[CoLoCo] suspicions confirmed

[Neal McBurnett]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 11:53:48PM -0700, David Overcash wrote:

> Actually, Shuttleworth has EVERYTHING to say about every decision in
> Canonical and for Ubuntu development.  He can over-rule the
> community council on any decision as well as direct development
> however he sees fit (mostly because he funds all development and
> official support).  He does, however, strongly value the open source
> community and chooses more often to yield to that group of
> programmers rather than simply be dictator.  : )

Sorry, but this is nonsense.  I have yet to hear of a meaningful case
in which Mark overruled any sort of community consensus.  It certainly
can happen, but it is rare.

Mark does not fund all development by ANY means.  Most development is
by upstream folks that have no direct connection with Ubuntu.  Next
comes Debian and Ubuntu volunteers, I bet.  Much is by Canonical
people who are paid partly by up-front money from Mark, but also by
income from their own support activities, even if Canonical is not yet
self-supporting.  Still more is by folks paid by other companies, like
Dell and HP etc.

I'm sure Mark doesn't even know about most decisions.  Ubuntu is a
very community-driven activity and I bet even Canonical is pretty
decentralized, like any business.

And as others have said, the KDE LTS situation is mostly dictated by
circumstances over which hardly any individual has much control.
And in this case it seems the consensus was for the path that was
taken, even by the KDE folks.

For my $0.02, it is much more fun to hack on bugs, support and
documentation than rehashing this silly stuff.

-Neal

> -David
> 
> On Jan 2, 2008 10:07 PM, TC <telecon at infosyndicate.net> wrote:
> 
>     Bah.  Big fat hairy deal.  I doubt Shuttlesworth had anything to say
>     about this decision.
> 
>     Collins Richey wrote:
>     > http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1920.html
>     >
>     > One of the least appealing things about Ubuntu (my $.02) is the
>     > delegation of Kubuntu to second class status, and the latest news just
>     > confirms what was obvious all along. Mark Shuttleworth made noises
>     > about supporting kde equally, but now he has reneged.
>     >
>     > At least I have a good alternative.