Upstream Values

I have a confession to make: I've pretty much made it a small goal in life to see Mark Shuttleworth get married. Or involved in a steady relationship.

I've reached this conclusion after meeting him a few times and thinking "he's such a nice young man, he should find a girl and settle down." Apparently, there's something about Mark that brings out my inner shadchen. That, and the fact that my wife keeps asking about him anytime I mention I've had a conversation with him. Hmmm...

So it was with mixed feelings that I read his blog today and learned that Canonical's about to make a big contribution to the Linux desktop community: while continuing their policy of integration and refinement, the makers of Ubuntu are also going to commit a team of developers to contribute to several upstream desktop projects: "OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE."

This is a very cool thing, because more participation from any distribution can give to upstream projects will make Linux overall that much stronger. Of all the precious resources a free or open source project can have, people are certainly the most important.

Mark sees the big challange in keeping the work of Canonical's upstream and release teams separate, to avoid any conflict of interest. I can certainly sympathize with that, but I wonder how much care really has to be taken. It seems to me that it's well within any contributor's rights to toss in code that will benefit his software down the line, as long as its not done to excess. If Canonical wants to update Desktop Gizmo A that benefits their other Desktop software, where is it written in the GPL or other open source licenses that that can't be done? After all, any change sent back upstream is going to immediately be shared with other downstream users (read: other distros), who can choose to take advantage of it or not. I would not care if this were Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, or Canonical.

Of course, these sorts of things should be done in moderation--any one who tries to completely stack the deck in their favor would certainly earn the ire of the development community. But it did surprise me that Mark felt he had to make a careful statement.

Regardless, it's still great news to hear.

And still, it is also bittersweet news... Mark is still working away at Canonical, still not settled down. Someday, I suppose...