Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 23 September 2008 05:53
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
For a long time, Shuttleworth has tried and succeeded in taking the high moral ground when it comes to comparisons of Ubuntu with Red Hat, Mandriva and SUSE, to name just three. Ubuntu has always been positioned as something being more community oriented and more in line with the ideals of FOSS than the others.
He has had to take a lot of criticism and has always managed to deflect it, at least to some extent. No longer will that be the case. The idea to sell codecs is a commercial decision and he will now be unable to talk of Ubuntu as a free distribution.
If we go back a bit and look at some of the criticisms levelled at Shuttleworth, he has had to face a constant charge from the Debian GNU/Linux project that he has taken from them much more than he has given back. Ubuntu, in case the reader is unaware, is based on the unstable branch of Debian.
Last week, Shuttleworth was under fire again, with kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman standing up at the annual kernel summit (the one for geeks, not the marketing do organised by the Linux Foundation) and
accusing Canonical of giving back very little in terms of kernel development.
Kroah-Hartman had figures to bolster his case - Canonical, he claimed, had contributed 100 kernel patches in the last three years out of a total of 100,000, which put it in 79th place among kernel contributors.
This, of course, led to a bit of a shitstorm with Canonical chief technical officer, Matt Zimmerman, trying to defend his employer against these claims.
Thus, even four years into its existence, Ubuntu still faces the same claims - a distribution that takes more than it gives. I have heard it from at least two very senior Debian developers.
