this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
81 points (93.5% liked)
Linux
48635 readers
1284 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Canonical's initial hiring strategy was "hey, you maintain Debian packages. Wanna get paid for that?"
They still employ quite a few Debian maintainers, and I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that Debian wouldn't be as good as it is today if Canonical weren't paying a bunch of people in part to do Debian develops. Their employee roll includes one of the developers of apt, amongst other people.
I'm also talking about people like this that almost never get recognition until something huge we all depend on becomes a huge problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
That's kind of a non sequitur. Canonical hires a lot of community members to maintain stuff for the community. They also have roughly 1000 employees according to Wikipedia. SUSE also depends on things like xz and has twice as many employees. Red Hat has 19,000 employees. Google depends on xz and has over 180,000 employees.
So if you're blaming Canonical for not hiring the maintainers of under recognised community projects that don't have corporate backing, then surely SUSE gets twice the blame, Red Hat gets 19 times the blame and Google gets 180 times the blame? (Not to mention Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, etc.)
Well...yeah?
And how do you quantify their reduced blame for hiring community members already? As I've already pointed out, Canonical has many Debian developers and maintainers on their payroll. While we're unlikely to ever get real numbers for it, if it turned out that Canonical had a bigger portion of their payrolls devoted to ensuring that community developers got paid than the other companies mentioned, wouldn't that say that they're even less to blame?