Conversion to Linux

[Jeffrey Watts]

Coincidentally, I came across an article about code contributions.  This
article specifically mentions the contributions (or lack thereof) of CentOS
and others.

"Then there are the distros that base themselves off of other distros, like
Ubuntu and [Lance Davis'] CentOS. These distros have yet another layer
between them and the original developers. Patches rarely, if ever, flow
backwards into an upstream distro, and the developers are very unlikely to
push their changes into the upstream packages as they don't feel the need or
don't realize the issues involved as they rely on the upstream distro so
tightly," said Kroah-Hartman.

http://www.sdtimes.com/RED_HAT_TOPS_LIST_OF_CORPORATE_LINUX_CODE_CONTRIBUTORS/About_LINUX_and_OPENSOURCE_and_CANONICAL_and_REDHAT/32870

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?

Jeffrey.

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Monty J. Harder <mjharder at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Red Hat gains something else of value from the cloners' existence:  There
> is now a far larger base of machines running binaries compiled from the same
> sources that RH uses, so if a CentOS user finds a bug, and reports it to the
> CentOS folks, they can confirm that the bug does in fact exist, write it up
> and get information to upstream, which would include RH.  RH isn't having to
> do any work to support these machines but gets these gamma testers to help
> them find bugs.
>
>


-- 

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that
will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kclug.org/pipermail/kclug/attachments/20081103/55be7110/attachment.htm>