[Media] Shuttleworth urges Linux patch and bug collaboration

[NoOp]

Technically related, but I suspect that there will be threads on Sounder
later...

Linux-Watch:
<quote>
Shuttleworth urges Linux patch and bug collaboration
Jun. 14, 2007

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- When Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and CEO
of Canonical Ltd., spoke at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at
the Googleplex, he didn't talk about Ubuntu, patents, or hardware vendor
partnerships. Instead he devoted his keynote speech to the importance of
collaboration in fixing bugs and getting timely patches out to Linux users.

Shuttleworth opened by saying that today we are engaged in a conflict of
ideas. "It's not about Red Hat vs. Microsoft or open source fans vs. the
evil empire, any more than the Cold War was about the U.S. vs. the
Soviet Union. The conflict is really about ideas."

Open source has the power of collaboration, which in turn gives Linux
and other open-source programs far greater speed in innovation. On the
other hand, our "enemy has far more capital than we do. Our key
advantage is that we have the better innovation pipeline."

Now, Shuttleworth continued, "To glue our pipeline together, we need
tools. Collaboration is an easy term to say, but it's hard to do. We
often don't know who to talk to upstream, so the question is: how can we
make collaboration better?"

The problem today is that while projects can work well on mailing lists,
bug tracking software, wikis, and the like, "Most of these tools focus
on a project. For example, in a bug tracker for a project. We need to
talk about collaboration between projects. We need a way that developers
working on a tool in GNOME can talk to people in KDE working on a
similar tool."

In short, we need a better way to "leverage one another's work." As it
is, "this is where things fall down."

For example, Shuttleworth said, "Translations fail to move upstream.
It's not because of a lack of will, it's because there are no conveyor
belts so translators can send their translations upstream." The result?
The same screens, the same documentation, is translated over and over again.

That's a waste of time and expertise, but it's even more critical when
it comes to bugs. "Many people work on bugs in many distributions, but
they're the same bugs, being seen by different pairs of eyes. It's an
open-source saying that 'Many eyes make bugs shallow' but we should get
all the eyes together. It's the same thing with patches, Shuttleworth
continued. "We need to make it easier for developers, across projects,
across distributions, to work together."

Shuttleworth then said, "The distro patches need to go upstream faster
and they need to move across distributions. We should set it up so that
work in Fedora can move more quickly to openSUSE or Ubuntu."
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</quote>

Full article located at:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8470376604.html