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Cake day: January 29th, 2024

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  • And how do you quantify their reduced blame for hiring community members already? As I’ve already pointed out, Canonical has many Debian developers and maintainers on their payroll. While we’re unlikely to ever get real numbers for it, if it turned out that Canonical had a bigger portion of their payrolls devoted to ensuring that community developers got paid than the other companies mentioned, wouldn’t that say that they’re even less to blame?


  • That’s kind of a non sequitur. Canonical hires a lot of community members to maintain stuff for the community. They also have roughly 1000 employees according to Wikipedia. SUSE also depends on things like xz and has twice as many employees. Red Hat has 19,000 employees. Google depends on xz and has over 180,000 employees.

    So if you’re blaming Canonical for not hiring the maintainers of under recognised community projects that don’t have corporate backing, then surely SUSE gets twice the blame, Red Hat gets 19 times the blame and Google gets 180 times the blame? (Not to mention Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, etc.)


  • You said Snap is a similar but alternative to Flatpak, implying that it was developed in response to Flatpak, which simply isn’t the case.

    Snap predates Flatpak, and it’s clearly a big money maker for Canonical with their commercial customers who want things like confined but upgradable services in an airgapped environment. By the time Flatpak was making enough headway to be considered feasible to use, snaps were already pretty widely used and had several fairly big names like JetBrains, ROS and CircleCI publishing on snapcraft.io.

    Flatpak cannot and was never intended to do all the things snap can, such as setting up system services or distributing kernels. So even if the assertion that snaps for desktop apps were a response to Flatpak were true (it’s not), it doesn’t make sense for Canonical to stop developing snap regardless, as desktop apps are only a tiny part of what snaps do.


  • Canonical’s initial hiring strategy was “hey, you maintain Debian packages. Wanna get paid for that?”

    They still employ quite a few Debian maintainers, and I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to say that Debian wouldn’t be as good as it is today if Canonical weren’t paying a bunch of people in part to do Debian develops. Their employee roll includes one of the developers of apt, amongst other people.