Who is Sponsoring the Work? Where are you, Canonical?

[feistybird]

https://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php


Who is Sponsoring the Work

The Linux kernel is a resource which is used by a large variety of companies. Many of those companies never participate in the development of the kernel; they are content with the software as it is and do not feel the need to help drive its development in any particular direction. But, as can be seen in Table 4, an increasing number of companies are working toward the improvement of the kernel.

https://www.linux-foundation.org/publications/images/table4-companies.gif


Novell's Linux contributions up 250 percent, sales 200 percent in 2007
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9907485-16.html

Novell Rises to Second Highest Linux Contributor
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/02/1753243

Can anyone find 'Canonical's name showing in any gtk+ source code? Why?

Where are you, Canonical?

Uncle Ben: Remember, with great power. comes great responsibility.

[smartboyathome]

Canonical doesn't do this, it has only one paid developer which works on other stuff.

[23meg]

Moved to Community Cafe.

[Eclipse.]

I have to laugh at broadcom being on the list, their linux support is pathetic.

[Kingsley]

Maybe Canocal is part of Unknown. :-k

[days_of_ruin]

Maybe Canocal is part of Unknown. :-k

I think unknown is Linus.

[madjr]

glad to see intel and hp there

[Whiffle]

I have to laugh at broadcom being on the list, their linux support is pathetic.

Actually that just confuses me. My laptop has Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express which works peerffeectly. Maybe their wireless division is just crazy?

[jrharvey]

glad to see intel and hp there

HP as in Hewlet Packard? If this is the same company then why do they not offer any sort of linux distro. Im not sure about their servers but their PC's are windows only.

[Vadi]

Isn't Canonical no bigger than like 10 people?

Nevermind that their revenue must be... tiny. Comparing it to the multi-billion companies is beyond silly.

[smartboyathome]

HP as in Hewlet Packard? If this is the same company then why do they not offer any sort of linux distro. Im not sure about their servers but their PC's are windows only.

Don't act so surprised. They support Linux in other ways besides laptops. For example, how many HP printers have you used that do not support Linux (I, for one, have not used a single one of the 3 I have had that doesn't support Linux). They even have a page (http://opensource.hp.com/?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN) dedicated to Linux.

[Kingsley]

Isn't Canonical no bigger than like 10 people?

Nevermind that their revenue must be... tiny. Comparing it to the multi-billion companies is beyond silly.

According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 130 employees.

And not all of the companies on the list have revenue over 1 billion USD, eg. Red Hat.

[Jussi Kukkonen]

According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 130 employees.

And not all of the companies on the list have revenue over 1 billion USD, eg. Red Hat.

RH has over 2000 employees so it's still in another league compared to Canonical...

[frup]

The kernel is just one piece of open source software. As far as I am aware canonical funds Debian developers to produce Debian.

Even if the company isn't contributing much in the way of kernel changes think of the ways they have helped free software... Advertising, Ship it etc. I'm confident that Ubuntu alone has doubled the amount of linux users and am not sure whether anyone else could have done that. That's a fairly big contribution in my opinion.

Ubuntu has also helped gnomes market share which was far behind KDE in 2004 and is now marginally in front I believe.

But seriously as of this moment, for the large part, the kernel is good enough. What is needed is more quality FOSS applications that are able to compete or really be considered better than their competitors.

[koenn]

The Linux kernel is a resource which is used by a large variety of companies. Many of those companies never participate in the development of the kernel; they are content with the software as it is and do not feel the need to help drive its development in any particular direction.

Where are you, Canonical?

Uncle Ben: Remember, with great power. comes great responsibility.

Maybe Canonical is one of those companies that don't participate in kernel development, are content with the software as it this (speaking about the kernel, of course) and do not feel the need to help drive its development in any particular direction


The article you link to put things in perspective quite well :

None of these companies are supporting Linux development as an act of charity; in each case, these companies find that improving the kernel helps them to be more competitive in their markets. The bottom line is : they contribute to kernel development because they need Linux supporting their hardware.


I don't see your point about "Where are you, Canonical?".

[drascus]

Well Canonical as i understand it is a small group is currently occupied in other avenues of software besides the Kernal. They don't really have the resources to fund it's development. Besides the Kernal is just one small part of the OS. It is an essential piece yes but the code of the kernal makes up only a very small part of the total system of an OS like Ubuntu. They may just have bigger things to worry about right now.

[mrgnash]

I rate this thread:

:lolflag::lolflag::lolflag:

[bruce89]

As far as I am aware canonical funds Debian developers to produce Debian.

It most certainly doesn't. Canonical pay people to work on Ubuntu, not Debian. Debian prides itself at being a volunteer group.

I'm not sure why Canonical people don't do much work upstream.

[Joeb454]

HP as in Hewlet Packard? If this is the same company then why do they not offer any sort of linux distro. Im not sure about their servers but their PC's are windows only.

What about HP-UX

Link Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX)

[Vadi]

I've read about this "whaaaah, Ubuntu doesn't contribute to Debian" thing before. Afaik, now there's a special tag Ubuntu devs must use on when they file a new bug, so you can tell... but I lost the blog post which described it :(

[Vadi]

According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 130 employees.

And not all of the companies on the list have revenue over 1 billion USD, eg. Red Hat.

Thanks for the correction!

[bruce89]

I've read about tihs "whaaaah, Ubuntu doesn't contribute to Debian" things before. Afaik, now there's a special tag Ubuntu devs must use on when they file a new bug, so you can tell... but I lost the blog post which described it :(

I know they're a lot better now, a lot more packages in Hardy have Debian version numbers without Ubuntu changes. However, Debian isn't upstream.

[samwyse]

I think unknown is Linus.
Linus is on the individual developers list with 0.6%.

[bruce89]

Linus is on the individual developers list with 0.6%.

Indeed, he's pretty much the gatekeeper of the source who decides what patches to allow in.

[phrostbyte]

Actually that just confuses me. My laptop has Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express which works peerffeectly. Maybe their wireless division is just crazy?

Yes, the contributions with respect to Broadcom is their wired drivers. For some reason Broadcom has very good WIRED support, but extremely poor WIRELESS support. Of course, since Linux is a common server OS, this makes a bit of sense. But I wouldn't rule the crazy factor out either. :)

[toupeiro]

I think oner of the other surprising things revealed to me in this thread is the contribution amount of SGI (Silicon Graphics). This is a company that went bankrupt for all intensive purposes, and have been slowly trying to reinvent themselves in the HPC world, most recently partnering with Microsoft on Windows Compute Clusters... Seeing them contribute so much to the Linux kernel though is good for two reasons:

1. I think Numaflex/Numalink are HUGE contributions to HPC/Linux and will be a driving factor in next-generation cluster implementations. The ability to effectively double the amount of processor cores a linux kernel can address is no insignificant contribution!

2, I keeps them from resurrecting IRIX!!!

[quinnten83]

well, if ubuntu is based on debian, doesn't that make Debian upstream?
And i constantly read on the ubuntuplanet blogs that they have uploaded code to debian. So they contribute...

[23meg]

well, if ubuntu is based on debian, doesn't that make Debian upstream?

What's meant here is Canonical (not) hiring (enough) people to work directly on individual upstream projects that make up distributions.


And i constantly read on the ubuntuplanet blogs that they have uploaded code to debian. So they contribute...

Ubuntu != Canonical

Ubuntu developers contributing directly or indirectly to Debian is one thing, Canonical paying people to work directly on Debian is another. The former has always happened to some extent (and happens pretty efficiently now), the latter has never happened.

[loell]

wished if sabdfl (http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=13307) could answer the question. though we know, its highly unlikely..:razz:

[feistybird]

A Long Story:

Re: [opensuse] Invitation to OpenSUSE developers (from Mark Shuttleworth)
Mailinglist Archive: opensuse
* From: JP Rosevear <jpr@xxxxxxxxxx>
* Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2006 15:51:03 -0500
* Message-id: <1164401463.23061.486.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg03788.html

Canonical and Debian - friend or foe?
http://blog.incase.de/index.php/2006/11/28/canonical-and-debian-friend-or-foe/

Comments from a Debian Developer:
http://www.netsplit.com/2006/11/27/slippery-slopes/

[Vadi]

I'm not sure what's the issue here you're trying to get at, fiestybird. Explain?

[feistybird]

Ubuntu is a Super Star of Linux world.

I hope Canonical can contribute something back to the upstream like what Redhat, Opensuse and all other major distros does!

As uncle Ben said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

[Vadi]

Ubuntu is. It's getting more people to Linux. More people on Linux means more bugs reports, more feature requests, better support.

Is that not good enough? I think everybody should do what they're best at. Ubuntu apparently is way better at getting new people in, while other distros are better at writing code.

I don't see anything wrong with actually focusing on something, and not doing everything at once and accomplishing nothing.

[23meg]

More people on Linux means more bugs reports, more feature requests, better support.

Not necessarily (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=577989).

[koenn]

what Ubuntu does is making Debian marketable, and marketing it succesfully.
What Canonical does is making sure that Ubuntu can do what it does, i.e. marketing Debian, and facilitating that process.

Software derived from Free Software remains free. So even if Ubuntu and/or Canonical devs wouldn't inject their work back into Debian or upstram development, Debian or any upstream project that see something they like in Ubuntu (a cool feature, a bug suddenly gone, a nice integration effort, ...) can just come and look how they did it, and copy it if they like.

Besides that the Debian community can happily continue building their software (which they do very well) and conform to their rather strict quality requirements and free software quidelines while Ubuntu, with roughly the same code, caters for the masses, and experiments with solutions that would be rather difficult inside debian (inclusion of not-so-free software, binary blobs, ...)

Looks like a good deal to all involved, so whats with the "With great power comes great responsibility"-attitude ?

[toupeiro]

Looks like a good deal to all involved, so whats with the "With great power comes great responsibility"-attitude ?


For some people, people aren't contributing unless they are on some sort of a list that says so...

[bruce89]

"fedora is the new ubuntu (http://wingolog.org/archives/2008/04/07/fedora-is-the-new-ubuntu)" is an interesting article.

[Vadi]

Every good company that makes it big has people who start to hate it. Every single one - Google, Novell, and many other examples, all have their share of people disliking them for whatever reasons. I guess it's coming to Canonical now too.

But hey, that's a good thing - means it's getting big :)