[clug] Has Ubuntu resulted in a decline of Linux distribution innovation

[Hal Ashburner]

David Schoen wrote:
> I would say more likely a decline in diversity rather than innovation
I'm guessing here as much as anyone, but I wouldn't say that at all. The 
rise of Ubuntu as a desktop distribution exactly coincides with red hat 
deciding it was no longer worthwhile to pay people to develop desktop 
software. A lot of our code has been written by people employed by the 
big distributions. Canonical and Ubuntu have proven you can have a big, 
unashamedly commercial distribution and have a policy of not paying for 
the development of code that is useful to the wider community. I don't 
know if Mr Shuttleworth still has this policy but it's fair to say that 
Canonical contributes very little indeed in comparison with Red Hat, 
Novell, Mandrivia, etc.
Be it desktop, server or kernel. Ubuntu fans seem to get very upset 
about people pointing this out
http://lwn.net/Articles/298864/
so maybe this will translate into it changing. We can but hope.
If you look at the innovative ideas in the Ubuntu distribution I 
strongly suspect the overwhelming majority of them will have been 
derived directly from the debian project.
Is the launchpad code still proprietary and secret code as this is 
canonical's "method for product differentiation?" Or has it all been 
released under a Free license so maybe debian could have their own 
launchpad? I haven't kept up with canonical at all but I do remember 
being surprised by the lack of criticism of them for taking this 
approach  when they decided to pay for some code to be written. James 
Henstridge is such a nice guy, insanely smart and has made such a 
terrific contribution to GNOME (libglade amongst other things) it would 
be a shame if his association with Canonical resulted in him no longer 
writing fantastic Free code.