Canonical takes much more than it gives

Sam Varghese
Friday, 30 July 2010 13:00

Opinion and Analysis

Ask anyone which GNU/Linux distribution one should recommend to would-be users and the answer is generally always one word: Ubuntu.

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Since it was launched in 2004, Ubuntu has gradually grown to be the most used distribution; the fact that it is produced by a big company like Canonical and has been aimed at the desktop are two factors that contribute to its success.

But, in real terms, what does Canonical contribute to the FOSS world? Where does it stand in terms of its contributions to other FOSS projects, from which it takes software to create Ubuntu?

Dave Neary of the GNOME Desktop Project has released figures from a census, the results of which he presented at the GNOME Users’ and Developers' European Conference which has been underway in The Hague, Netherlands, and ends today.

By those figures, Canonical's contributions to the GNOME project and its core dependencies are a miserable 1.03 percent of the total. And this is a company which has linked its release cycle to that of GNOME; if GNOME does not release every six months, Ubuntu would not be able to do so either.

Red Hat tops the list of companies that contribute to GNOME with 16.3 percent and Novell is close behind with 10.44. Neary notes that 11 of the top 20 GNOME contributors of all time are either present or past Red Hat employees.

Neary's census shows that though more than 70 percent of the GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, more than 70 percent of the commits to GNOME releases are made by paid contributors. The statistics come frome examining the modules present in the GNOME 2.30 release made in March.