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: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:2008-03-08
"Compare against Mandriva or Gentoo
Except, you know, both of those have been around a lot longer. "
And how is that even relevant to comparing the output for the last few years where all of them have existed?
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.
and lets forget about Mandriva here
Yes, that comapny has been mismanaged and is largely responsible for its own demise from being King-of-the-Hill to an also-ran, but it still contributes more to upstream than Ubuntu.
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.
It all boils down to numbers. People may be and regularly are biased. Numbers can be so too, but they are often less so.
Lets see the numbers to "defend" Ubuntu. Numbers of their contributions.
Or just admit that Ubuntu is not a big contributor and either see that as a bad thing, or a thing that does not matter - if there are other people are willingly doing the work, why does Ubuntu/Canonical have to? It does not. It is totally free to take the work of others, repackage it and try to make money off that. It has every right to do so.
For most end users, this debate matters not a jot. All they care is that they get a usable, working distro that they like.
The only people that this debate matters to is those that try to make out that Ubuntu is a big contributor to upstream, or those that get riled by the first lot. For (almost) everyone else this is a moot issue.
Edited 2008-11-11 16:02 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
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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.