On Wednesday 01 October 2008 16:35:56 Gaurav Mishra wrote: > And if you think that the Free software awareness Ubuntu has brought > doesn`t qualify in being in Free software ecosystem , Then my friend > you are wrong , Because then you bring to the conclusion that "FSF > has no meaning of existence even" > > Will love to know *specifically* were i am wrong !
Actually, Gaurav, this is less of an FSF and more of a Debian issue. So no point in dragging FSF into this debate. :) Manoj has a point in Ubuntu having problems fixing patches upstream. It might be true, but certainly not intentional. Ubuntu's benevolent dictator - Mark talks about Ubuntu's perspective of the problem here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/145 . You can certainly make out that he also agrees with the basic premise that changes should go upstream. But he also mentions atleast one aspect of the problem Ubuntu faces: > In the month of April 2008, I found the following bug counts for > large FLOSS projects: Upstreams: Mozilla 5,334 OpenOffice > 1,076 > Gnome 5,364 > KDE 1,335 > Total: 13,109 > Distributions: > Ubuntu 13,064 > Debian 5,103 > > With hindsight, April was possibly a bad choice, because it was an > Ubuntu release month so there’s usually a small spike in the number > of bugs filed. It would be interesting to see the stats for other > distributions, and projects, over a full year. But the general > picture is clear - within our family of distributions, Ubuntu carries > the brunt of the load w.r.t. bug tracking, triage and patch > management - not only for our users, but for a broad cross-section of > the open source stack. The numbers are clear. Especially for a distro which has made itself a mission of releasing every six months, handling an order of magnitude more bugs than other projects is certainly an issue. It is no excuse for not sending patches upstream, but people in this thread have oversimplified the process of actually sending patches upstream. Mark talks about it a bit in that post (read, ensuring that fixes get made upstream in the required time needs more than technical skills ;) ). As Manoj has pointed out, there is probably a problem right now, and he might be right about it. My take is that it is not always an intentional thing but more of a case of a problem in managing the a project of the scale of Ubuntu. But, again, bitching to the world about how Ubuntu has been *leeching* from Debian does certainly not help their case ( or Ubuntu's). For two distributions which share so much and have quite a bit of overlap in goals, it certainly is not an effective way of co-operation in fixing this issue. I actually makes me suspect if the Debian folks are interested in a solution at all. It seems more like they are quite ok with Ubuntu not being there at all, regardless of whether Ubuntu has made any difference to the FOSS world. Sad, really, for a distro having such lofty goals. - Sandip _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
