A lot of new blog posts has come up on Planet Ubuntu yesterday. Here are my responses.
1. Charles Profitt’s “Freedom and Community” to respond against my previous post of “Some thoughts about Canonical and the community”
Of course Canonical doesn’t kill people. What I’m trying to say by denoting Canonical the “Big Brother” is that they are ignoring the community’s feelings. Or rather, they are sort of ignoring the “old community”‘s feelings. They just do whatever they want and don’t fully consider the different stakeholders (developers, testers, documentation writers, deriative people and all users) in the world of Ubuntu. Canonical is a commercial company I know, but then I’m now starting to worry about freedom in the Ubuntu world.
2. Jonathan Riddell’s post about “An Ubuntu community that is a community”
My main sponsor for KDE apps packaging, thank you for killing the whole Ubuntu community more.
I do not go against the project lead in normal circumstances, but both Lubuntu and Xubuntu people were alarmed. We should be more unified, not less.
3. Elizabeth Krumbach’s post about “On the Ubuntu community”
Elizabeth (or the Community Council) I don’t blame you at all. After all, it was Canonical who wants a new sort of community, so why would it tell the old community about their plans till absolutely necessary?
4. Philip Ballew’s post about “Confessions of a community member”
This is what I have been thinking about. I remembered playing with Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alphas 1 & 2 testing the whole night. It doesn’t feel worthwhile now, and this just makes me think I have wasted time for nothing.
5. Scott Lavender’s comment in response to Martin Owens’s “Ubuntu membership”
Our Ubuntu Studio project lead is correct. The community is still here, it’s just different.
6. Roland Taylor’s Google+ post
No what they want to run is
pbuilder-dist community delete
pbuilder-dist raring delete
pbuilder-dist rolling create
pbuilder-dist canonical-community.
Just my 2 cents.
To be fair, I think the rolling-release question is being handled in the right way: a proposal was published, and discussion about it is ongoing. Mark Shuttleworth’s recent post indicates that he’s not entirely sold on rolling releases, so it doesn’t seem like a decision that’s already been made. And a couple of months before the start of a release cycle is a good time to have this kind of discussion.
Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be communicated very clearly, and it came just between the online-UDS announcement and the Mir announcement, both of which were ready-made decisions handed down from Canonical. In particular, it would have gone down better if it had been clear from the start that 13.04 would still be released as planned (which now looks to be the case).
Not quite agree, however, a very interesting article.