First GNOME Census Results 175
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."
Canonical's code contribution (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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Re:Canonical's code contribution (Score:3, Informative)
commits aren't sufficiently granular for comparing (Score:3, Informative)
You can commit on simple edits (like a ui typo change), or on adding a whole new chunk of code.
And, if you're busy, you might make both an edit and the addition in the same commit.
Is someone who makes five typo change commits doing five times the work of someone adding one with a new function?
I seriously doubt it.
no kidding. (Score:1, Informative)
When I'm trying to fix a general linux problem, I will often put Ubuntu in the google search terms list just because it is MUCH more likely that I will find the solution on an Ubuntu forum somewhere, even it the solution needs to be tweaked a bit for my specific case.
Re:Lines of code isn't the only thing that counts (Score:3, Informative)
I think a lot are pointing out which dishes suck. They may not be able to tell you exactly why and how, but if your target is the general public, that's useful info if you know how to sort it out properly.
> All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.
If the bug reports are distracting the workers then it's the fault of the organization.
The bug reports do not have to go straight to the developers. They can go to someone else first whose job is to figure out which are the top problems to be fixed - there are always bugs so you have to prioritize. Maybe someone could also figure out whether the problem is a bug that's best fixed in a module or one that's best fixed by changing the architecture in the future - too often if people are too busy fixing stuff at the tree level, they don't fix stuff at the forest level.
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Re:Lines of code isn't the only thing that counts (Score:2, Informative)
Really? Because all I've ever seen while browsing Ubuntu forums is someone posting a problem, followed by 12 pages of people going "me too!" and a few "so, does anyone know how to fix this yet?" It's the AOL of linux distributions. And its not like I haven't tried Ubuntu before. The problems that I've run into with it generally require me to step outside of the approved Ubuntu point-and-click way of doing things and edit config files by hand. Nothing is where it should be, and often my manual changes get over-written by GUI config bullshit. It's exasperating to say the least.
The majority of Ubuntu users that I've met in person fall into two camps: people who never should have been using Linux or Unix in the first place, and Rubyists. I don't have particularly charitable feelings towards Ubuntu or Canonical. The fact is, they aren't really contributing much of anything of value to the wider world, and their marketing is a detriment to society. I once had the misfortune of taking an over-flow support call while working at a web hosting company where the customer couldn't figure out how to use FTP to upload his website. Of course, I assumed he was using Windows. In the most heinous fucking southern, hvac-guy accent, he was like, "I don't use windows, I use that linux ubuntu." There used to be minimum standards of competency which were de-facto enforced. Back in the golden days. Before Twitter.
RedHat has been around for a long time, contributed a lot to various projects, and deserves credit. I don't typically have good things to say about any for-profit company, however I'm willing to trust RedHat fairly well. I've used their products in a production environment in the past and used to buy all the box releases they used to sell in stores for my Linux machine I ran along side a FreeBSD machine.
Re:Ironic ... (Score:3, Informative)
WTF?
RHEL has a workstation and server variant amongst the mirad of options, Redhat still provide alot of support to Fedora's efforts.
Re:16 times? Strange metric... (Score:3, Informative)
For me the important point is with which system can I get a computer working quicker and with less effort for installation and maintenance. Ubuntu wins.
Ubuntu wins for you. I suspect this is primarily related to your greater experience with Ubuntu. I, on the other hand, can set up a RHEL system much faster and with less effort for installation and maintenance than I can with Ubuntu. RHEL wins for me. Having done both, I can state objectively that there are fewer steps to get a working RHEL web server (for instance) than there are for Ubuntu.
you may say that this only reflects the superiority of APT over RPM
Well, compare apt to yum since those are more similar tools. Apt is faster, I'll grant you. Yum, on the other hand can install a local package and resolve dependencies from the repositories and it can install a package given the path of a file it provides. Apt cannot do those things, so I believe yum to be the superior tool.
Re:16 times? Strange metric... (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, FFS.
Superiority of APT over RPM? Get a clue. You can compare APT and YUM and how well they manage whatever packages your distro of choice have.
Fedora 13 installs everything I need for the laptop out of the box - wireless driver, mobile modem driver, even bloody compiz works on ATI mobility card without any additional requirements. YUM is rock solid for ages now. The only extra thing needed is rpmfusion repos to get proprietary codecs going.