Re: On cadence and collaboration
Bernd Zeimetz <bernd@bzed.de> writes:
> As long as it is (partly?) based on the fact that bugs will be fixed by
> Debian for free so Ubuntu can just reuse the bugfixes and get the money
> for them, I think it should be discussed.
People keep saying things like this, but no one I know who's running
Ubuntu is paying for it. Clearly Canonical does have a business model and
is charging for some things, but are they making money off of *our bug
fixes*? That's not clear to me at all. Personally, I view Ubuntu users
as just a larger audience for the same packages I'm making for Debian. If
something specific to Ubuntu breaks a package, well, Ubuntu gets to keep
both pieces unless it's fairly obvious to me what's wrong. But insofar as
those users find problems that affect the package in general, it's just
more input to make it better for everyone.
(Also, separately, I came to terms with people making money off of my work
without necessarily giving anything back a long time ago. I think that's
just part of free software.)
> There is nothing bad in general with that as long as Ubuntu gives their
> bugfixes back to Debian and we don't have to retrieve them out of a mess
> of Ubuntu patches...
This can be a major problem for some packages, but I have to say, I think
that's way overstated for most things. For example, I've never had much
trouble extracting relevant fixes from Ubuntu patches for my packages.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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