Re: Canonical's business model
On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 11:47:53AM -0200, Gustavo Franco wrote:
> On 1/11/06, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> > Of course people can do this, but this is so very much not the point. The
> > point is that publishing source packages on a website that people have to
> > poll is not "giving back to Debian", and AFAICT the majority of changes
> > Ubuntu makes to packages are only made available to Debian in this format.
> > This includes many changes in Ubuntu's universe section[1] which I think it's
> > bad strategy to be making externally to Debian in the first place if
> > they're serious about limiting divergence from Debian.
>
> I agree with the poll thing, but the 'giving back to Debian' applies
> when you think about things like xorg (David even wrote it), gksu
> (kov), pkg-ltsp, some other transitions and i'm sure that someone can
> came up with a better list than me.
Perhaps I was unclear in my previous post. What I said wasn't that
Canonical was going out of their way as a company to give back to Debian.
What I said was that Daniel and I established a personal and working
relationship that allowed us to bring the changes back in to Debian.
Fundamentally, I had to do the exact same thing for xorg as anyone else had
to do for patches to their packages. I downloaded the sources to the
breezy(?) packages, looked through each and every packaging file and
diff'ed it against our xfree86 packages, and applied what I wanted.
What Daniel did was be there for me to ask questions of, compare notes, and
occasionally offer fixes when he had the time. As far as I know this wasn't
any corporate decision by Canonical to give back to Debian, but it was a
personal decision by Daniel to help me (for which I'm immensely grateful).
The greatest strength of having Canonical on our side, from my POV, is that
it's a company full of people like Daniel, who are fundamentally Debian
people, and who are willing to work with you on this kind of personal
level. I don't really buy in to their whole "giving back to Debian" thing
(because they didn't really "give back" xorg, I had to take it after they
made it for themselves) but they do present a great opportunity for us to
establish these kinds of working relationships.
- David Nusinow
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