is getting big enough that they could manage to do more.