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

[Andrew Clayton]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2010 11:49:10 +0100, Rick Moynihan wrote:

> 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.

I think I've answered most of this in my previous posting, so I won't
repeat myself here. I just want to reply to this point.

It's true that GNOME or any project can go looking through distributors
packages looking for patches that they could apply. But that way leads
to madness and just isn't sustainable.

If everybody just patched their own packages and never tried to get
stuff upstream, you'd have a hell of mess. Everyone's GNOME would be
slightly different.

This is something the kernel community learnt from in the pre 2.6 days.
Due to the long multi year release cycles for major releases. You
had the various distributors all backporting features from the devel
kernel to their stable enterprise kernels. E.g a RHEL 3.x 2.4.21
kernel won'r mimic a kernel.org 2.4.21 very much, it's got tons of
stuff backported from 2.5/2.6. 

The new devel model in 2.6 has helped to hugely reduce all this
backporting.

One of Fedora's key principles is "upstream". So a Fedora kernel won't
have anything (with one or two exceptions) in it that isn't in the
kernel.org kernel.

AIUI, Ubuntu kernel's have always carried various patches of
questionable quality in the name of hardware support, even if it does
mean your system may be a little less that stable.

Andrew