Back in April 2008, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth pitched the idea of major open source projects synchronising their release cycles on a 6 month period. Projects like gcc, the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, as well as the distributions, would work out an acceptable release schedule. It would allow for easier collaboration between the various projects, and hardware vendors would be better able to support Linux since all major distributions would ship with the same kernel version.
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2006-01-11
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Getting big in terms of users or consumers is very different from getting big in terms of upstream contributions. Unless you have a lot of upstream contributions, you can't really drive it strategically in the direction you would prefer. Red Hat only has the ability to support critical infrastructure for customers because it contributes heavily in that area
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
The more critical it is, the more contributors you need and that's why you see Red Hat as the largest contributor the Linux kernel and employing maintainers of glibc, gcc, many of the GNOME components etc. This isn't charity. It just makes business sense to do that if you are making your money selling services around Free and open source software. Since you can't lock in your customers, this is the real way to provide value (unless you want to mix and match with proprietary software in between which is rather tricky to do if you are building a community).
If Canonical wants to drive sync release schedules, it can't merely hope to float the idea and get everyone to agree. Contributions in the ground level is what earns the trust of the community to actually listen and help. Pick and choose what is considered as critical for your distribution and employ people or sponsor people already working on those areas.
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I agree completely. I think Ubuntu is getting a bit too big for its breeches and thinks that just because of the buzz it's been getting lately, it can start pushing around the rest of the (established) community. The reality is, most of the work that Ubuntu benefits does not come from Ubuntu. It's not even really its own distribution, with Debian providing the base and a lot of QA and development work.
I think Shuttleworth is correct in believing that there should be more synchronization between the various projects and not just on a single distro level. He is wrong, however, to think that all the distros should just bend over because Ubuntu says so. If Shuttleworth and Canonical are serious about this, they could start by having Ubuntu sync with a few more core projects as well as putting more work into other projects that they find important. Since they have been serious about X stability, they should hire people to work full time on X development (God knows, X needs more serious developers) and then start talking about coordinating release schedules.
Just my $0.02.
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Please read the posts. If you agree that there should be more synchronization between the various projects you agree with what Mark has suggested. Because that is pretty much all he has proposed. If anything, it is Aaron who is suggesting that all the distros bend over backwards to help KDE do its releases.
Edited 2008-05-20 03:29 UTC
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Mark is basically trying to get projects to synchronise with Ubuntu's six month release cycle - for Ubuntu's downstream benefit.
If Mark wants some kind of coordinated release mechanism then he's going to have to put something into it. Aaron suggested one way he might be able to do that, as it is not up to upstream projects to compromise their feature list to stick to Ubuntu's six month release cycle.
It's Mark who's asking for this.
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2006-07-26
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This seems like a good idea but I'm not sure how it would work.
Are we talking about dependencies here? Aren't people already working as fast as they can to use new features of libraries their stuff depends on?
Lets say there is a program that you use written in PyQt. The authors want to use a new feature of Qt that is going to come out. As a user of the program you have to wait first for the Qt release, then the PyQt release, then the author of that program to use the new feature.
How could this happen in any other order and still get proper testing?
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It's more of a business thing. If all major distributions ends up using the same version of gcc, the linux kernel, etc in their releases (which in turn are released in the same time-frame) hardware vendors for example will have an easier time supporting those releases with drivers.
It's not really about bringing new features of underlying libraries to the users in a different way or a faster way, it's more of how to make Linux more attractive to the enterprises.
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2006-08-01
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It's more business as usual than anything else :
Dag Wieers : http://dag.wieers.com/blog/ubuntus-need-to-catch-a-wave
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2005-07-06
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I've been reading the articles here and on Slashdot lately and there seems to be alot with the opinion that Ubuntu is a good choice cause its the best desktop distro. But I need to know what have they done to make it the best? Its like nobody is calling ubuntu out for thier claims. I know about the sudu thing. nice idea but other than that what makes them a great desktop? I mean Novell and RedHat are the ones submitting all the usability patches upstream. Re-designed gnome with all those 2.4-2.6 usability improvments.
Why is ubuntu the undisputed king?
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They are king because of marketing, nothing else. And the marketing is because they are incredibly open, and give free cd's to everyone. They don't contribute as much as the big ones like Mandriva, Suse and Red Hat, yet everyone perceives them as huge contributors because many ppl working on Gnome use Ubuntu... But they're not paid.
edit: with 'not paid' I mean not paid to do the work on Gnome etc, of course.
Edited 2008-05-20 15:45 UTC
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2006-01-04
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I think first distributor or the Linux Foundation or someone need to identify critical FOSS packages and employ someone to maintain them full time.
Having no committed maintainer for Openssl is pathetic. Although this time the fault was Debians it still cannot be excused that there is not better support such a crucial package. A full time committed maintainer might have helped.
It is always good to have someone whose job it is to care for software.
There are probably other packages.
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2006-09-27
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There's a Spanish idiom that goes "ir a por lana y salir trasquilado", that is, "going for wool and ending up shorn". I think this would apply to Mark Shuttleworth if Aaron Seigo's idea catches on
