I took the bus down to New York and any travelling for me seems to leave be dehydrated and haggard. No matter what kind of transport I just get in a bad mood about it. I think it’s all the bumping, noise and people around me.
Anyway, I’m here now so I can start to relax and enjoy the big apple again.
Here’s to DebConf!
I’ve been thinking about my time and how much I spend on actual project work.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I should not disregard the time I spend struggling or the time I spend relaxing enjoying some entertainment.
This seems to also be a facet of history in general. We hear about important points in history and important people, but are we really any good at knowing what was and wasn’t important? Doesn’t it seem more likely that all sorts of individuals did all sorts of small amazing things which we will never really know about or be able to appreciate.
There is a lot of enjoyment which is disregarded.
About Canonical’s contributions in the Gnome project…
Dylan McCall said:
This whole thing is really putting forwards an issue Gnome has right now: they can’t, as a community, decide whether they like the idea of external projects building new environments on the Gnome platform. (Case in point: Meego for netbooks).
I think there’s one camp that thinks Gnome should be a user-facing product, with its own special branding and its own distinctive look that everything ships in pristine condition. (I’ll inject my opinion in brackets here: I think that entirely defeats the purpose of having multiple distributions).
Then there’s another camp that sees Gnome as a starting point with lots of handy tools (and common modules) for distributions to build operating systems. For example, Unity, Meego, Jolicloud, UNR…
That first camp sees Gnome as a monolithic project; only internal work is worthy. The latter camp sees Gnome as something akin to Gnu.
Sorry for posting the whole thing, but I thought this comment needed to be made more widely.
I’m starting to get ready to go to DebConf in New York next week and I’m certainly excited to be given the opportunity to meet more of the Debian community. Because I don’t do much packaging I’ve not managed to get to know enough Debian people and I feel like projects such as http://art.debian.org/ are interesting and I would love to find others who are involved in similar things in that section of our extended community.
Anyone have any suggestions of what I should keep my eyes open for next week?
I wanted to play with brush lines and I was thinking back to a chat I had with my good friend David about Free Software and lack of User attachment to sticking with Free products when their only desire is practicality. This of course can make a very transient user base who will leave at the first sign of trouble.
Of course any time spent with a particular piece of machinery like software will develop an educational and brand familiarity attachment. I want to put those to one side because I believe they are useful over long time periods but not the short term.
Contributors (and if you reading this then your more than likely a contributor) are of course different, they’re invested in time, philosophically and socially and so are much more likely to stick it out and may actually know how to not only work around problems but we hope through training programs like UDW and UW that we can train people to know how to deal with problems in a more sustainable way. Treating bugs as problems for everyone and not just the individual.
Of course what the mainstream pattern looks like is different, they don’t have contributors or contributing developers, everyone is locked into working around problems. The key difference is that because users are customers, they’re invested in the product. They feel like they own it (even when they don’t) and feel like they ort to stick out problems so that they can get their money’s worth. Of course what do you do in both this and the above case when you have a major headache that you don’t know how to work around or even if you manage to work around? You complain like crazy on your blog, to your friends and to anyone that will hear your pain.
Your complaining is a direct reflection of your ties to a particular product, even to it’s defects.
In the most ideal case and one I was trying to make the case for a few days ago, we’d be able to either turn users into contributors or if that’s not possible then into paying customers that pay for real solutions and code patches, not just work-arounds.
The training that’s going on is a great start, but with better training materials in the community we could be making more contributors aware of the ability of solving problems more permanently and thus improve their input into progress (blogs showing you how to work around a problem are not progress in code terms).
Software isn’t perfect and we need to get lots of people with lots of energy (or money) to invest that energy into the community and to the community collaboration that so effectively benefits everyone. And in my mind the best way to get people quickly attached to FOSS and Ubuntu is to get them to invest into it sooner rather than later, then we have time to get people familiar with the brand and educate them.
Your thoughts?
Thanks to seven translators who were able to write po based translations and some new heavily artillery svg building scripts to manage it all, I’m pleased to blog about the French, Czech, Serbian and Thai language translations of the short “How to Ask Smart Questions” guide.
Update: Added German, Polish and Hebrew.
This should open it up to more readers. More translations are welcome, but only if you can edit po text file, if you’d like to learn then please do get in touch.
Translators get in touch!
Just having some fun.
I’ve you’ve ever struggled to get the support answers you need from the Ubuntu community, this guide may help you, it’s a pdf download, don’t forget to favourite if you can:
Revision 05, 2010-07-23: Download Directly
Yesterday I posted an entry about how I felt that commercial economics should be more widely employed in the FOSS world and that it’s our failure as a community to engaged appropriately with non-material-contributing users in such a way as to make our material contributions more economically sustainable.
Some took this to mean that I was a dangerous capitalist (ironic for those who know my as the dangerous socialist).
OK let’s make one thing clear, I do _not_ advocate for the sale of something that is already paid for. And by that I mean that someone else already put the money or time into making something FOSS and has graciously licensed it for download.
If you need to spend full time on a project to make it a success then you have no choice but to find a way to make money. My proposals so far have been more about promoting the idea of paying for the _creation_ of software than about the rather more impossible _distribution_ of software. To do that would be to make something artificially scarce.
There must be a way to see users in different lights, they are: users, potential contributors, potential inverters and a source of problems. If you can turn every Ubuntu user into a contributor then that’s great, it’s healthy for the ecosystem and it’s growth and I know it’s great for the education of the contributors. On the other hand if you don’t have time to contribute then the next best thing to invest is damned money. Paying for someone else’s time can get you that contribution and it can even be more meaningful since the people who your paying can be highly skilled and your simply saving them from a life of non-foss development.
I’ve not yet given up the hope that we _can_ find a way to have fair Free Software development that pays the bills and delivers freedom.
I was reading the comments on the interesting Mint blog about Mint testing a Debian derivative so they can take advantage of rolling releases and get away from Ubuntu’s instability. Some of the comments allude to a different sentiment:
Ubuntu is so commercially driven, whereas mint is such a nice community effort, I’d be so much happier to use mint.
– fred
Ubuntu started to annoy me a bit with all this commercially oriented development of the distro.
– Miro Hadzhiev
But above all I believe that Ubuntu will change direction and become increasingly turned to a more commercial aspect. At the same time they will lose the * community * Exchange.
– F.Dionne
My response to this anti-commercial sentiment is this quote:
You keep on using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Simply that users and members of the community are confused by what commercial actually means. Commercial is not against the community, the community is commercial, people are employed to work on Ubuntu, work with Ubuntu and to be a part of the community. A varied commercial community would actually be kinda nice, imagine if we had a Dell community manager, or a system76 guy in IRC who was chatting away to the rest of the community of users *and* business people. Take a look at Organisations Learning to contribute to FOSS the right way.
I don’t think *making money* is the real fear of these people, I think the fear is Canonical with their often over bearing unfair influence with Ubuntu that often seems like they are on one side inviting development of their features that they decide are cool and on the other side ignoring and diminishing the features that others who are not Canonical want to work on or would like Canonical to help with.
There is also a fear that Canonical will only really want to work on what makes Ubuntu attractive to OEMs and other large organisations that they have a commercial relationship with. I know that aint true and lots of Canonical people continue to work on things which are good for the whole platform, but sometimes Ubuntu’s certainly had the flavour of feature stuffing and Mark hasn’t helped with the way he words his posts about new features in the past makes it seem like they distrust users opinions.
My personal concern is the lack of commercial involvement of Ubuntu’s users, basically it goes like this: Canonical is a business and is interested in making enough money to pay it’s developers a wage. What they work on is based around what makes money. The money comes from Dell and HP. The developers work on what Dell and HP want. Users never get a direct say in the development of Ubuntu because A) They have no commercial relationship with Canonical and B) Canonical doesn’t co-operate wonderfully on DX with other programmers (commercial or non) preferring instead to announce features at the last minute and rail-road decisions and opinions of others.
OK I’m not on a rant against Canonical, both of these might actually be solved/able:
B) We’ve seen a turn around in Caonical’s DX team shenanigans, announcing Unity at UDS was a very good thing and shows leadership instead of authority. Hopefully the flavour of the team has shifted from assuming all users are idiots and need to be told what’s good for them, to something a little more progressive.
A) If the continued redesign of the Software Center can include the ability to pay for FOSS, then we can introduce the commercial relationship with Canonical _and_ App developers and provide a way for non-technical people to have an economic relationship and thus a say in the future development direction.
All signs point to common sense and progress, mistakes were made but I don’t see more on the horizon. So lets make sure Ubuntu isn’t considered “too commercial” let’s consider FOSS “not commercial enough”, because only through demanding the right commercial terms in our transactions can we make sure that developers get to eat and users get rights to the software they use and we’re not forced to accept traditional locked down software because we’re too eager to get free beer and not responsible enough to pay for Free Speech.
Your thoughts?
