Canonical Contributing Too Little to Kernel Development?

...to application development, packaging, distro management, and sales and marketing in commercial distros.

They need to change the license of the kernel to GPL+contribution.

@tuxchick That is about what I was thinking when I saw the headline too... Like the kernel is the only place people can contribute, or other areas of contribution don't matter... :-(

People love to bash Ubuntu because they are perceived as the most popular distro. Never mind that Red Hat is more successful financially or that Fedora claims to have as many users if not more.

What's funny is following the progression of these lame "stories". This one started eons ago when Greg K-H criticized Ubuntu's lack of kernel contributions. He was giving a talk somewheres and it was a minor comment in a large presenation. Naturally that got jumped on and amplified out of proportion. Then it went away. Now it has come back for no good reason, other than ignernt dunces get paid to write this crud.

I didn't see Mandriva or Xandros on the list either. Mandriva has an Enterprise Server edition. How come we hear no complaints about other desktop Linux companies not contributing to kernel development?

@caitlyn Yeah... it seems to be chic to hate the perceived leader, regardless of who it is or if there is any reason to the hatred. Not to say that there are no legitimate complaints against Ubuntu (nobody is perfect), but some of the bashing I've seen has been pretty silly.

I don't get it either. People love to bring this up and slam them for it yet never mention the fact that compared to Red Hat they have a tiny fraction of the amount of manpower, revenue and profits (if they even have any yet). They completely ignore the fact that Shuttleworth is trying to build a profitable business and not just donate his fortune to Linux.

> I didn't see Mandriva or Xandros on the list either.

And amazingly enough, I don't think Patrick Volkerding contributes to the kernel either. It's a conspiracy I tell you, a conspiracy.

Patrick Volkerding uses vanilla, unpatched kernels from kernel.org. I recall only one time that he patched a kernel for a serious bug, and that patch was already committed in the revision control. He just back-ported it to the latest non-rc release, to make it more stable.

> And amazingly enough, I don't think Patrick Volkerding contributes to the kernel either. It's a conspiracy I tell you, a conspiracy.

Nah he's just a slacker.

Update: The current kernel in Slackware-current (how redundant) is patched, to fix CVE-2009-2692, another offset-from-NULL dereference.

I'd be willing to bet that out of the 600 or so Linux distros out there the vast majority have contributed no kernel code, as in zero. Where are the complaints about them?

Considering how many at least moderately successful distros are now based on Patrick Volkerding's work I think it is pretty darned easy to see that he has made a major contribution to the Linux community. His "Linux System Commands" has been on my bookshelf for years and is still the best quick reference to the command line I've found. I may not like every little thing about Slackware but I have tremendous respect for Mr. Volkerding and the work he's done.

Quoting:Patrick Volkerding uses vanilla, unpatched kernels from kernel.org.

Nice headline: "Patrick Volkerding leeches!"