Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Re: Canonical's bad decisions

[Lucy]

2009/6/18 MJ Ray <address@hidden>:
> Lucy <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
>> What people don't realise is that Canonical are a very small company,
>> much smaller than Red Hat or Suse so aren't able to commit as much
>> back to upstream projects.
>
> Canonical has "over 200 employees" according to their website.  I
> think that's on the top border of the current UK definition of a
> medium-sized enterprise (50-250 IIRC).

Compared with Red Hat's 3,000 employees and revenue of $401m in 2007
(pretty sure they saw a fair amount of growth last year too).
According to http://www.linkedin.com/companies/red-hat

> What people don't realise is that there are much smaller companies who
> spend over a third of their time committing back to upstream projects,
> but all this blind love for Canonical and their proprietary software
> business models increases the pressure on the rest of us to cut back
> on committing upstream because, after all, being a bit anti-social
> isn't hurting the famous Canonical's reputation much, is it?

I think this 'blind love' for Canonical is not as prevalent as you
might want to believe. They seem to be under very intense scrutiny and
get a lot of criticism from the FOSS community. I also wouldn't really
call them anti-social, they are trying to get the Ubuntu community to
contribute more upstream and I think they're not doing badly given
their size and inexperience.

FWIW, I think that software companies, particularly ones involved in
free software should be scrutinised by the community, but we shouldn't
lose sight of the facts either.