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First GNOME Census Results

Posted by timothy on from the but-it's-in-the-constitution dept.

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."

26 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. doesn't seem that scandalous by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the linked post is an accurate overview, at least, it looks like Red Hat is doing a lot more contributing to GNOME's core, while Canonical is doing a lot more building of apps, widgets, and other miscellaneous desktop stuff on top of GNOME. Both seem like reasonable things for an open-source company to contribute. Linux desktop environments need more hacking on the core, and need more interesting things built on top of that core too.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    1. Re:doesn't seem that scandalous by buchner.johannes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah? Link?

      Maybe that coincided with the time when there were no free 3D drivers, and Red Hat forwarded the "Fuck You" from hardware vendors since they (a) hadn't the drivers developed yet and (b) had a principle problem with including proprietary drivers.

      Then (in my opinion) Ubuntu et al not-so-strict distros included proprietory drivers, Linux became more present on the desktop, Hardware vendors noticed Linux. Open-source driver developers had more time and resources to continue and eventually brought forth free drivers.

      What's your version?

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:doesn't seem that scandalous by crush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Fedora and Red Hat provide Free Software in their repositories. It's trivial to install the non-Free drivers (and their associated hidden bugs) supplied by NVIDIA.

      In addition to that Debian, Red Hat and Novell and Intel and other honest players have spent huge amounts of time coding up Free drivers with the Nouveau project (free NVIDIA drivers), Intel drivers, and ATI/AMD drivers

      Sounds like the only one saying a big FUCK YOU is your self.

  2. Half the story by ThoughtMonster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The census is correct in implying that Canonical has not as many modules in upstream GNOME repositories, however that is only half the story. The census counts all commits since the beginning of the project, so Red Hat has a 6-year head start. Not to mention that Red Hat is a much bigger company than Canonical.

    Canonical provides a lot of things of value to GNOME and the free software community in general. The (recently established) Canonical Design Team produces research on software usability, the value of which is not easily quantifiable. Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance). This might change if (or when) these modules are accepted in GNOME proper.

    To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

    1. Re:Half the story by buchner.johannes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

      Too many, we marked them as dup. But your point is invalid since Canonical != Ubuntu users and Canonical != Ubuntu maintainers. Latter are all in the volunteer camp. Red Hat users & maintainers are probably largely there too.

      The way I see it Ubuntu is mainly a packager (distribution) and behaves like one. They mainly configure, build and distribute the existing software. Of course they provide patches for bugs they encounter, and they send it upstream to reduce their own work.

      But Canonical doesn't have the means and will to truly commit developer resources to Linux (like Red Hat does). They want to achieve something with what is there*, and they are very good at communicating, community-building, reacting to users, connecting users and developers. That is Ubuntu's value.
      Red Hat has some of this too, but for them it is business to engineer a Linux that works, because that is what they sell.

      *Greg Kroah Hartman complained Ubuntu doesn't give patches upstream.

      --
      NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
    2. Re:Half the story by ThoughtMonster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ... But your point is invalid since Canonical != Ubuntu users and Canonical != Ubuntu maintainers. Latter are all in the volunteer camp. ...

      I disagree. In principle, you are correct, Canonical, as a company, has nothing to do with me, as a user, filing a bug report on some piece of software. However, how many of these bug reports would exist in the first place if not for Ubuntu, for which Canonical is largely (if not wholly) responsible? Something about eyeballs and shallow bugs.

      For me, Canonical succeeded where most other companies did not, in marketing Linux and GNOME as user-friendly solutions, which in turn, I believe, will draw developers to produce more software for Linux.

      Whilst this is, in part, due to the relative maturity of both products, for which Red Hat is largely responsible, I believe that GNOME benefits greatly from Canonical's approach towards user-friendliness as much as Canonical benefits from the infrastructure on which they base their products. Canonical has produced great software (like Upstart) which may not be obvious.

    3. Re:Half the story by houghi · · Score: 3, Informative

      Greg Kroah Hartman complained Ubuntu doesn't give patches upstream.

      http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3385088017824733336#
      Keynote address by Greg K-H given during the inaugural Linux Plumbers Conference Sept 17, 2008 in Portland, OR.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    4. Re:Half the story by crush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance).

      That's the problem: Canonical is not doing the hard work to get what little they do write upstream. Stuff that is not upstream is just balkanized, fractured, non-maintainable code. It doesn't provide any benefit to the rest of the GNU/Linux community, i.e. the people that write all the rest of the code and upstream it so that Canonical can exist in the first place. Usability research is useful, but when I click your link I see one study (on Empathy) and further clicking around on the Canonical Design team site reveals that, as so much of Canonical appears to be, it's all about marketing. Seriously: ONE study and then three guides devoted to "guidelines to support the brand documentation and help create consistent brand usage."?

  3. Apples and Oranges by WarJolt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Redhat is publicly traded, has over 9 times as many employees as canonical and actually makes a lot more money then Canonical.
    Quit picking on the small fry. Ubuntu contributes enough.

    1. Re:Apples and Oranges by arose · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Is this over the lifetime of Gnome or that of Canonical. If it's the former, then your argument doesn't hold water. Yay for statistics without methodology!

      --
      Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
  4. Languages by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One interesting observation about the contributions on language bindings: Obviously volunteers are mostly into scripting languages (Python, Perl), while each compiled language is dominated by a single company (C++ by Openismus, Java by Operation dynamics, and C# by Novell).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  5. Freeloaders = good by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion.

    'Freeloading' often has a negative meaning, but in open source land the opposite is true IMHO. Any additional user helps to improve the software just by using it:

    • Increased user base means increased market share, bringing open source software closer to the point where companies take Linux support more serious for their products, governments may take a 2nd look at their open source use & support for open standards, websites are checked more often in alternative (read: non-IE) browsers, etc, etc.
    • More users = more testers, more bug reports etc. This ultimately helps the software quality, if more bugs are found (& hopefully, fixed).
    • More users = (over time) more experienced users, that can help newcomers get started.

    So regardless of who deserves credits, that's many networks effects that benefit all users of such software, Gnome included. Freeriding on that is about as harmful as watching new years' fireworks without lighting any of your own - you still contribute to the party, just by being there. And in that sense, Canonical has done a lot to support Linux - by attracting & supporting many new users.

    1. Re:Freeloaders = good by noidentity · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This isn't even freeloading, because it doesn't put any load on a project to use a copy of its source code. This isn't something physical where it's limited.

  6. Canonical's code contribution by eddy_crim · · Score: 5, Informative

    Canonical's code contribution is irrelevant. What open source has always needed is some polish and some marketing. Thats what canonical provide, they polished and marketed (to an extent) a decent distro. OSS has never been short of decent code and quality software engineering. Canonical are providing a great link in the value chain of linux and as long as the basic prinicipals are upheld im all for it!

    --
    hmmm.
  7. I call bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except that as this report shows, Ubuntu has basically done jack shit to improve Linux usability.

    This report doesn't show that. There are lots of code. Combining all that code to a package that is somewhat nice, well configured and works out of the box is damn important. Even more important is the massive amount of documentatiton that the Ubuntu community has created about pretty much everything. It would take an idiot not to recognize the value of those things. But let's take an example.

    I have an extra computer in my house (but no extra monitors, etc.) and I decided to install it as a debian server. There was a slight complication, though: It is a bit noisy so I don't want to keep it in my bedroom and I also don't want to run cables all over the floors so I went to a shop to buy a wireless adapter. They are traditionally PITA on linux side so I went out to google for linux compatible devices first. I found an awesome list created by ubuntu community (didn't find anything comparable from anywhere else) and bought a device that worked out of the box on Ubuntu. I got home and tried to install it on Debian... Which I didn't succeed at. I found a guide, it had a number of broken driver links. Then I found more guides with more links. After an hour or so I was able to aquire the package... But I couldn't get past 'make'. Another hour trying to get past the problem for no avail. (for the record, I'm a sophomore year software engineering student going for bachelor's degree. And at some point I asked my roommate, sophomore going for CS degree in another university, for help). Then I gave up trying to do it that way, decided "Meh. I'll have to at least use stuff from Ubuntu repos anyway...", formatted debian, installed ubuntu and it all worked out of the box. As it always does with Ubuntu.

    I haven't had much experience with red hat lately but the work that Canonical is doing is obviously valuable.

    Essentially, Ubuntu is claiming that they've brought Linux to the desktop. Except they haven't. Red Hat has done more - 16 times as much, in fact - towards getting Linux on the desktop, but Canonical is taking all the credit for Red Hat's effort.

    You may say that "As Red Hat has been around longer and contributed constantly the whole time and done a lot of marketing, etc... Their overall contribution to Linux exceeds Canonical's by a wide margin" and I would completely agree with that. But if you say "Red hat has contributed 16 times as much code == red had has contributes 16 times as much to bringing linux to desktop", you are very, very wrong.

    1. Re:I call bullshit by icebraining · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My guess: you used stable Debian.

      Drivers usually come with the kernel, and Debian trades new drivers and other features for a stable environment. Ubuntu simply ships a more recent kernel, at the expense of less testing.

      Another option is simply using Debian Stable with a backported kernel. It's as easy to install as normal Debian, but comes with a more recent & less tested kernel.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    2. Re:I call bullshit by crush · · Score: 4, Interesting

      1. You're conflating Ubuntu and Canonical.

      2. Canonical is a large, private company which has been around since 2004. If we compare the contributions only since 2004 then Red Hat has still contributed more code than Canonical: to EVERY part of the Linux stack. More egregiously if we compare the large, well-funded Canonical to small start ups like Litl, Collabora and Fluendo even then Canonical fails to contribute as much.

      We've come a long way since our launch in 2004. We now have over 350 staff in more than 30 countries, and offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal and the Isle of Man.

      Everyone puts these Canonical freeloaders to shame.

      You would indeed be wrong if you merely said "Red Hat contributes 16 times as much code". That's ONLY what they contribute to GNOME specifically. They develop the kernel, most of the toolchain for compilation, vast parts of the network stack, fonts, ... basically bloody everything AND they do that by adhering to Free Software and SHARING EVERYTHING UPSTREAM where it's easy for any distro to benefit from their work.

    3. Re:I call bullshit by Pollardito · · Score: 3, Funny

      he should clarify whether he means freeasinbeerloaders or freeasinfreedomloaders

  8. Lines of code isn't the only thing that counts by mattbee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When it comes to bugs and usability problems, Ubuntu run a much sharper bug tracker - it usually has coverage of almost any minor GNOME issue. Between Canonical and their users, It might have taken many man-hours to track down, discuss and identify a small usability bug, which might only result in a fix of a few lines of code. It's not about turning the screw, it's knowing which screw to turn. So counting lines of code as the only contribution is completely unfair to Canonical.

    This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.

    --
    Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
    1. Re:Lines of code isn't the only thing that counts by Spewns · · Score: 3, Insightful

      None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches.

      They're users. Most simply don't have the know-how to do these things, and it's unreasonable to expect them to, especially in the "downloading code and submitting patches" department. You make it sound like a trivial thing for even hobbyist programmers to do, especially with the bloated, ad hoc codebases they'd probably be dealing with. And if you're hearing from them, they are talking to upstream. Upstream to Ubuntu users is the Ubuntu forums or Canonical.

  9. If you want to get paid.. by onion2k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you want to get paid for what you do then charge for it. I don't mean money necessarily. There are lots of ways of getting paid. But charge something.

    In this case the reciprocal amount of work people are demanding from Canonical is a form of payment. If you want to claim it's not "fair" that one company is doing more for a project than another you've got to set up the system to stop them, otherwise you have no grounds for your complaint. You can't set up a stall with a big sign saying "Free, please take what you want, no need to give anything back in return" and then moan when someone takes you up on your offer.

    --
    http://twitter.com/onion2k
  10. Check which modules get rejected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The reason why RedHat's piece of GNOME commits is so big is because they have been rejecting modules developed by competing companies. Novell made a push to get their start menu included in GNOME, it was rejected by the RedHat majority. Same thing with Compiz, a compositing window manager developed by David Reeveman of Novell, also rejected despite it being an almost complete drop in replacement for Metacity which is ancient RedHat technology. He also worked on bringing OpenGL into xorg and had a working prototype for how to do it. Also rejected because RedHat favored a different approach by writing AIGLX. The reason why Novell doesn't have a large stake in GNOME's codebase is certainly not for a lack of trying. There are dozen more modules that have been rejected over the years. What they all have in common is that RedHat employers aren't working on them.

    Then check what modules have had no problem getting included: PulseAudio, Clutter, DeviceKit, Cheese, gnome-user-share... All created by RedHat employers. Basically, when it comes to the core of GNOME's infrastructure, RedHat has been very effective in keeping outsiders out.

  11. 16 times? Strange metric... by mangu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Red Hat has done more - 16 times as much, in fact - towards getting Linux on the desktop

    That's assuming each line of code has the same value.

    For me the important point is with which system can I get a computer working quicker and with less effort for installation and maintenance. Ubuntu wins.

    OK, you may say that this only reflects the superiority of APT over RPM. Comparing Ubuntu with Debian, Ubuntu wins again.
     

    1. Re:16 times? Strange metric... by hdparm · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oh, FFS.

      Superiority of APT over RPM? Get a clue. You can compare APT and YUM and how well they manage whatever packages your distro of choice have.

      Fedora 13 installs everything I need for the laptop out of the box - wireless driver, mobile modem driver, even bloody compiz works on ATI mobility card without any additional requirements. YUM is rock solid for ages now. The only extra thing needed is rpmfusion repos to get proprietary codecs going.

  12. Open source by nxsty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Greg DeKoenigsberg, an ex-Red Hat employee wrote a blog post slamming Canonical for the "absolutely egregious" statistic and suggesting that Canonical has been "riding on Red Hat's coattails for years." Tough shit. This is open source, if you don't like others using your work you should develop proprietary software instead.

  13. What matters is end user convenience by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a user, I don't care in the slightest who committed more patches, or lines of code.

    What I do care about is how easy and convenient it is to use a particular distro. And there Ubuntu offers a lot. Try to play an MP3 file? Fail on Fedora out of the box; with Ubuntu, you get a dialog asking you if it's okay to download the codec - a single click, a brief wait, and it Just Works.

    Or take drivers. As soon as it boots, Ubuntu prompts me to let it install proprietary NVidia drivers. A single click, and I have a 3D enabled system which actually works and has performance decent enough for gaming. Fedora? Either join the bug hunt with noveau, or search for a 3rd-party repository providing what you want.

    Yeah, yeah, I know, Free Software is supposed to good for your karma, and friends don't let friends use proprietary crap. And Red Hat are your friends, right?..

    ... does anyone actually care?

    Well, I guess some people do, and those people stick to Fedora. Judging by the amount of users it has compared to Ubuntu (and other distros who don't shove "FOSS only" into their users' throats), it's not as popular as some people would like it to be.

    The linked blog post by an ex-RedHatter is dripping with venom over how Ubuntu "beats everyone at marketing", but totally misses the point. Ubuntu beats everyone at convenience and "just working" first and foremost; marketing is just icing on that cake. You want to make a principled stand over FOSS? Fine, but then don't complain when users flock elsewhere!