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Greg K-H Attacks Canonical
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Greg Kroah-Hartman of Novell accuses Ubuntu supporter, Canonical, to be non contributing to the development of Linux kernel.
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Sunday, September 28, 2008:
Greg Kroah-Hartman, a respected Linux hacker, has shot many bullets at Canonical, the company behind one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions (Distro watch) during The Linux Plumbers Conference.
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He started by saying that the contributions of Canonical are minuscule compared to other players. According to his own blog, "A few months ago I gave a talk at Google about the Linux kernel development process. During that talk, someone asked me about Canonical's kernel contributions as they did not show up on the list that I was showing. I offhandedly remarked that they did not show up as they had only contributed 5-6 patches in the past few years. Now this comment didn't go over very well with the Ubuntu developers, and they called me out on it as they felt it was wrong."
He further added, "In the past 3 years, from the 2.6.15 kernel to 2.6.27-rc6, Canonical has had 100 patches in the Linux kernel. I apologize about my previous statement and would like the world to know the correct number here. But as the Canonical employees seemed so eager for me to get the number correct, let's look a bit closer at it. What does 100 patches really mean?"
Many have taken his approach to be incorrect and dubbed it to be as mud-slinging on Canonical as Ubuntu is a real threat to Novell's Open SUSE in the market. So, instead of mentioning the great contributions Canonical has done by making GNU/Linux a house hold name, he chose to pick the wrong place to hit Ubuntu. He never said a single word about the great community Ubuntu has build through forum where you can find almost any answer related to GNU/Linux systems.
Matt Zimmerman, a well known developer in the Debian project, who currently works for Canonical Ltd. as the technical leader of the Ubuntu project, and chairman of the Ubuntu technical board and CTO of the project, has tried to make the picture clear. he also said that Greg never mentioned in his presentation that he works for Novell, which he should have as there is a clear bias in his presentation.
He wrote on his blog, "Greg considers the “Linux ecosystem” to be GCC, binutils, the Linux kernel, X.org, and a handful of other projects. He disregards most of the desktop stack (including GNOME and KDE), all desktop and server applications, and most anything else that is recognizable to an end user as 'Linux'."
Matt further wrote, "The first slide in his [Greg] presentation acknowledged that he had miscounted Canonical’s contributions to the Linux kernel. As he freely admits, his method is not an exact science and there were many other errors. However, given that he intends to use these statistics to attack Canonical, he should take more care in compiling them. His original claim, given at a Google tech talk in June 2008, was "Canonical doesn't give back to the community". He supported this by saying that "Canonical made six changes to the kernel in the last five years. Greg now states that Canonical has in fact contributed in excess of 100 patches. This means that his raw data for the kernel was incorrect by two orders of magnitude."
He wrote on his blog that, "However, no one, certainly not Canonical, has ever claimed that Canonical does as much Linux development as Red Hat or Novell. He's refuting a claim which has, quite simply, never been made. Canonical is primarily a consumer of the Linux kernel. It is one of the building blocks we need in order to fulfill our primary mission, which is to provide an operating system that end users want to use. It is, on the whole, a good piece of software which meets our needs well. We routinely backport patches from newer kernels, and fix bugs which are particularly relevant to us, but our kernel consists almost entirely of code we receive from upstream."
An excerpt from his blog goes like this:
Why, then, does Greg feel that Canonical should be expected to make more changes to the Linux kernel?
Is it because Ubuntu is a very popular system, with a lot of users? It is that, but most people who use Linux aren't kernel developers, so a large user population doesn't translate to a lot of Linux kernel patches.
Is it because he thinks Canonical is making a lot of money off of the Linux kernel, and should give some of that back? We make no secret of the fact that Canonical as a company is not yet earning a profit. We make a promise to our community that we will never charge money for Ubuntu.
Is it because he thinks Canonical developers are writing a lot of patches and not contributing them? If he does, he hasn't compared our kernel tree with Linus'.
Do you agree with Greg or Matt, share your though, click here.
Swapnil Bhartiya, EFYTIMES News Network
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| Kernel patches aren't the only way to contribute to the community. But after Canonical starts making money from Ubuntu, surely people will expect them to make contributions that help everyone, whether they use Ubuntu or not. It seems that Debian is already benefiting from Ubuntu's existence. |
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| - R S Chakravarti, Cochin, 9/29/2008 7:15:25 PM |
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