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Except that this isn't plagiarizing. It's one distro packaging something that's been developed - FOR THE PURPOSE OF EVERYBODY ELSE USING IT TOO.

There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate.

It's called sharing, and it shouldn't cause you to drop your monocle. Ahem.

Bad choice of words on my behalf, should have said they steal the limelight after someone else does all the hard work!

There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate

There certainly is competition in open source. A lot of the forks we see compete with the original maintainers' vision. This can be a good thing since a group of people might decide they don't like the direction of development of say, X Window, and they come up with something that suits their needs better. Maybe their isn't monetary competition but when your module gets dropped in favor of a newer or better one it certainly drives progress. It is a more friendly kind of competition but it can also get hot and heated. It hurts a little when your own design gets dropped. We like our own stuff to succeed. It makes a developer feel good.

You're being childish if you really think that there is no competition in the open source world.

No open source devs or other folks are interested in climbing the greasy pole, or using their skills in open source to leverage a job elsewhere? No distro is interested in what the other distros are up to? No distro is interested in bumping up its usage figures, which in almost all cases can only come by taking users from other distros? No distro is interested in using the latest and greatest software, because without it the distro will lost some of its appeal compared to others? No developer is interested in producing the best program of its kind, which by definition means better than the others and which also invariably means taking users from the others?

The open source world is rife with competition, and open source on the server is a ruthlessly competitive commercial business. It's time we laid to rest the myth of devs in back bedrooms only "scratching an itch" in a land of milk and honey. Life doesn't work this way, and Linux's main players are all hard-fightin' multi-billion corporations - Red Hat, Novell and IBM. Yes, there are plenty who scratch their itch. But the ones whose software really makes an impact and goes on to be used by thousands or millions of people tend to take things an awful lot more seriously than that.

In fact, I welcome competition. It is a powerful incentive to improve and behave. Without it, arguably, Linux at least would still be stuck in the 1970s, with new users (if it had any) being patronized by greybeards telling them that graphical x-servers = bad, bad, bad. Thank god all those days are over.

Agree, we all share between distributions.
I think the issue is that Ubuntu users and even Canonical to an extend tend to take credit for open source innovation as a whole.

Last year at Linux world I saw a Canonical session on desktop linux and it was shocking to see all the projects they took credit for :
- Plug and play in Linux with HAL & Dbus
- Graphical network management with NetworkManager
- Improved X server
- Improvements in Linux device driver support for more platforms.

Sadly none of them were developed or funded by canonical.

But they certainly do a good job of packaging.

So ubuntu is to blame for that? Whos "fault" is it?


Drama queen.

I think there have been lots of Fedora news on OSnews too. I remember some Fedora news where the main topic were the new Fedora desktop wallpapers and not much else...

Fedora and Ubuntu are just popular, therefore covered more in the news. OSnews publishes news - that simple. News stories just don't drop down from the sky but someone has to write them first.

If you do find interesting news about other distros or operating systems somewhere else, please, submit those news to OSnews too, we others might be interested in reading them too. Of course, even better would be to write news about interesting topics not covered elsewhere yet, although not everyone has the skills and means.

Anyway, I agree in the sense that I would like to read more news stories about other distributions too. There are many interesting specialized niche distros (source-based, mediabox distros etc.) inventing new things all the time. But as they are often small, there may just not be that many news about them.


Blehh.., go trolling elsewhere, please. Why are you talking in terms of closed commercial software development when talking about open source? Like already said above, you cannot call it plagiarizing if someone uses some opensource software elsewhere as to have many users and developers - everywhere, not just inside one company - is one main goal of open source.

Also, Microsoft has been inventing many things by themselves too.

And also, Ubuntu is far from Microsoft as the company behind Ubuntu is not even profitable yet and only employs a relatively small number of people still. Ubuntu also hasn't advertised itself much more than any other commercial distro has, the reasons for its popularity are elsewhere.

Well, sending free CD-ROMs like what Ubuntu has been doing, might be too expensive for other distro makers - lacking a millionaire as their sponsor - which has definitely been one reason, but only one, for Ubuntu's popularity. But other than that, nothing prevents other distros or operating systems from doing things better and becoming more popular than Ubuntu - but, whining and trolling is surely not the way to do it.

Edited 2008-11-09 11:43 UTC

It's because you Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva/whatever fanboys have constantly underestimated the power of marketing. You people are constantly complaining about Ubuntu being only about marketing, yet here you see another piece of evidence that people simply aren't going to know what you have done unless you do more marketing.

You fanboys should stop complaining. How can you possibly expect the world to know your achievements unless you market your efforts? Stop treating marketing as some kind of evil act, and start improving your marketing! Marketing is not evil, it is important. Until you understand that you have no right to complain. I'm sorry, your current situation is entirely thanks to your own behavior, not because of Ubuntu.

Edited 2008-11-09 12:58 UTC

There is no hallmark of success more reliable than gratuitous criticism from a wide community of also-rans.

When you see others plagiarizing you but with a little worse success you should congratulate yourself for good work and feel proud for having made something worth copying.

When you see others plagiarizing you but with better success you should still feel proud for having made something worth copying. But now copy someone else's stuff and improve on it

unfortunately that seems to be all to common in the Ubuntu community.
I think all Ubuntu's "innovations" came from somewhere else - Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.
Now it's all open source so we shouldn't snipe about that but I think the issue is that Ubuntu users (and maybe Canonical) tend to take credit for all this "innovation".

Canonical does a great job at integration - putting the bits together, but I can only think of one Canonical "innovation" and that's upstart.

Exactly, we shouldn't snipe about it as it is open source.

It surprises me to see how many people still view and evaluate open source development using the unsuitable premises of closed proprietary development. However, it is a different paradigm so a complete paradigm shift is necessary.

Open source is - by the very definition - developed in the open, not behind the closed doors of some commercial company only. Why don't many people still seem to get this, even though they may say that they support open source?

As to taking sole credit for some open source software, I just haven't seen Canonical being guilty of it, any more than others. Claims that they would have been doing that a lot seem mostly FUD to me, maybe caused by envy and Ubuntu popularity. Canonical (& Redhat, Novell, etc.) knows, like everyone else, that most of their software is open source, so developed by many others too than just themselves.

Now, some commercial open source companies like Redhat or Novell, and Canonical too, might sometimes have incentives to develop something behind closed doors too, and (maybe) only open source it after that, in order to have something special to offer and to stay more competitive. In a way, Canonical did the same thing with Launchpad. Such things can be said to come from a single company only - originally. But those are rare exceptions, and most of their software is open source, developed in the worldwide open source community from the start.

So usually open source innovation and development - by the very definition of open source - doesn't happen inside this or that company only. That is the whole idea! Redhat, Novell, Canonical and others all take part in that same worldwide non-proprietary community, maybe concentrating and putting more resources on some fields than others, but all cooperating in the same worldwide open source community. If they compete, the competition is more about services, support, marketing and such things.

Edited 2008-11-09 23:55 UTC

I doubt that. Red Hat's usb creator works with other distros as well. This thing is natural progression. We have to remember that live cd's started out being installable on hard drives. So this was the next step.

Ins't it funny how on every item about Ubuntu so many people has to whine like little spoiled brats about how much exposure Ubuntu gets?

You man like how Linus invented Linux long after Unix and Minix

Edited 2008-11-11 16:08 UTC