Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Nov 2008 19:08 UTC
Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.
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Member since:2008-03-08
None of that matters - the figures Greg uses are not for contributions over 10 or 15 years. They are going off recent history.
and if you think comparing against Red Hat or Novell is unfair, fine. Compare against Mandriva or Gentoo. Ubuntu still does not come off well.
(and the comparison was about nuts and bolts since it was a plumbers conference, not a desktop conference.)
All these figures only matter if you are trying to prove that Ubuntu does/does not work upstream and wether it provides a rosy future for itself/linux as a whole.
However if all you care is that Ubuntu is a good distribution to use *now* (which, to be fair, is all that matters to a lot of people), none of the above matters.
Member since:2005-08-18
Compare against Mandriva or Gentoo
Except, you know, both of those have been around a lot longer.
It's also obvious that Ubuntu is not going to have as large a developer community as, say, Gentoo since Ubuntu is not primarily targeted at developers.
All you really need to know though, is that GregKH is working for Novell and is slandering a competitor. Trustworthy? Not any more than Mark would be if he went out and stated that Novell does not contribute.
This is one of those very rare times when I find myself agreeing completely with Moulinneuf. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today.
Member since:2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
from : http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/09/what-behind-gregkh-latest-ra...
If you haven't seen the latest rant from Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman, I'm not going to link to it. You'll have to find it on your own.
Greg has used at least two high-profile speeches this year (a Linux Plumber's Conference keynote, and a Google Tech Talk) to tear down the contributions of Canonical to the Linux ecosystem.
I hope that people take it for what it is, pure and simple...
a negative marketing campaign
engineered by a high-profile Novell employee
against a key competitor
Greg threw out some numbers in his slides, usually showing a very small number next to Canonical, and then much larger numbers next to Red Hat, Novell, and others, such as IBM.
Full Disclosure...
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that:
1. I am currently employed by Canonical
2. I was an IBM employee from 2000 - 2008
3. I spent most of 2005 as an IBM employee on-site at Red Hat
Some missing numbers...
I dug up a few numbers that Greg missed.
* Worldwide Employees (2007)
o Canonical: ~130
o Red Hat: ~2200
o Novell: ~4100
o IBM: 386,558 ...note that IBM's headcount is accurate to 6 significant digits, and the others are fuzzy :-)
* Revenue (2007):
o Canonical:(probably somewhere south of the following numbers)
o Red Hat: $523 million USD
o Novell: $933 million USD
o IBM: $98,786 million USD (yes, that's a hundred billion dollars)
* Years in Existence
o Canonical: 4 (founded in 2004)
o Red Hat: 15 (founded in 1993)
o Novell: 29 (founded in 1979)
o IBM: 119 (founded in 1889)
So, yeah, Canonical is a small, young company. It would be nice if Greg would normalize some of his numbers against each company's size.