Linux kernel developer and Novell engineer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, recently lashed out at competitor Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, for not contributing enough to the Linux community.
Kroah-Hartman's remarks came during his keynote address at the recent Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference, which just kicked off this year, is designed to bring together developers working on Linux's, well, plumbing – the low level code that most of us take for granted.
The result of Kroah-Hartman's talk is a classic nerd fight of pathetic proportions. In one corner you have Kroah-Hartman's figures which, as Canonical points out, have been wrong in the past, and in the other corner is the now pissed off Ubuntu community, which argues that Ubuntu's popularity does more for Linux than all the kernel contributions in the world.
Like most nerd fights, both sides are right.
Kroah-Hartman's point is that Ubuntu has made very few contributions to the Linux kernel and is therefore not a good community citizen. And he's right, on the list of kernel contributors, Canonical ranks 79. The bulk of the work on the kernel comes from Red Hat, Novell and IBM.
If you'd like to see the actual figures, the slides from Kroah-Hartman's talk are available on his website and there's a – video of the actual talk on Google Video.
Interestingly enough, Canonical seems well aware of its lack of kernel work. In a response to Kroah-Hartman's talk, Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu's CTO, writes, "No one, certainly not Canonical, has ever claimed that Canonical does as much Linux development as Red Hat or Novell."
Zimmerman goes on to call Kroah-Hartman's talk "trolling."
I'm generally inclined to agree – even just glancing at the slides you'd be forgiven for wondering why Kroah-Hartman spends so much time on Canonical/Ubuntu. If Canonical isn't in the list of top contributors, why single it out in a talk about Linux's top contributors? The most obvious answer is: because it's a very popular distro and you're trolling for a fight.
Kroah-Hartman completely ignores the the huge contribution Canonical has made with Ubuntu, something that Novell, Red Hat and countless others failed to do for nearly twenty years – Ubuntu made the Linux desktop cool.
Scoff if you want, but Ubuntu represents a significant shift in the Linux ecosystem – Ubuntu is fundamentally a consumer of the Linux kernel, not a contributor. And there's nothing wrong with that. Nowhere in the GPL does it say that thou shalt contribute to the kernel.
As Zimmerman puts it, the kernel "is one of the building blocks we need in order to fulfill our primary mission, which is to provide an operating system that end users want to use." In other words, Ubuntu is made for people to use, not to help advance the design of the Linux kernel.
Is there a danger in that? Sure. For instance, the argument goes that, if every company distributing Linux moved to Canonical's model, Linux might suffer from a sudden drop in kernel contributions. But that's essentially the danger any open source project faces; if no one contributes, it doesn't progress.
Now, I'm not saying that Canonical's approach is completely mercenary – in fact CEO Mark Shuttleworth has already said the company is working hard to make a greater contribution to the community – but even if it were, there's nothing wrong with that. The only thing the GPL requires in that regard is that if you make changes to code then you contribute those back. For the most part Canonical uses the stock kernel, so there's no problem.
It might help to look at a similar situation, say, for example Mozilla and the Gecko rendering engine that powers Firefox. Generally you don't often hear Firefox developers complaining about Camino or Flock or Songbird developers not making enough contributions back to the core Gecko engine – despite the fact that most Gecko related projects don't make huge contributions.
If Kroah-Hartman is unhappy that Novell and Red Hat are doing the bulk of the work and Ubuntu is reaping the benefit, then he's missed one of the fundamental points of open source – the freedom to do whatever you want with the code, including nothing.
So while it may be a bit early, we're going to call a nerd fight winner: Canonical and the Ubuntu community, for contributing to Linux in less statistical but important ways – like creating an OS doesn't make us want to punch kittens every time we boot it up.
[via Computer World]
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