"Ubuntu and Canonical's relationship poses an interesting
dichotomy. On the one side, is Ubuntu, a community-supported
distribution. In a briefing with us on Wednesday, Shuttleworth said
some 150 regular volunteer coders are involved with Ubuntu,
compared to the 20 full-time Canonical developers. On the other
hand, shifting to a long-term support framework means Canonical
must do some serious growing, since according to Shuttleworth, the
bulk of the support will necessarily be picked up by Canonical
itself.
"We will be very interested to see how this relationship is
maintained. As commercial vendors move into the enterprise arena
(Red Hat and SUSE come to mind), they have struggled to keep in
touch with their vibrant developer communities. (Though the
openSUSE Project seems to be faring better than the Fedora Project
in terms of community strength.)
