GNOME Wars! Red Hat Vs Ubuntu

Dave Neary, GNOME developer, has posted his GNOME Census which indicates where contributions to GNOME come from.

The “Census” is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. Apparently, the aim of the census project was to identify three particular areas.

What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like?

An interesting element of the census is the revelation that 70% of the GNOME developers are identified as “volunteers”. Whilst I’m sure that the definition of “volunteer” remains quite ambiguous, what cannot be ignored is the tension between Red Hat and Canonical.The census suggests that Red Hat have contributed 16% of the GNOME upstreams whilst Canonical have only offered 1%. As a result of the findings, there have been a number of interesting arguments.

Former Red Hat employee Greg DeKoenigsberg, has written a blog totally slamming Canonical’s contribution to GNOME, suggesting that they have been “riding on Red Hat’s coat tails for years”!

But as the guys from OMG!Ubuntu have pointed out, Canonical do a lot of work on improving GNOME downstream for Ubuntu, with projects such as the application indicators, notification system, Unity and the Me Menu; just to name a few.GNOME is very picky when it comes to accepting commits upstream into the core GNOME modules, for example, Seif Lotfy’s work on Zeitgeist was denied.

It’s also definitely worth reading the points of view from Ubuntu legend, Jono Bacon, who is happy to clarify with everyone, Canonical’s contribution to GNOME.

About these ads