Greg Kroah Hartman's Google Tech Talk comments!

[jryanitpro]

I was wondering if anyone listened to GKH on a recent Google tech talk saying in no uncertain terms "Canonical doesn't give back to the community"

He was referring to the kernel in general but I found the comment at the very least in poor taste.

I have been trying to get involved with kernel development and more specifically maybe helping with the Ubuntu kernel and was taken back by his seemingly provoking remark.

Any thoughts?

[jrusso2]

Do you have a link its hard to say without seeing the context of his speech.

[jryanitpro]

Oh trust me on this one the context couldn't be anymore clear. If you dont want to listen through the talk the relevent comment is at about 23:00 minute mark. But If I were you I would listen, it is an interesting talk other then the flame stuff.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3414999620283973916&q=linux+kernel&ei=L-1dSN3tJoT-qgK8lqWLCA&hl=en

[mrgnash]

It's probably one of the more frequent allegations made against Ubuntu... Kinda interesting that it's coming from a Google guy this time, considering that (as I understand it), they use a customized version of Ubuntu on their machines.

[jrusso2]

Oh trust me on this one the context couldn't be anymore clear. If you dont want to listen through the talk the relevent comment is at about 23:00 minute mark. But If I were you I would listen, it is an interesting talk other then the flame stuff.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3414999620283973916&q=linux+kernel&ei=L-1dSN3tJoT-qgK8lqWLCA&hl=en

Ok it was only one sentence but it appears he is talking about financially. But I am sure they contribute code.

[jryanitpro]

like I said you should listen to the talk. He said "Canonical has contributed 6 patches to the kernel in 5 years they do not give back to the community"

By the way the slides behind him were specifically counting patches "code".

Just so we're clear on what is being refered to and it's not money.

[jrusso2]

Well the way the Ubuntu kernels are its probably good they don't contribute much.

[hanzomon4]

Ouch!

[jryanitpro]

In my experience the Ubuntu kernel is one of the main reasons Ubuntu is still moving forward ie the hardware support. I can't count the times I tried other distros just failed miserably with the hardware "just working"

I wonder if this animosity stems from the commercial developers that claim to be neutral.

Besides Linus most of the "leaders" work for Google Novell and Red Hat.

To be fair it seemed Greg was implying Google should be showing up better in the code stats then they are currently. Which he made the case that Google was 13th in the list of the most patches contributed and that without Andrew Morton's patches Google was 40th. Novell and Red Hat are notably at the top of the list constantly. He made sure we knew Canonical was somewhere like 400th on the list.

He seemed to imply that users should be using distros that "give back" to the community. Linux will never gain more everyday users with the kernel developers thinking everyone should be willing to be beta testers for Red Hat and Novell.

For the first time in a long time some one starts getting Linux more stable and easier to use and that is somehow not considered giving to the community. It's not like it is the religious argument against binary blobs it is simply to me the Linux community shooting themselves in the foot and eating it's own young sort of.

I myself will continue to use Ubuntu and support the Linux community as a whole.

I hope that kernel devs being employed by commercial competitors doesn't hold back our community and Linux as a viable option to Microsoft Windows. With this type of mud slinging going on in the Linux community in just gives Microsoft a crack to exploit in the open source model and community as a whole.

Just my two cents. I would like to see Mark or someone from Canonical comment on this though. I already noticed a post somewhere on the net that corrected GKH's quote of 6 kernel patches from from Canonical in 5 years. It was actually 6 patches for the current stable kernel 2.6.25.
Maybe it was an honest mistake on his part but I think not. His point was to put down Canonical's contribution history.