Yesterday I had a chat with Jono Bacon and Michael Hall from the Canonical Ubuntu Community Team. I first asked them why aren’t they doing at least one physical UDS per year, and they clearly seemed opposing my argument. Then I asked how about per post-LTS and such, and they still don’t see the need for it. Then I saw Pasi Lallinaho’s post about UDS and Canonical away from community, and I agreed.
The problem we have here is this:
Community finds it difficult to adopt
For example, we are now just near Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Feature Freeze, and now suddenly Canonical’s Technical Lead Rick Spencer wants to step in and say “let’s cancel it for good”. It clearly destroys all the original plans for 13.04, especially for flavours. For example, Ubuntu Studio originally has some plans made for 13.04. Now it’s even unsure would these not be released to the public on April this year.
Update: Jonathan Riddell saved it for good, but fhe future of 13.10 and 14.10 is unknown.
UDS destroys comunity friendship
Canonical is happy that they don’t need to sponsor anyone now, but then this really breaks the Ubuntu community, especially teams of flavours, which now doesn’t have much chance to meet each other……..
People are leaving
From Planet Ubuntu + Google+ at least 4 community members have left the Ubuntu community because of Canonical’s decisions. Most of them even gave up Ubuntu membership. Is this what we want? Canonical being “Big Brother” in the Ubuntu community?
Summary
Canonical has been annoucing decisions that threatens the Ubuntu community. I really hope that the relations can be repaired.
Leave comments if you wish:-)
guys – coldplay knew this may happen, here is their song-answer :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1horffGyO0
IMO, the distro known as Ubuntu is now a Canonical commercial product, even if it is mostly free and open source and there’s no charge for the base OS. To me, the community is not currently in a position to govern either the OS development or direction. Is there anyone on the Technical Board who is not a Canonical employee–even a single representative from the Community Council?
Closed door decisions and surprise announcements of major upheavals to the Ubuntu infrastructure simply should not happen with community governed FOSS. So, Ubuntu is not that in my mind. It’s a Canonical product.
Although I don’t care for Unity and prefer Gnome3 + extensions or, to a lesser degree, Cinnamon, I keep using Ubuntu because: (1) I am used to it, (2) nostalgia for using it since 2005, (3) I like many of the Ubuntu usability and polish changes from Debian. Now, I see fewer and fewer reasons not to simply switch to Siduction (Debian unstable rolling distro) or Debian itself. Sure, no PPAs, but I can recompile software not otherwise available for Debian if need be.
I’m still with Ubuntu, and don’t disagree with Canonical’s objectives. But, I think it’s gone too far for Canonical to continue with the ruse that they are helping along a community distro. The “community” is now nothing more than Ubuntu evangelists-in-training. Whither the power users?
3 of 7 members of the TB are not working for Canonical and Mark is listed as an administrator only, so AFAIK this would be more like 3 of 6. https://launchpad.net/~techboard/+members
For the CC it’s 4 out of 8, we started with 5 out of 8 though, Laura got hired. https://launchpad.net/~communitycouncil/+members
Thank you for the clarification.
It still seems to me that Ubuntu the OS is nowadays more like RHEL than Fedora, for example. The obvious way for Canonical to deal with Red Hat employees rejecting its rather weak attempts to contribute its already-completed work (v. collaborating on the design/architecture/engineering) upstream is to flood upstreams with contributors who are Canonical employees and–wait for it–collaborate cooperatively. With this, one’s tone is quite important. A sabdfl approach will not work, but that seems to be the Canonical way (moving from integration to leadership is another way of putting this).
I don’t fault Canonical employees: they have the jobs of a lifetime to work on something based on FOSS and get paid for it, not to mention that the result is extremely popular among GNU/Linux users. I don’t fault Canonical for its aspirations, either. But, it’s hard to feel welcome as a contributor to something that has major infrastructure massively altered in a very closed way that conflicts with the GNU/FOSS spirit and ideals. Copyleft, openness and freedom are very important to that crowd. Much less so or even not at all for the mobile/tablet app devs, so it seems Canonical found its natural partners for commercial exploitation. I think some of the “kerfufle” is because the GNU/FOSS-type community members are not willing to participate in exploitation like this, and also for the wasted effort concerns voiced by Elizabeth Krumbach. In addition to all this, there is a concurrent shift away from copyleft, so it seems that decades of work are falling by the wayside.
To clarify, I did not mean to say Canonical is not participating in copyleft, although Debian rejected the Ubuntu Font Family for that reason, as I understand it, and contributor agreements are a nuisance pill to swallow. Rather, I was referring to a trend in the larger open source software community.
Well considering one manager at Canonical already said that the reason UDS was really cancelled was that they didn’t see it as a worthwhile investment of their money eliminates Jono Bacon’s faux announcement about it being to expand access.
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