Does Canonical give back to the Community?
Google Tech Talks has a great presentation by Greg Kroah Hartman about the Linux kernel. I’ve seen it before and would only suggest to watch it yourself if it weren’t for Mike McGrath’s comment today on his blog. What does Canonical contribute back to the Community at large? And I don’t mean the Ubuntu Community but really the Community at large. A comment below Greg’s video says that Canonical had 6 changes for kernel 2.6.26 and not in the past 5 years. Even if that is the case then it’s still a number so low that one can hardly call Canonical a serious contributor. So is Canonical just leeching from others? Since I’m a Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora guy I can’t say but to me it seems Canonical should step up their kernel development contribution. But wait there’s more. Didn’t Mark Shuttleworth recently make a plea for syncing new releases of the main distributions. This concept was shot down as a lame attempt to be able to leech more work from for example Fedora and Red Hat. So what does Canonical actually contribute back to the Community? From where I’m standing it looks like not much.
Update: read Ben Collins’ take here and decide for yourself. He has a point that GregKH used incomplete data. However, Ben’s comment pretty much says it all about Canonical’s contributions back to the community: “Second off, using a check for ^Author with a canonical.com or ubuntu.com email address in the v2.6.25 tag of the upstream kernel tree, shows 91 commits (I should know the numbers, since 63 of those were from me). Granted, Redhat and SuSe outnumber us considerably, but then we don’t have > 100 kernel developers on staff (we have less than 10).”.
So I’ll stand by my initial observation. With only 91 commits from less than 10 Canonical kernel developers I can imagine that Mark Shuttleworth would like to sync releases with the major distro’s that spent an awful lot of money on kernel and other development. Yet at the same time Canonical apparently has enough money to send an Ubuntu DVD to anyone interested no matter where they are. I guess it’s a matter of priorities. So how much does Canonical contribute back? Doesn’t seem to get any better with this new information.