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Our Blogs Open Sauce A conversation with Martin Michlmayr
Our Blogs Open Sauce A conversation with Martin Michlmayr | A conversation with Martin Michlmayr |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Thursday, 31 January 2008 | |
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Page 5 of 6 So say a company hires some Debian developers and gives them some time to work on the project... Yeah, I think that's a very good model. I know that people during the talk you referred to mentioned monetary donations, but I don't think that's something that works very well. The thing is we do have some money and it's not being used. The other thing that companies can do is to become active in development - fix some bugs, add some features, things like that. What about Canonical? Do they give you anything back by hiring Debian developers? Or does Canonical just poach them? I think we're not very happy about our relationship with Canonical. They're not giving back as much as they claim they do. It really depends on which developers are involved in Ubuntu. Some of them stay active in Debian and contribute patches but some of them don't really do that. I think it's pretty sad that Canonical doesn't have a policy that patches should be contributed back. They make some changes available on their website, but they don't spit patches out in a nice way. They basically make bare changes available but then it's our task to look at them and see if anything is useful. That's just not the way that developers should work together. When we make changes to software we don't just publish our changes and tell people, "take a look at that". We send specific changes with comments to the upstream developers. I think that's how it should be done. It's definitely not the way that Canonical interacts with Debian. What about the other Debian-based derivatives like Xandros? Do they give anything back? No. It's a pity because most Debian-based distributions are not involved in the active development of Debian, Xandros is not involved at all. A couple of Debian-based distributions made by the local governments in some regions of Spain are more active in contributing their changes back. Why do you think this happens? Don't people have an obligation? Most of them would not exist were it not for Debian. I don't know what happens because I talked to some of them. Clearly there's a benefit to working with Debian. It's not just a nice thing to do. It's also in their interest because it minimises maintenance. It makes it much easier to work together, so if they need anything, we're more likely to listen. Usually when you talk to them, they say "yeah, we should do that", then often nothing happens. I can't quite explain why. What about Kevin Carmony of Linspire? Does that company contribute anything back? He's actually not involved in Linspire anymore - he quit. First of all, they have moved to Ubuntu as their base. These distributions are no longer involved in Debian directly but even when they did there was almost no interaction. I had some kind of an email exchange with one of their technical people, and he was interested but he said basically that they don't have the resources to do the right thing. |
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