I’ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting:
“Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent, or than the whole-community events.”
However, I did surprise someone by ending with
“The silver lining is that most Ubuntu improvements are free software and are/can be contributed back to the free software world.”
That’s in part because Ubuntu finally made some progress on the Mailman colour mismash bug I tried to fix 5 years ago which is still unfixed in GNU as far as I know.
So I think that as long as much of Ubuntu is free software, its contributors will still be doing some good work. I hope a mailman bgcolor/CSS patch is taken by other distributions soon.
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5 comments so far
1 MJ Ray (mjray) 's status on Thursday, 22-Oct-09 07:08:27 UTC - Identi.ca // Oct 22, 2009 at 7:08 am
[...] Published Some Good Does Come From Ubuntu http://www.news.software.coop/some-good-does-come-from-ubuntu/799/ [...]
2 Dean // Oct 22, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Uhm, that bug you linked has nothing to do with Ubuntu as far as I can see. That project just happens to use a bug tracker hosted and primarily driven by the same company who host and primarily drive Ubuntu.
Reading through the list history some of the attitudes on display are probably why Ubuntu “gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent,”. The three years it took to release Sarge and Ubuntus more friendly installer are probably also related
3 MJ Ray // Oct 23, 2009 at 9:15 am
I thought that Mailman itself uses the sourceforge bugtracker. But now I see from http://www.list.org/bugs.html that it has moved over since I last looked. So what does “Also affects distribution” mean if not ubuntu? Very confusing!
The attitudes are a product of the insults, not the other way around. And debian release time and installer features can be influenced visibly by getting involved, more than some other distributions.
4 Dean // Oct 23, 2009 at 12:49 pm
You can mark a bug in launchpad as existing in multiple distributions or upstream projects. Ubuntu uses that field to track bugs that also exist in Debian, if the Debian bug status changes to ‘fix committed’ or ‘fix released’ then it is flagged in a report as a potential easy fix. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/428884 for an example of a bug affecting several upstream projects + debian + ubuntu
I’m aware that Debian is open and relatively easy to influence. I don’t mean to criticise it, I just think if Debian had managed to release Sarge a year or so earlier then Ubuntu would not have had the impact it has had.
By the way your “notify me of followups by email” functionality appears to be not working.
5 Jonathan Carter // Oct 23, 2009 at 1:04 pm
/me gives debian a hug