2006-11-28
Canonical and Debian – friend or foe?
Pointed at the issues by Josselin Mouette’s post, I got aware of a list of issues posted by JP Rosevear, which is a reply to Mark Shuttleworths post to the opensuse mailinglist. Note especially point 2, which is: “Preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because you had hired him.”
If this issue is true, it’s the worst thing I ever heard of regarding Canonical. I mean it’s bad enough that points 1 (“Having a stated policy of not funding any significant new software development because the Return on Investment is not good enough”) and 3 (“Not releasing any source code for launchpad/rosetta/malone to maintain a competitive advantage”) certainly are true (even though I can’t prove and therefor don’t 100% believe the second part of #3). But unless there is a very good reason to delay the submission of the patches developed to “upstream”, Debian.
It’s bad enough that Canonical hired the most active Debian Developers, depriving Debian of much of their time, while not really supporting Debian (i.e. while not actively submitting patches to Debian). It would have been better for the community if Canonical had hired less active DDs (or even non-DDs). Sure it would have been harder to select some sufficiently qualified people for the jobs, but the total outcome whould have been better IMHO (getting time from previously uninvolved people, while keeping the existing contributors).
Anyway, I really would like to know wether the mentioned point #2 is true, and if so wether any valid reason for doing so could be given before I set my opinion about this issue in stone.
One thing is sure however, I’m becoming more and more critical regarding Ubuntu and Canonical over time while I once hoped that the opposite would become true for those criticizing Canonical at that time. Actually I still hope so (and thus I hope reason to become less sceptical again).
Another thing is also sure: If Canonical wants to use Debian as a base for much longer, it should make damned sure to work with Debian more actively instead of seemingly working against it (more or less openly).
Update: As also pointed out in a comment below, a post by Scott James Remnant proves point 1 from the the aforementioned list and gives a further hint that point 3 might be true. More precisely it says “we have a policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed”, which probably means “not doing our own major software development”, since – as a comment to that post also says – Canonical did some software development, like launchpad/rosetta/malone and some other relatively small projects.
See also Rescueing files from lost+found
See also ATmega16 controller and DOG-M LCD module – can’t get it to work right
See also Wishlist for lenny… or why debian packaging is considered hard
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Joe Buck said,
November 28, 2006 at 03:56 UTC (+0000)
Haven’t you noticed the problem with this charge? It assumes that there is a single person who is the Debian Gnome maintainer. In fact, there’s a large team of Debian Gnome maintainers.
So tell me again how Ubuntu hired away one guy and prevented Debian from releasing an up-to-date Gnome.
Look, there’s plenty about Ubuntu to complain about, so it isn’t necessary to go around making up phony charges.
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 04:38 UTC (+0000)
You should realize that I said “if this is true”, so I’m not saying it is. I do realize that there is more than one Debian Gnome maintainer. So let me rephrase the issue:
Is it true that Mark Shuttleworth or anyone else inside Canonical requested that the person hired at canonical which also is one of the Debian Gnome maintainers should not upload a new Gnome package(s) release to Debian until Ubuntu LSO was released?
Chris Cunningham said,
November 28, 2006 at 04:46 UTC (+0000)
[Parts stripped because they asked for a flamewar]
Debian’s X people work with Ubuntu’s X people. Debian’s X is moving in the right direction at an appropriate rate. Debian’s (non-Canonical) gnome people are [inappropriate wording]. Debian’s gnome lags. I can think of simpler probable reasons for this than conspiracies.
tarat said,
November 28, 2006 at 05:44 UTC (+0000)
Point #1 and point #3 are proved by a Canonical employee.
http://www.netsplit.com/blog/articles/2006/11/27/slippery-slopes
This phrase tells it all :
“And just to drive the point home, some of our Linux friends shipped similar support in their last releases. They don’t enable the NVIDIA binary driver, but this means that a large percentage of their user base can’t get the bling without manual hackery.
We needed a way to catch up with both the commerical operating systems and other Linux distributions; we have a policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed, so the only way for us to get ahead was to package something that others wouldn’t.”
They will do anything to “catch up” with the ‘competitors’. They want the closed drivers to be “ahead” of free distributions like Fedora and Debian. So point #3 does apply. They love their closed launchpad to gain their competitive advantage.
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 05:45 UTC (+0000)
Come on Chris, please use appropriate language. If Debian’s Gnome team is slow and without sufficient social skills in your opinion, please say so, but without abusive language please.
As for “Conspiracy”, I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy if Mark S (or whoever at Canonical) asked his employees not to work against the interests of his company. I just don’t see why uploading a new (set of) Gnome package(s) to Debian would be against his company’s interests.
Marketing reasons (“I want Ubuntu to be the first Linux Distribution to contain Gnome X.Y”) wouldn’t be a valid reason in my opinion by the way.
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 05:52 UTC (+0000)
tarat: Yes, I saw that blog entry later on, and I really think that the policy stated in there is the right way to go:
“we have a policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed, so the only way for us to get ahead was to package something that others wouldn’t.â€
This simply won’t work in the long run. The way to get ahead of others will always be to do actual development and – hopefully – innovation. Even in the Open Source Community, this does get you ahead of your competitors. Not doing own development will always leave you running after the others, even when you are combining the best things from each competitor.
Reinhard said,
November 28, 2006 at 10:03 UTC (+0000)
Err, I’m surprised by point 1. Canonical is founding bzr, a free decentral VCS. How can you say canonical didn’t “fund any new development”?
Point 3: The old discussion of giving back patches: Canonical is producing patches on an automatic basis. You ask for manual reviewing and submitting back. Did you look at how many developers are actively working in ubuntu and how many in debian? Don’t you think that if every much had to be mailed to submit@b.d.o, nearly no other development on ubunut would happen?
I rather think debian should start working on guidelines how derivates can contribute back better. I think the automatically generated patches at patches.ubuntu.com are a good start, but often they are good enough. Let’s better think about mean how to improve this workflow. E.g. I could imagine that the new W&P format could be exploited to better seperate debian from ubuntu changes from upstream software. Please don’t blame ubuntu for not continuing development of this way.
Np237 said,
November 28, 2006 at 11:49 UTC (+0000)
Haven’t you noticed the problem with this charge? It assumes that there is a single person who is the Debian Gnome maintainer. In fact, there’s a large team of Debian Gnome maintainers.
This claim is based on the wrong assumption that all these maintainers are doing the same job. One of them has made 97 uploads in two months. I have made less than 20, and some other people have made a few. In the meantime, I have seen 0 uploads, 0 commits from Canonical employees. The guy who was hired was not one of the “two uploads a month guy”, he was the primary maintainer at that moment.
Anyway this is over now, we have understood we cannot expect any help from Canonical wrt. GNOME packaging and we have mostly replaced the manpower that was hired. But seeing Mark Shuttleworth claiming the opposite still gets me on my nerves.
Chris Cunningham said,
November 28, 2006 at 14:40 UTC (+0000)
Apologies for the earlier rant.
Ah, but: this isn’t necessarily true. Debian’s early success lay in the way it was put together, the way people worked with each other, the core values that were upheld: not because it actually contained technical advantages in the form of new code.
Ubuntu is primarily successful because two years ago Canonical were able to ship Debian with a modern gnome in a way that normal people could install without a manual. At this point, Ubuntu’s desktop offering is objectively better than Debian’s, and because the Ubuntu community is widely seen to be more vibrant and welcoming than the Debian community it is likely that the gap will only increase over time. Canonical don’t need to fund new development; they just need to make Ubuntu the most welcoming distro to work on. You can already see this happening with new Linux software, which is usually packaged for Ubuntu before anything else these days.
I think the real reason that people are so irritated by packages with Ubuntu version numbers in them being pushed into Debian is that it shows that the “ubuntu is leeching” argument is a fallacy. Ubuntu is supplanting Debian as the upstream “debianish” Linux distro, and people are getting their egos bruised.
– Chris
Stoffe said,
November 28, 2006 at 17:42 UTC (+0000)
“Having a stated policy of not funding any significant new software development because the Return on Investment is not good enoughâ€
I’m wondering about this: what about stuff like Casper and Upstart, and plenty more projects like those? Why aren’t they considered “significant new software”?
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 19:02 UTC (+0000)
Stoffe: “Upstart” is mostly a concept, and as a piece of software, it is rather small. And the idea behind it initially surfaced on non-ubuntu mailinglists. I can’t say anything about casper though. And I certainly don’t know how much of the work done on either of the two was done by Canonical employees or by some other Ubuntu contributor (in which case I wouldn’t want to attribute the new software to Canonical, even if they were the first to use it).
Chris: I agree that Ubuntu appears to be the more “vibrant and welcoming” community, though I would really like to see Debian to be just that: vibrant and welcoming. Sometimes I think removing a dozen or so DDs from the keyring (i.e. expelling them from Debian) could achieve that in the end, but that way is certainly wrong.
Anyway, I personally don’t care wether a package in Debian has an ubuntu version number or not, but what I do care about is that Canonical isn’t putting half as much effort into contributing back to Debian (which Mark S. promissed more than once, among other times in a small chat I had with him at DebConf 05) as they proclaim they do.
Regarding the founding of the bzr VCS development, I’m not sure how the founding works here, but if it’s similar to other founding of open source software, the funds going into this over the course of a year wouldn’t sustain hiring an IT professional for two weeks. This is a lot different than doing the development themself (by hiring someone to work on that).
Np237 said,
November 28, 2006 at 22:36 UTC (+0000)
Chris, I don’t care about Ubuntu becoming the “upstream debianish distribution” or whatever expression Ubuntu fanatics will invent. I do care, however, of Ubuntu trying to make the Debian project move in a direction that suits their development issues, while on the other side maintaining a small competitive advantage on visible parts of the system so that people don’t use Debian. This is what is killing the project. Canonical is trying to turn a great distribution into a package supermarket that wouldn’t be usable without their own bling.
A sign of good will from Canonical would be to ask all their members to resign from their Debian positions unless they are really willing to assume these positions.
David Nusinow said,
November 28, 2006 at 22:40 UTC (+0000)
“Debian’s X people work with Ubuntu’s X people. Debian’s X is moving in the right direction at an appropriate rate.”
Chris, this is entirely wrong right now. Yes, I worked with Daniel Stone when he was the Ubuntu X guy. I still work with him today. But right now I don’t collaborate with anyone on the Ubuntu X team. I don’t know who did their transition to 7.1 (Debian did that independently) and I don’t think they really have an X maintainer at this point. I’ve never even spoken with the guy who was their X maintainer (the same one who is at the head of their current X-related specs) and as far as I can see he doesn’t really care what Debian is up to.
We have our own plans, and Ubuntu will surely benefit from them, but as far as the X stuff goes Debian has been the driving force of its own destiny in that area for some time now. We’ve been able to keep up a good pace because we’re doing exciting stuff on our own, and we don’t need to follow Ubuntu in order to get it done. I’m happy to collaborate if the opportunity and desire are there, but Debian doesn’t need Ubuntu to function, and that’s the way it should be.
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 23:05 UTC (+0000)
I must say I agree with Josselin (np237) and with David:
“Debian doesn’t need Ubuntu/Canonical to function and that’s the way it should be.”
And therefore: “A sign of good will from Canonical would be to ask all their members to resign from their Debian positions unless they are really willing to assume these positions.”
Actually: I would like everyone to resign from their Debian positions unless they are willing to do the duties that come along with them. Or at least ask for help if they want to do the work but don’t have the time to do it alone.
On a somewhat unrelated note:
Debian unfortunately has a culture of “learn to do it by yourself, I would welcome your help, but I’m not telling you how you could help”. What people with that attitude don’t recognize is that spending an hour showing someone who is willing to help how to do it will often save you several hours later on. Either because that person won’t f*ck anything up which you would need to fix or because the person actually starts helping because he feels his help is welcomed instead of turned down (and impression I usually get when being told to go learn to do the work on my own and without assistance from those who already know the stuff).
David Nusinow said,
November 28, 2006 at 23:40 UTC (+0000)
Sven, it’s interesting that you’re talking about the “learn to do it by yourself thing”. Lately, I’ve been spending most of my time in the XSF not actually producing much code, but checking over the work of others and helping guide them in working on what they’re doing. Most of the recent Xorg changelogs should show that, with me just signing and uploading the package, and other people doing most of the actual visible work. This, combined with documenting things on the wiki, providing relatively open access to our repo (along with strict standards for actual work), and just trying to invite whoever was interested to work on a project inside the team has led to the XSF membership increasing dramatically over the course of the last year or so.
While I’ve definitely made mistakes at all this, I think it’s a step in the direction you want, which I’m convinced is the right one. I’m hoping that the XSF will be an example in how to make this work for the rest of Debian. The various teams should act as incubators to foster a strong community of developers who help each other out. Hopefully this’ll eventually affect the user community too, although I haven’t figured out how to make that transition yet.
sven said,
November 28, 2006 at 23:51 UTC (+0000)
David, I know about the XSF effords in that direction and actually, I try to do the same for the cyrus-imapd team (which obviously has a much smaller audience). As to the question of how this could eventually affect the user community, I guess that this will either happen somewhat automatically or not at all.
I hope your attitude and efford and the resulting effect will be recognized by others and taken as an example of good team work (and, to a degree, leadership).