On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of the USB kernel subsystem. His views are clearly more from a Linux kernel perspective, but they're interesting nonetheless. There were some surprising statistics in regards to the Canonical contribution - they make me wonder if perhaps something was missed. Perhaps the Canonical folks use Debian email addresses?
It's a fairly common complaint that Canonical only looks after Canonical, rarely contribution to new projects, or contributing to upstread projects at all. Just patching as necessary to make things "perfect" on Ubuntu. One can contrast that with Fedora's policy of patching "locally" on on exceptions, having all packages adopted upstream instead.
One arguement in favour of this behaviour of Canonical is that they are doing plenty of good for the community by making the experience very user friendly. Personally: this contribution of theirs is not to be ignored, but code doesn't write itself, and user friendliness doesn't generally go along with encouraging users to submit bugs whenever something breaks.
I have never heard anyone argue that the actual development effort by Canonical's staff is greater than reflected by the statistics -- little to none. So I would say the numbers are correct. Whether or not you consider their other contribution equal is a different arguement.