Ever heard of upstart, the revolutionary new event based init system. It is the one that Fedora uses now. http://upstart.ubuntu.com/

Developed by Scott James Remnant, a canonical employee.

How about the Linux kernel bugs Ubuntu submits upstream?
http://tinyurl.com/5ymnoh

Or all of the patches here:
http://patches.ubuntu.com/

There have been enough patches from ubuntu to fedora’s system-config-printer tool, the ubuntu developer working on it has upstream commit access to it’s repository.

It isn’t like they are totally ripping off everyone and profiting. Quit pretending they are.

Sorry for using your blog as a place to feed the trolls, but someone might actually believe him. At least neo isn’t as poisionous as Ivan

Show it? Majority of Canonical employees seem to be working on a proprietary web service called launchpad. Where are your real major upstream contributions really?

Thank you for what you have written. It is a lot more in the spirit of our community than the comments I have seen in Zeeshan blog (and yes Zeeshan could have been more tactful himself). I think most of the absurd comments come from those who do not develop. I’ve seen this issue pop up between KDE and GNOME where the developers can sit down, joke together and buy each other beers while a lot of the vicious vitro comes from those who stop seeing the other guys as human and deserving of respect.

That is not to say arguments with strong words are never valid just that some dialogue has no place within a valid argument and serve just to cause strong reactions. Phrases like “stop being a cry baby” are just disrespectful and words I never want to see in any debate.

I would like to highlight however that this disrespect for developers has become a issue simmering under the surface. All distributions could do better to highlight upstream as the place where community development produces what we can distribute. It is this community that allows us to innovate and compete with more entrenched products. When people who commented were disrespectful to Karl, they were disrespectful of the whole upstream community. Perhaps upstream can help ease the burden of downstream by providing versioned about pages which list the prominent contributions for that version. This would allow all of us to easily provide direct links for feature lists and not be a burden to the downstream providers.

I don’t yet have all the facts behind the decision, but I can see that Zeeshan would have reason to be upset if they are as you describe. I can also see that the release managers may have felt it better not to get into a situation where they set a precedent of having to meet every request like this for any feature in a release of GNOME which becomes a release of Ubuntu. I’ve asked the Ubuntu team to let me know what factored into their decision, and will come back to your blog with some answers in due course.

In the meanwhile, I’d like to comment from my own perspective. At Ubuntu we see ourselves as working very hard to bring innovation in the free software community to a wider audience than it would otherwise receive. And that’s a unique contribution that we can make. Everyone plays their part in the ecosystem, everyone makes the contribution that they are most interested in doing, the thing they will find personally most rewarding and satisfying. In the case of Ubuntu, we want to bring the brilliant work of the whole community to the world, predictably and smoothly. That in itself is, I think, an amazing contribution to the open source world – remember what it was like without that? When you had to wait an uncertain amount of time before you could have a fully-supported, properly maintained secure distro of your recent releases? I feel good about the contribution we make just on that level, so it hurts to be accused that “Canonical only makes a meager contribution”. If we didn’t do the work we do, lots of people wouldn’t actually have GNOME on their desktops, lots of bugs would not get filed, the system would not improve at the same rate. Just because we think it is important for us to focus more on that than, say, X or kernel development, is not a good basis for accusing Canonical of not contributing. In this world, we need both farmers and chefs.

We would never try to pretend that work done by someone else, which we are bringing to a wider audience, was done by us. And we have a good track record of celebrating, very publicly, the contributions of individuals who have done brilliant work. That’s the best way to say thank you and also the best way to encourage more innovation, more perspiration, more participation. I can point to plenty of examples where this sort of public praise, thanks and credit has been made.

In this specific case, I’ll find out why the team chose to drop the feature from the release announcement. I am absolutely sure it was not out of a desire to take credit for someone else’s work. It may have been that the team did not want to set a precedent for the final release in the actual announcement, as opposed to on the web site.

If you run Ubuntu, you’ll know that we devote a very high-profile menu item to the “About GNOME” dialog box. I’ve defended that on many occasions, because I think it’s vital that a distribution be a conduit for people back to the original projects that actually provide a home for the innovation that makes free software potent. Yes, Canonical does innovate, and does contribute upstream, and it is pretty revolting to read community leaders twisting facts to suggest otherwise. But we recognise that the vast majority of the amazingness in any distro release has come from the work of thousands of OTHER folks, whether that be GNOME, KDE, GNU, kernel, X, Debian or any of the hundreds of communities that help shape the free software platform today.

Meaning of course that Ubuntu will have to attribute everyone else too, not just Karl.

Not on that level. The GPL does not ask to give full credit when you write release notes, but it does require it in the copyright notice on the source code itself and main credits of the product. But not on release notes that were put together simply for the convenience of the community.

>with moral obligations

You just don’t get it, re-read my fist comment. If Ubuntu was to give this guy credit in this fashion, then it would be UNFAIR to not give credit to 1000 other contributors too. And doing so is simply impractical. If you want to talk about morality, then you should talk about this to Karl, who is asking for the impossible. What he asks for is very time consuming — which means expensive. And Ubuntu lives on borrowed money, so they can’t afford to give Mr Karl a blow job just because he asks for one.

Really, is it too difficult to understand this, and put your Ubuntu hats for a moment instead of thinking this through only from your own little corner? It should be obvious.

Read the GPL if and when you have time and you would realize it has attribution requirements too and btw this conversation has nothing to do with legal requirements and everything to do with moral obligations.

J5, the above doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Did you read to WHOM I replied? I didn’t reply to your article, I replied to Karl’s comment. Did you not see the quoted sentence in italics? That was Karl’s, not yours. So what exactly is your problem to reply this way to me? By all means refute my points, but don’t make it about your and your blog post. It’s about Karl’s post.

And as for my attitude, well, Karl deserved that attitude when he wanted attribution where no one else was asking for one, and for a piece of code licensed under a license that doesn’t require attribution. So yeah, my attitude was spot on against him.

What really pissed me off is that sentence that I quoted of him above. This man is incapable of putting the shoes of the other guy and think what would it be like if he was on the other side of the fence. And I just can’t stand such people.