Ubuntu and Upstreams

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues]

2005/4/29, Corey Burger <corey.burger at gmail.com>:
> "Ubuntu can help expose upstream projects to new users, give them
> credit for their work, and generally raise awareness of their efforts.
> While we should avoid confusing "racing car" branding overload, we
> should credit upstreams in our DOCUMENTATION  or user interfaces,
> documentation and websites - and let upstreams know we are doing it."
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> (I am not speaking negatively, I just want to know where we want to go
> with this.)

(I'm new to this list, so forgive my rude intervention in this discussion.)

It's a good thing that we are concerned with giving upstream projects
appropriate acknowlegdment. Good relationship with upstream projects
is vital for any free software OS distribution in 2 different but
important fields:

- Technical field: By trying to make all the relevant vendor patches
upstream, we are reducing the maintainance burden, since the mainline
code is being improved and the developers don't need to maintain large
sets of patches;

- Political field: Acknowledging your partners helps you build a good
image in the free software community. When you don't, you usually
loses credibility. Look at Linspire (former LindowsOS): They make an
overly agressive branding strategy [1], that produces many "branded
forks" of widely known software projects, like Mozilla (plus patches),
wich is called "Linspire internet suite inside their distribution.

That said, I don't think that this acknowledgement will take too much
space in the docs, since it can be done in a short yet elegant way.
This way everybody under the sun will be happy :)

Again, sorry for making this intervention. And I hope that i was clear
enough in my message, since english is not my native language and this
post will be read by many english technical writers (thinking about
this gives me creeps). Go easy on me!

Cheers

Lucas

[1] I want to make clear that I have nothing against Linspire, wich I
regard as a really good Operating System, with good developers and a
strong focus. They do some mistakes, tough and I'm just pointing this
for the sake of the current discussion.