[dundee] GNOME Census - Who Writes GNOME & the start of a Flame War

[Rick Moynihan]

On 31 July 2010 19:38, Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:29:51 +0100, gordon dunlop wrote:
>
>> Oh dear who would think that the GNOME Census (not the garden
>> variety) would erupt into a flame between senior Linux people, here's
>> the report.
>>
>> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GNOME-Census-Who-writes-GNOME-1048613.html
>>
>> The guy who struck the match? It was Greg DeKoenigsberg, a former
>> Fedora Project Leader & Red Hat Community Architect from Toronto, now
>> CTO of the Institute for Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) in
>> California. He thought that he could talk frankly on his blog now
>> that he doesn't work for Red Hat any more. Has the Californian sun
>> got to him or was it the beer? How stupid!!
>
> To be fair. He's just telling it like it is.

It may well be like it is, but Ubuntu's success is clear and
significant...  FLOSS is all about building on the work of others, and
there's no sense in getting pissed off when it happens....  Lines of
Code is a very poor metric for measuring contribution; and even if the
entirety of Ubuntu's contributions were 'marketing', graphics
designers and a focus on UX (which they're clearly not) they've
managed to produce a distro which has significantly increased the
appeal of Linux and FLOSS.

Given that Canonical don't have Red Hat's market cap, they're clearly
targeting the high value (low cost) changes, and are good at doing so.

People need to measure Canonical's contributions as being more than
just upstream code...  And yes, for the record they should push back
more, but Gnome and other projects can always pull changes back if
they want.

Oh and before I trigger a flame war here... Red Hat are clearly the
daddy when it comes to contributions to FLOSS... but then it's been in
their DNA since 1993, and they've got a long history of control lower
in the stack (e.g. with their acquisition of cygnus solutions in the
late 90's).  To some degree people need to cut Canonical a bit (but
perhaps not loads) of slack over this...  For starters they've got 10x
less employees than Red Hat!  Given this, it makes sense that they
focus more of their efforts higher up the stack.

R.