Ubuntu and Upstreams

[Sean Wheller]

On Saturday 30 April 2005 07:03, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues wrote:
> 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.)
>
> 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;

From the documentation perspective it has always been my thinking that we need 
to focus on what is good for Ubuntu/Kubuntu. We cannot stop people from 
contributing to upstream projects nor should we attempt to discourage this. 
However, each time one of the team becomes involved in projects external to 
our core projects, effort is detracted.

My solution to this problem is to use vendor drops. Bring upstream docs that 
are of value to our core projects, to us. Have the team edits and enhance the 
vendor drop and push it upstream, while resusing the vendor drop in our core 
projects. In this way we need to give credit to upstream and our team.

> 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!

Don't be sorry, nobody on this list should feel scared are afraid to voice 
their opinion regardless of their proficiency in the English language. We 
value all input and ideas that have a clear focus and objective in mind and 
that can be backed by workable solutions. Of course if messages don't fall 
into these categories then we just shoot down the author :-)

-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
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