Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions

Re:Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions by td on Friday July 30, 2010 @04:45AM (#1560592)

These discussions are really tiring. First it was "Canonical is not contributing to the kernel", now it's "Canonical is not contributing to GNOME", ... Isn't the point of free software that people can take the code and build whatever they want to build on top of it? The consequence: people can use the code it without owing you anything. Apart from the strictly legal side, there is of course the question of moral behaviour, but even there I don't see the point of the complainers, since

* AFAIK, canonical never claimed to be the driving force behind GNOME development.

* Even if they could be doing more for the upstream development, what is the net harm that canonical is doing to linux? What is keeping people who don't like ubuntu from ignoring it, and going on with their business the way they did back when ubuntu didn't exist?

Constructive criticism is ok, but the belligerent tone of the accusations gives the impression that this is ultimately about hurt egos.

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Re:Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions by ciupicri on Friday July 30, 2010 @07:43AM (#1560786)

You are right about the tone used in some of these discussions, but on the other hand I think that the public should know who's really doing more for GNOME, the Linux kernel etc.

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Re:Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions by xpaulbettsx on Friday July 30, 2010 @09:45AM (#1561074)

This might be true, but I personally find it pretty embarrassing that Microsoft has made more contributions in terms of code than Canonical to the Linux kernel tree (as of a few months back when GregKH gave a talk at MS).

Don't get me wrong, Canonical is within their rights to do all of this, but from a moral perspective I think they owe it to be doing more towards contributing back to others' work instead of always promoting their own projects in Launchpad

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Re:Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions by sigzero on Friday July 30, 2010 @09:34AM (#1561042)

I wonder at what level people really do care about that.

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