downstream

[David Farning]

I just heard from John that it wasn't clear to him why we are going to
be receiving patches for Linspire.  Opps, my bad.

For the past couple of weeks while you guys have been cleaning up the fx
and tb code, I have been working on improving our relationships with
both our up and downstreams.

Currently, [Lin|Free]spire is a derivative of Debian.  Starting with
their next release they will be deriving from Ubuntu.

One of the problems that I see our team having (as well as being a open
problem in general) is our tendency to do our own thing.

When talking with upstreams, I have been getting pretty poor responses.
Mostly they are saying, "You guys are so fragmented, your market share
is so small that we can't be bothered by you."  As a result it is going
to be difficult to push patches and coordinate with their issue tracking
systems.

So, I started working downstream.  My basic idea is that the closer we
work with our downstreams, the more people we have doing QA and helping
improve our code.

Firefox and Thunderbird present a unique opportunity to start working
together.

1.  The trademarks Firefox and Thunderbird are important for marketing a
distro.
2.  To use the trademark, Mozilla requires all patches to be approved.
3.  Carrying a large patch set is really going to be a pain in the butt.
4.  Linspire is interested in pushing as many of their common patches to
us for approval and subsequent inclusion in either the Mozilla or our
code base.
5.  They will continue to work at having their distro specific patches
approved themselves.

I am also working with other downstream distros to get to this level of
collaboration with Fx/Tb.  I would like to create a happy and healthy
ecosystem where 'everyone' works to improve Ubuntu and in return the
disto they derive form Ubuntu improves:)

Once we have Mozillateam as a 'proof of concept.' I would like to extend
the collaboration to other packages and teams.

thanks
-- 
David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com>