Patrick’s Blog(2)

Nice analogy. Read it here.

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.

I watched the game with a couple of friends. What a great match. Overall attractive gameplay. Quick passes keeping the pace high and creating scoring chances for both teams. I wasn’t too sure about this one and neither were my friends. I mostly heard 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 or 1-1. Who could have imagined 4-1?! When Thierry Henry scored for Les Blues (the French team) putting them only one goal behind at 2-1 people around me got anxious. I recalled similar situations where the opponent gets alongside and wins in the end so it was paramount for Oranje (the Dutch team) to prevent France from leveling the score. Only one minute after Henry’s goal Arjan Robben did exactly that and made a beautiful goal from an almost impossible position. If that wasn’t the end for Les Blues then Wesley Sneijder shattered any hopes the French still had.

Free Software Magazine (free subscription here) has a nice analysis by Tony Mobily of Vienna’s failed migration to GNU/Linux. I did not know that Vienna’s IT Department was trying to create there own distribution called Wienux based on debian. I totally agree with Tony that this was a major mistake. Why didn’t they just take CentOS, Fedora or even Red Hat? Fedora is the stepping stone for the next RHEL release and largely sponsored by Red Hat, CentOS is the free version of RHEL and Red Hat is the leading Enterprise Linux vendor. All three distro’s are sound technical choices and when it comes to support and long term viability RHEL is a safe bet too. It would be interesting to learn more details about Vienna’s Wienux decision. My take is that the “techies” got too much leverage and were not properly directed by project management. As a result things spun totally out of control and the decision was made (or pushed) to create Wienux. So all in all I don’t think that Vienna’s migration was a failure from a technical point of view. It was a failure of Vienna’s ability to control the technical direction of the project, validate technical decisions and perform periodic due diligence on the technical and business parameters. And that sounds more like a Program Management and Project Management issue to me.