Comments on: Statistics for GNOME development

By: John M. Anderson

John M. Anderson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:55:48 +0000

I agree, I’d love to see a breakdown of GNOME development

By: Azrael Nightwalker

Azrael Nightwalker — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:33:44 +0000

We’ve already had a Launchpad flamewar. There’s no need to repeat it.
See http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2007/11/no-more-bug-reports-from-me.html

By: pirast

pirast — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:35:17 +0000

well, regarding “there should only be one launchpad”: red hat also publishes koji (build system), bodhi (update qa and co) source code and they are still alive..

I’m also not really happy with the contribution of canonical in floss software, mainly because when you consider that the 50 employees working on launchpad would work on gnome it would rock seriously even more.

but i think that it will come by time when canonical does support for more and more companies (maybe?).

By: jef

jef — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 08:49:27 +0000

Canonical is privately owned company funded by a multi millionaire and its developers for the most part are packaging and patching up upstream software instead of contributing innovative things on their own. Half of them are working on proprietary launchpad. Plain fact is that their are not contributing much compared to the amount of hype they have.

The centralization and service excuses are not good enough to justify keeping a important part of a so called community distribution proprietary. Google is irrelevant here since it is not part of a Linux distribution infrastructure. Freeing up tiny bits of launchpad is just pointing at scraps.

Centralization is not needed at all. Bugzilla uses XMLRPC and communicates between distributed instances of bug tracking systems which is the way to go. Some Ubuntu fanboys are simply mimicking Canonical without analysing the problem.

By: John E.

John E. — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:15:40 +0000

The very point of Launchpad is centralization; for that, there must be only one Launchpad. Sure, people should be able to interface with Launchpad from their own websites in the future, for example, a local bug tracker instance that communicates with Launchpad should be possible with a “Launchpad API”. But making the core Launchpad application open source _from the start_ would have caused many “Launchpadlets” to spread all over the web and defeated the purpose of Launchpad as it is today.

Canonical have made it clear that Launchpad will be freed in the future, and have actually freed some components of it.

By: apokryphos

apokryphos — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:17:25 +0000

@jef: in comparison to the other companies in the list, it is very small, yes. Novell has some 5,000 employees and Red Hat has 2,200 employees, for example.

@John: That it’s as proprietary as Google is not really comforting, mainly because it’s still proprietary. Other open source projects might want to create their own instance of Launchpad and run it differently, modify the source code, share and distribute it. You know: free software ideals. The reason why it’s more of a shame than the Google case is because Canonical/Ubuntu should value these ideals.

I agree that statistics for GNOME/KDE would be pretty interesting, though the biggest contributors are of course not hard to guess. GNOME: SUSE/RH, KDE: SUSE/Trolltech.

By: John E.

John E. — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:10:12 +0000

Launchpad is as proprietary as Google. It’s a service. It’s not intended for you to run on your computer; someone else runs it for you, and lets you access all the content in it via open standards (e-mail, XMLRPC), so you can get out exactly what you (and others) put in.

By: jef

jef — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:09:54 +0000

A company with over 100 people lead by a multi millionaire is small in the linux world? I didn’t knew.

By: ulrik

ulrik — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:58:54 +0000

Yuriy: Comes as a complete non-surprise to me.. Canonical is a very small company with a huge (wery widely spread) distribution.

By: jef

jef — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:16:43 +0000

Canonical won’t be in any major list of FOSS contributors since Ubuntu does only does packaging of code contributed by organizations like Red Hat for the most part.

The major Canonical “contribution” is a proprietary service called launchpad. A completely shame really.