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First GNOME Census Results
supersloshy writes "The GNOME Census, a project to see who contributes to GNOME and how, has released its first set of results. The results group people by their reasons to contribute code, what they contributed code to, and what percentage of the total contributions they have. For example, 23.45% of code contributions were volunteer, 16.3% of code contributions came from Red Hat, 1% of contributions came from Canonical (which has caused a lot of controversy), and 0.24% came from Mozilla Corporation. The census results are also represented in diagrams (release activity, why contributions were made, and what was contributed to and by who). The report is also available here and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license."
And that's the entire point. Ubuntu has a massive following of very vocal non-coding users. I contribute an upstream project and I often go to the Ubuntu forums looking for any bugs people have found. These are swamped with hundreds of trolls, moaners and flamers. Most will explain how much of a waste of time a particular project is, how the coders are morons and how things are getting worse every day, while smugly pretending to be uber-experts in everything. None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches. This is not contributing back to the community.
All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.
Ubuntu community gives as much to the open source community as 4chan gives to the modern art movement.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Excuse but Canonical does not promote or market OSS (Open Source Software). It only promote and market Ubuntu.
It does not suggest to search and try other distributions or even software projects what Canonical itself is using.
It only promotes itself and wants all the users to come to use Ubuntu and contribute to Ubuntu.
Canonical is $$$ making firm what idea is to make money, not to promote or market OSS for others. If it would, Mark would never founded Canonical but would have hired more developers for upstream projects and it would have come much more efficent and better results when the upstream would have one or two hired guys. Even as part time or seasonaly.
Canonical is spreading lies and misinformation about Linux. They are not trying to get people to start using some OSS in the companies or home, but get Ubuntu.
And Canonical loves the propietary software. Their COO thinks so and Mark has said that closed source is better if it gives better results for end user. Ubuntu is everything what Debian does not want to be = non-free software system.
Canonical is just a company. It is not contributing to community but for itself. It is not developing documents for the community but for itself. It is not even using same localisations than community, it wants to make themself.
Canonical is not trying to get the "Linux compatible" stickers to hardware but "Ubuntu compatible" stickers.
Canonical does not care the fact thet Linux kernel is the operating system. They want people to believe that Ubuntu is the operating system and it is different than Linux. Actually they want people to believe that Ubuntu is better operating system than Linux!
Ubuntu users are not talking about GNOME and it development direction. They are talking about Ubuntu and its desktop and how Canonical should do next generation desktop. People do not understand that GNOME is the desktop in the Ubuntu and Canonical does not control it, develop it or does not contribute to it. Why all suggestions to Ubuntu and for Canonical, while they do not make a difference what they would do in GNOME forums?
If wanted to contribute to OSS, contribute it to upstream, not to the distribution what you are using!
Distribution is nothing else than just a distribution. It is your tool what you use to do something with computer. Just like the Linux is the OS what is used to run all GNU's and all other software. It is not somekind magical thing what makes stuff. It is just a tool. Distribution is same thing. It just a package in your chosen ways packaged so you get tools what you can use to contribute to the upstream, not to the distributor itself.
The only difference what distributor should do among others, is to offer support. But never ever by tying own customers/users to itself but keep them so free that they can when ever they want, change distribution or choose to get support from somene else or start contributing to upstream over the distributor itself.
Canonical is not good at all to the community. It is just doing "Mr. Nice Guy" trick for Media and most people take it without thinking what actually is happening.