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IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offeringIBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offeringPosted Dec 4, 2008 20:04 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)In reply to: IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering by cry_regarder Parent article: IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering
"""
One of the issues we faced (and still face) is Ubuntu fan boys posting on the fedora lists and causing developer distractions. """
I call "bullshit" on that. I keep a casual eye on fedora-devel-list and have not noticed what you claim. (fedora-list is already such a realm of chaos that I'm not sure that anyone would or could notice if it was problem there.)
One of the problems that Ubuntu advocates face are false claims like the one quoted above. An inordinate number of them (in my opinion) coming from the direction of the Fedora community.
Just to provide some context... I consider myself to be a member of both communities... CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu (roughly in that order) being the distros I rely upon to serve my customers' needs, and my own, too. I think that sometimes people here peg me as an "Ubuntu guy". And I do have an "Ubuntu hat" that I sometimes wear here. But my ties to the Red Hat world go back to 1997 and Red Hat 4.2, and are still strong today.
I just call 'em as I see 'em.
(Log in to post comments)
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 4, 2008 21:01 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Just for the record,
I do not encourage nor do I participate in the disruption of internal project channels or forums that are task oriented such as help forums or task oriented tools like bug trackers. Even if those discussions are being held in public, its not appropriate for me to wade into them. In-process discussions in bugtrackers or mailinglists or forums where I am not a stakeholder...I'm not going to walk into and poke people in the eye.
But I do encourage and participate in the discussion and debate of personal blog postings, press releases or another announcements which are disseminated to the press or otherwise intended to be seen by external individuals. Anything that makes its way to LWN is fair game. Anything that ends up on CNet or other laypress news sites that has a comment section is fair game. Anything which gets posted on a personal blog is fair game.
-jef
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 4, 2008 21:32 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
I do not encourage nor do I participate in the disruption of internal project channels or forums that are task oriented such as help forums or task oriented tools like bug trackers. """
Did someone make a claim on that either way?
"""
Please just call a spade a spade, Jef. You troll every Ubuntu related thread you see here. To the point that if you missed one I (and I expect others) would be concerned for your health and welfare. You might consider that behavior "advocacy". But it's bad advocacy. Meaning that people who might already agree with you might nod their heads. But people who don't happen to agree already just tune you out and your message is not heard. What does that accomplish? I guess you think that you are "exposing" Canonical or some such. But outside of that clique which already agrees with you, it's just bad advocacy for your cause. Bad advocacy for Fedora. And bad advocacy for Linux and FOSS. Others have called for a 'spaleta-filter'. I am opposed to this idea because I believe it is important to keep tabs on the damage you do. If your goal is to effectively persuade others to your cause, you are, in my opinion, going about it all wrong. You might want to pause in your crusade for long enough to think about that.
Steve Bergman
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 4, 2008 21:40 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'm pretty sure I don't troll the Ubuntu security update announcements in LWN....yet.
If you think this is bad then you aren't really watching the Fedora communication channels... I do far more damage to Fedora when I talk in the Fedora dedicated communication channels.
-jef
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 4, 2008 21:52 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
I'm pretty sure I don't troll the Ubuntu security update announcements in LWN....yet. """ No. But if you did, I suspect that I would be in favor or your being banned for some period. It would be *completely* improper behavior.
"""
What you say and do in Fedora-specific channels is your business and your responsibility. For a number of reasons, it would not be appropriate for me to show up to criticize.
-Steve Bergman
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 5, 2008 12:43 UTC (Fri) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link] But I do encourage and participate in the discussion and debate of personal blog postings, press releases or another announcements which are disseminated to the press or otherwise intended to be seen by external individuals. Anything that makes its way to LWN is fair game. Anything that ends up on CNet or other laypress news sites that has a comment section is fair game. Anything which gets posted on a personal blog is fair game. -jef Trolling like you are puts a bad reputation on RedHat/Fedora and linux in general. I hope your not employed by RH because that would be quite unprofessional of them to tolerate that behaviour. I've got quite a lot of respect for a lot of people at RedHat and my first introduction to linux was through RH4.2 , However in any future distribution choices for myself and products I work on, it can't help but be negatively affected by your trolling especially since you are a Fedora Board Member. The simple fact is that negative behaviour is it's only bad reward. It doesn't matter who started trolling first , or what somebody's intention is when trolling. I can understand there being some troublemakers in both communities but all you are doing is making it worse. What you are doing is making you look like a spoilt prat , furthermore it makes absolutely no sense to further divide the developers amongst distributions and not work together. When someone makes a mistake amongst the development community then you explain that to them , help them understand why they are wrong and how they made the mistake and then move on otherwise you alienate more people. Yes shuttleworth made a crucial mistake thinking that user numbers counted towards deciding the goals of open source projects. When it comes to open source projects , it's not about the users but about the contributors. If you want to change the direction of something then you work on that direction and contribute it. I'm sure some people are jealous of the users Ubuntu has gotten in it's short life. That is a short sighted , zero sum thinking. More users is a good thing , it can only result in more contributors to make the open source ecosystem better.
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 6, 2008 1:01 UTC (Sat) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link] Yes shuttleworth made a crucial mistake thinking that user numbers counted towards deciding the goals of open source projects.When/how did he do that?
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 6, 2008 1:29 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
This is why I like uses direct quotes as much as possible. I'm not sure I can find any actual Shuttleworth commentary which goes as far as to say that users numbers are more important than contributor numbers. I've certainly not going to suggest Shuttleworth said anything like that unless I can find an actual quote.
However, It's reasonable to assume that usage numbers do matter to Canonical's business plan...even if the majority of those users are paying for support contracts. Just enough of them need to. So more users should bring up the odds of getting enough paying customers. I do have issues with the numbers Canonical quotes with regard to the Ubuntu userbase, because they haven't explained how they get that number.
It's also reasonable to assume that usage numbers do matter to the larger ecosystem. Contributors come from somewhere, they don't grow on trees. If Canonical is expanding the linux userbase with Ubuntu then they are most likely indirectly helping to grow open source contributors.
Even if Canonical employees are doing a particularly bad job of being good upstream citizens (Dustin Kirkland excluded for his upstream ecryptfs work, which should show up next time there's a review of the linux plumbing contributions) the more important question is this. Is the culture Canonical created inside the Ubuntu community helping to turn users into contributors at a faster rate than other distributions?
If you are a Ubuntu user are you more or less likely to be an upstream contributor than if you are a Fedora user or a Foresight user or a Mint user or a Gentoo user? Has Canonical really created a way for people to get involved in the larger open source ecosystem or have they found a way to get people contributing to a Canonical controlled walled-garden?
Translations.... how is Canonical fairing there? Have they made it easier or harder for Ubuntu's community translators to contribute upstream compared to users in other distributions? Translations should be an absolute slam dunk if Canonical really was building a better way to contribute to the ecosystem. And yet, Ubuntu translator contributions into upstream projects are frustrated by the process flow that Canonical has created for the Ubuntu translation community.
-jef
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 7, 2008 1:19 UTC (Sun) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link] Firstly I want to say that this is a much better comment than one of your trolls. It's the sort of comment that others respect , sure it has a few tiny flaws and biases but then so do most comments.This is why I like uses direct quotes as much as possible. I'm not sure I can find any actual Shuttleworth commentary which goes as far as to say that users numbers are more important than contributor numbers. I've certainly not going to suggest Shuttleworth said anything like that unless I can find an actual quote. Your right Shuttleworth didn't say that, and more so that's not what I was saying above , furthermore I said he thought that users counted towards the direction of the project , now I'm only inferring his thoughts from his actions and I could be wrong. Understand I think that Shuttleworth's heart is in the right place. What I was talking about earlier was when Shuttleworth spoke of a direction for a group of large projects , where canonical wasn't a large contributor to them (or even a small one in some cases). That irked a lot of contributors. In the end it's the contributors who decide the direction of the project and if any company wants a project to go in a particular direction then they need to throw contributors at that direction. It's also reasonable to assume that usage numbers do matter to the larger ecosystem. Contributors come from somewhere, they don't grow on trees. If Canonical is expanding the linux userbase with Ubuntu then they are most likely indirectly helping to grow open source contributors. Yes they make a difference but only indirectly , contributors come from them and they make support demands on companies which focus contributors on that problem.the more important question is this. Is the culture Canonical created inside the Ubuntu community helping to turn users into contributors at a faster rate than other distributions? A bit biased Jef , now if Canonical/Ubuntu Community was helping to turn users into contributors at a slower rate we'd have a problem that the linux community should reflect on. If they are helping to turn users into contributors at a higher rate than we have something positive for the community to reflect on and for other distributions to learn from. If the rate is the same as other distributions then we simply have the status quo and there is no negative or positive implications. Translations should be an absolute slam dunk if Canonical really was building a better way to contribute to the ecosystem. And yet, Ubuntu translator contributions into upstream projects are frustrated by the process flow that Canonical has created for the Ubuntu translation community. When I've looked at launchpad and the associated process flow , I must say I haven't been impressed with it but then I haven't been impressed with the process flow in the overall linux ecosystem in general. I think that is one of the areas that can be improved for lots of projects. It's a tough problem in general though. Maybe something that better integrates wiki's+bug trackers + discussion{mailing lists,forums,newsgroups, perhaps even IRC}. In my experience hardware (specifically some input devices + 3G modems) can be a bit of a PITA to setup and then work out how to push the fixes upstream and even where to fix it.
"non-contributing" users do matter Posted Dec 7, 2008 4:51 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
quote:
now if Canonical/Ubuntu Community was helping to turn users into contributors at a slower rate we'd have a problem that the linux community should reflect on
I disagree with you
if Ubuntu is introducing twice as many people to linux and is converting half as many to contributers they are still just as good as other distros.
or if they are introducing people to linux who would never use the other distros, but only converting 1% of those people into contributers, it's still a net win for the number of contributers
this is completely ignoring other effects of "non-contributing" users
these include
not to mention reducing the amount of money going to microsoft and other proprietary-only vendors.
do you think that there is any chance at all that Adobe would have released a 64 bit flash for linux if the only people who used linux were people that contributed directly to opensource projects?
in other words, users do matter, even if they aren't "contributers".
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Dec 9, 2008 22:09 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
"What I was talking about earlier was when Shuttleworth spoke of a direction for a group of large projects , where canonical wasn't a large contributor to them (or even a small one in some cases). That irked a lot of contributors."
Its best to provide a reference to the exact quote so everyone reading gets a chance to read the original quotation which you are referring to in context with the personal editorializing. I'm pretty sure I know what you are referring to but its best not to assume. I try to do it as much citation as possible, but I fail to include it sometimes myself.
"A bit biased Jef , now if Canonical/Ubuntu Community was helping to turn users into contributors at a slower rate we'd have a problem that the linux community should reflect on."
I make no attempt to hide my bias, be afraid of anyone who attempts to claim they are unbiased. I do not yet work for Fox News so I still have the luxury of being biased, unfair and yes even unbalanced.
And I am in fact reflecting on this very problem. I think Canonical's approach to building a community distribution around a set of proprietary services that implement the processes of how that community is to work together shows a systemic and fundamental problem with Canonical's corporate view of how the open ecosystem is meant to work.
The fact that Shuttleworth can say that:
But then Canonical goes and builds the critical parts of the Ubuntu collaborative process, the mechanisms that grind the Ubuntu sausage, as a set of proprietary services...that is a problem. And it continues to be a problem. Even if Launchpad is opened by next November, and Canonical gives up on Launchpad's proprietary service model..its still not clear if Shuttleworth plans to take the concept of the proprietary service and wedge it deep into the linux desktop moving forward. In his vision of the "weblications" of the future, how important are open services? Will Canonical rig up new proprietary desktop services or will Canonical fully embrace the idea that the open development process is the better development process?
The Ubuntu DaD service should never had to need to exist as a separate service. Its a travesty of duplication of effort caused by Canonical's core corporate culture. The MoM service should have been an open codebase for the Ubuntu contributor community to extend if Canonical as a corporate entity really believed that that free software=better innovation.
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/DaDandMoM
That specific example is better now, as Canonical appears to have opened up the MoM codebase and DaD is going to be merged with it. But other areas are not. The services that the Ubuntu translators work with are still closed and are not open to the community to extend or adjust to better meet workflow needs. I bring it up DaD/MoM only to stress the point that I think Canonical's corporate culture has a systemic problem that goes beyond translation workflow.
Then there is also the fact that Canonical has put forward an Ubuntu code of conduct which talks about upstream collaboration as an important aspect of that code, but has largely failed to be a shining example of that collaboration is a problem. It's easy to say that Canonical is a small company and doesn't have the manpower to commit to upstream, that's a real easy excuse to use. But the reality is, they have come out and made a statement that to be a good community member you should value upstream collaboration. That is a value statement embedded in the Ubuntu code of conduct. Does Canonical as a corporate entity managing the Ubuntu community live up to the very expectations its set for that community? If they aren't a shining example of the collaboration ideals they would have their own community meet then you can't really expect that community to be better.
This "do as I say, not as I do" approach to open collaboration is a systemic problem to the Canonical corporate culture, which will only be reinforced and strengthened over time as traditional business pressures take hold as Canonical transitions from a cash-burn tolerant venture-capital mode into a profit-maintenance established business. These are corporate culture behaviors that Canonical must address to be better members of its own community as well as the larger ecosystem.
-jef
IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering Posted Apr 23, 2009 16:38 UTC (Thu) by kitterma (subscriber, #4448) [Link]
"That specific example is better now, as Canonical appears to have opened
up the MoM codebase and DaD is going to be merged with it. But other areas are not."
It's not ... is going to be .... It's done. DaD was shut down by the people
GPL code here:
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