The open source community needs a federated but decentralized system for tracking bugs and patches, according to Mark Shuttleworth. Speaking in a keynote address at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Sunnyvale this week, the amateur astronaut and Ubuntu founder called for better collaboration among open source developers and companies.

Shuttleworth spoke of a “war of ideas” between open-source and proprietary software. The latter has more money, so the former had better leverage its primary advantage — collaboration — more effectively, Shuttleworth's talk suggested.

Shuttleworth said that currently, much duplicated effort exists between projects such as KDE and Gnome, and between commercial Linux vendors such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE. Problematic areas include getting translations into the hands of upstream developers, overlapping efforts to fix bugs, too much authentication required for bug tracking systems, and the lack of a standardized format for bug reports.

A synopsis of Shuttleworth's keynote can be found on Linux-Watch, here.

Shuttleworth was named to the Linux Foundation's board of directors in March, shortly after the Foundation was formed by the OSDL-FSG merger.

 
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