Contributor hunteke

Ubuntu needs to go green. Powertop, Lesswatts and other tools have finally hit the Linux scene to pave the way for better power management. It needs to be said, "if you want your battery to last longest, or have your energy bill be the lowest, you better use Ubuntu Linux."

The idea is to have a simple fund to which people could donate. The fund should be used exclusively to pay open source developers or documenters.[1] To get paid, the developers/documenters (henceforth just "developers") must develop and enhance open source projects against some sort of viable metric.

The projects to be tackled should be voted on by members of the charity. A member of the charity is one who is a member of the charity website. In this way, "mere mortals" could have a vote on what ideas developers are to work.

There should be no special disposition given to those who give money to the charity.[2] People could give money earmarked in one of two ways: directly payable to any developer for the charity, or to be used to build an endowment.[3]
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[1] Absolutely no one else should receive money from the charity fund. No administrator, no board member, no hosting provider, no one. Only developers.

[2] This is expected to weed out those trying to influence the charity through money, and to garner more (smaller) donations from a range of people

[3] The idea behind the endowment is to make the charity self-sustaining and growing. Thus, part of the proceeds should be reinvested into the endowment itself, and the rest should be dispersed to developers.

Let's first examine some facts...

Number of employees from Wikipedia:
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Canonical: 130
RedHat: 2200
Novell: 4100

While this is not necessarily 100% accurate of how many linux contributors each company employs, it provides a good hint.


I recently read an article here about kernel contribution:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
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RehHat: # changes 9,351 or 11.2%
Novell: # changes 7,385 or 8.9% (up from 3.6% last year)
The lowest number of changes by a company in that article was 285 and canonical didn't even make the list.

I understand that canonical is not a hardware company and as such may not contribute to add support for additional hardware, but it can still contribute. THis also is not isolated to the linux kernel.


Canonical employs only a couple of people to work on gnome. Most of the people are employed by Redhat/Novell. Similarly for KDE, this is likely Novell/Trolltech.

I imagine the situation is the same for core applications that are relied on by the average user.

[....]

It is important that Ubuntu is polished up to the little details.

LOOK AT THIS: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LittleDetails

The live CD is the first thing many people see when trying Ubuntu and it can be a turtle even on the best systems. This is hardly putting our best face forward.

The Live CD needs to be better optimized for responsiveness to make for a better user experience.

Addendum:

The constraints of a Live CD are hard to work with especially all the different hardware out there. I think with the Live CD less is more.
Most people that take it as a test drive are going to look through the menus for things that look familiar to what they know and try browsing the net. For the most part they are not going to be doing anything intensive. I think one option is reducing the memory footprint and services loaded. I'm sure there are other suggestions that you and the developers may have.