More than half of Windows machines are INFECTED with malware

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> Samuel Thurston, III wrote:
>> He misses "the desktop" because there is no such thing.
>
> That's just silly.  Of course there is "the desktop" as an abstract concept,
> just like "the OS".  And there are specific desktops.

But that's my point, you can't contribute to an abstract concept, and
since in his talk he was dealing with people from all kinds of
different distros supporting all kinds of different desktop
environments... people who work on "plumbing"... that's where the
discussion went.  You don't have a linux distro without the linux
kernel.

>  I didn't have a problem with you mentioning unproven facts,
> merely yelling it as something that must be taken at face value.

I get it.  Horse dead. Moving on...

> Why is it an issue that the proportion of desktops to servers is small?

In the context of Greg K-H's keynote, it's significant because that's
why the desktop isn't considered a broadly common part of the system,
or as he defined it "part of the plubming".  It isn't always
necessary, it certainly isn't consistent across distros, devices, etc.

>>
>> Is the desktop Canonical's focus?  the X.org contribution factor would
>> be relevant here... Canonical is almost non-existent in this space.  I
>> don't know how much contribution Canonical makes to the gnome project.
>
> I wouldn't know.  I just bridle at the argument that they don't contribute
> because they don't have kernel developers.  If you suggest to me that

Wait wait wait.  Not this again. My argument was that they don't
contribute to the kernel.  it's not called "Ubuntu Gnome 2.0 Desktop
and Associated Useful Applications" last time I checked.

> Canonical takes unfair advantage of the Ubuntu community to produce a
> product (which really strikes me as Hartman's target) I'd be willing to
> believe you have a point.  It seems to me that the ubuntu developer
> community contains very few paid Canonical employees.

I mostly agree here.  I'm not sure about "fair or unfair" in terms of
taking advantage because it doesn't appear that this relationship
stops the volunteers from working.

>> Kay Sievers was the udev maintainer the last time I checked, and I do
>> not believe Kay is a Canonical employee.
>
> I thought, Scott Remnant.  I could be wrong...

I haven't checked since early last year sometime so heck if I know.
Are we talking release maintainer or package maintainer?

>
>> However in the context of the discussion of "will Canonical eventually
>> turn evil like Google" this raises two issues: 1) Google is still
>> giving a lot to the community, and 2) Canonical isn't.
>
> See, I just don't buy that.  Canonical, who might not be giving _enough_ to
> the community, _created_ the Ubuntu community.

But see, Canonical, like Google, has a business model that is directly
connected to the well-being and vitality of the kernel, in addition to
all the other stuff that goes into the distro.  Canonical much more
so, I believe.

Now, I certainly appreciate the contribution that is Ubuntu.  But that
contribution is not a contribution to the same community that builds
the kernel, which Ubuntu needs to function, which Canonical needs to
make money.  See where I'm going with this?

> The key is, just because Ubuntu makes a change, doesn't mean that Debian, or
> any upstream is ever going to accept it.

I don't know if Greg K-H was counting submissions or merged packages.
But it's not as though they have to pass their patches through the
debian team... after all if they submit to kernel subsys maintainers
directly, and the patches are merged, they'll be in the tree the next
time round when the linux-source and linux-image maintainers from
Debian pull down the tree and build it.

Granted that there's no guarantee the subsys maintainers will take it
either, but it removes a potential hurdle.