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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."
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
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.