The Open Source Contributions of Six Blind Men and an Elephant

by Kristin Shoemaker - Sep. 23, 2008Comments (4) | Trackback URL

The Linux Plumbers Conference may have ended last Friday, but the discussions -- and one discussion in particular -- will be analyzed, deconstructed, and argued for quite a bit longer.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's assertion is that Canonical doesn't contribute significantly to kernel development and the packages that make up the core of a Linux system. Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman responded to this assertion. It seems at that point, much of the community, developers and users alike, took to examining their particular parts of the open source elephant.

Herein lies the problem.

Kroah-Hartman works on the kernel, the "Linux ecosystem." He was delivering an address at a conference geared to a particular audience -- people who work on the core of the Linux system. In this light, his arguments appear completely valid. He couldn't rightly comment on other areas of development, as they weren't in the scope of his experience, or the conference's focus. This is also well within reason.

Hackles were raised and legitimate points were perhaps initially missed due to the extreme focus on Canonical, at least during the slideshow part of the presentation (video and audio of the latter half of the keynote will be posted online as it becomes available, so it isn't possible to comment on the entire keynote). And if initially taken aback, Canonical's Zimmerman feels it was, in many ways, a productive experience.

The Linux community fights an uphill battle every day. It feels that much of that time, the community is fighting with itself. The elephant is like a rope. The elephant is like a wall. Linux is the kernel. Linux is the supporting applications.

To steal the words from the wise man in the elephant parable: "All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched a different part of the elephant."

If Kroah-Hartman's keynote was heavy-handed, and if Zimmerman's response was defensive is a moot point, now. Kroah-Hartman is clearly aware there is more to the Linux environment than the kernel, and Zimmerman is willing to look a bit closer at the core development contributions Canonical can offer.

Constructive criticism is difficult. It is difficult to deliver, and it is even harder to accept. We may not all contribute equally to the same aspects of a project, but there are no contributions without value. A kernel without applications to run, and an application without a kernel behind it is as pointless as declaring an elephant's tail a rope.


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4 Comments
 

Don't get it...

0 Votes

I get it.

The writer is trying to explain the row over the speech and compares the situation to the parable of six blind men and an elephant. In the parable, the six blind men are touching a different part of the elephant, so none of them have a complete mental picture of the elephant. The row in the community derives from the same kind of problem. The original speech addressed only kernel development, but other people thought it pertained to application development because they personally are involved in application development, not kernel development. Instead of listening to the speech in its context, they took it out of context. Hence, a fight resulted within the community.

In other words, it has all been a huge misunderstanding.

0 Votes

At last someone provided a easy to understand analogy. I was getting tiered of seeing people jump in defence of the company Canonical, all of them with the same kind of talk: Canonical build this system that is used by so many users. Well they did, but never contributed to the basic software layers that enable them to do so.

So in the blind man and elephant parable should be modified to say that the elephant is of clay and being constructed and perfected by all those that wish to do so. Canonical provided a good looking elephant, with some nice texture to it, but never worked on the legs that support the elephant (what I guess would be the kernel, X, compilers and base libraries).

I'm still happy that there is a Canonical to provide for the nice elephant, but it doesn't change the fact that there were no patches going upstream.

Things will probably change now (or so it seams). Great! So it was great that Greg did his presentation, and pointed to the big pink elephant on the sky. ;)

0 Votes

First of all, let me say I am surprised that a Novell employee would attack Canonical. As a Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developer who has been directly affected and threathened by Novell's deals, let me state openly that I take everything Novell says will heaps of salt. Has Canonical broken the GPL? No. Do they do enough in all facets of GNU/LInux ecosystem? I think so. Just the fact that they have managed to be the one coherent consumer friendly distro that gets marketing should be enough IMHO. But I know Canonical's stance (as well as that of my distro, Mandriva) and they have always done right in my book when it comes to doing what's right for the free software movement and the GPL which is more than I can say for Novell and for others. Im not an Ubuntu fanboi (although I did have Xubuntu running on my dad's 10 year old laptop) but it is one of the distros I trust to do the right thing. Could flyboy put more money down the drain? Sure but Im never going to be the one who tells people how to spend their money.

The last mile is the user experience. KDE with compiz eye candy is great but there is still the finishing touches that need to be worked on to make it a flawless experience so I think it makes perfect sense to put effort there. Take the 10 most used software and write down the 10 most common task they are used for. Make these 10 tasks as simple to use as possible. That's what you need. The iworks suite is a limited one and offers very little options but is usually fine for most mac users since most of them are NOT graphic artists like they all claim to be. They wont pay thousands for a real video editing suite since imovie does all they need. Same with garageband and so on.

Do something in Linux that is a smooth as the Piclens FF3 extension and uniformize it over the desktop.

Those are the things we should be looking at. If Ubuntu takes the lead on this and not on other facets. So be it. There is no right or wrong place to spend money. Although I think the whole X thing really needs work badly.

0 Votes
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