Distributions
Ubuntu debates governance models
On November 14, Jono Bacon posted a blog entry that suggested it was time for Ubuntu to rethink—or, in his words, reboot—its entire governance structure. Bacon, of course, served as Ubuntu's Community Manager for many years, and has a long history of front-seat experience with that structure. The current governance structure, he said, has remained virtually unchanged over Ubuntu's entire lifetime, and perhaps it no longer accurately reflects the way the distribution and community operate. Needless to say, not everyone was in full agreement with Bacon's assessment—though quite a few people have expressed an interest in thinking seriously about making changes.
Bacon's post began with an overview of Ubuntu's existing structures. There is a Community Council (CC) and a Technical Board (TB) that are responsible for handling community and technical policy, respectively. At the next level down the hierarchy, there are numerous sub-councils, which handle narrower task sets (such as IRC and web discussion forums), plus the various Local Community (LoCo) councils, the developer membership board, and so on. These sub-councils handle everything from outreach and communication to organizing the volunteers who work on development, testing, marketing, QA, and the other tasks that go into building the distribution. With the exception of the developer membership board (which reports to the TB), the sub-councils are delegated their roles by the CC. Board memberships are completely open to the community, he notes; Canonical does not appoint any of the seats.
The chief problem, Bacon said, is that over the years the various
governance bodies—particularly the CC—have started
spending the dominant portion of their time on administrative
matters like settling policy decisions and arbitrating conflicts. As
a result, they have become mostly "reactive
" in nature,
rather than proactively setting direction or leading the project by
inspiring volunteers.
Furthermore, the Ubuntu project has changed considerably over the years since these governance bodies were chartered, he said, now incorporating distinctly different realms—such as phone development and cloud-computing utilities like Juju, neither of which existed in Ubuntu's early days:
In years past, Bacon said, project leader Mark Shuttleworth
tended to fill the "inspirational leader
" role for
Ubuntu, but he has been less able to do so in recent years, since he
has spent more of his time on business matters.
The general approach Bacon proposed as a solution is to redefine
the CC, TB, and perhaps other governance bodies, so that they can
provide " The resulting
thread drew in a wide range of responses. CC member Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph agreed
that there is room for improvement on the inspiration front, but felt
that the work needed to improve matters was not in restructuring the councils. The CC, she said, is often occupied with " Joseph also commented that it can be hard for non-Canonical
contributors, even those on the CC, to feel like they have authority
to " Other list members flat-out disagreed with Bacon, however. Ian
Weisser, for example, said
that " Opinion was also divided on the question of whether the phone
and cloud projects are actually unwelcoming to non-Canonical
contributors. Alan Pope took
issue with the notion that Canonical "controlled" either to the
exclusion of community contributions. Whether any one individual
feels included or excluded, or course, will vary from person
to person. But the question of whether Canonical's interest in phone
and cloud development has a positive or negative impact on the
interest level of Ubuntu
volunteers in general remained a sticking point for several in the discussion.
Scott Kitterman said
that he has no interest in the phone and cloud efforts, so he
finds Ubuntu as a whole less interesting to participate in. But
Kitterman also contended that " Benjamin Kerensa, on the other hand, said
" The idea that Canonical's engineering efforts on its phone and
cloud products draw attention away from the traditional desktop and
server community was a recurring theme. But there was little
agreement on whether this drawing-away-of-attention is a matter of
perception (which could be counteracted with improved communication),
or is actually costing the distribution contributors (which would, of
course, require more serious countermeasures to correct).
In a separate
message, Kerensa expressed frustration that Bacon had raised the
question without offering a solution. Ultimately, several others
echoed that same sentiment: it seems that many of those involved feel
that the governance model for the distribution could be improved, but
what is lacking are concrete proposals to consider.
Stephen Michael
Kellat commented, though,
that the LoCo Council has been discussing making changes of its own.
Its proposed changes are not public as of yet, he said, but they will
be soon. The LoCo Council " As anyone who has observed the governance-model debates within
other Linux distributions (most recently in Fedora) will probably
recognize, though, such conversations almost always start with someone
posing the problem—and the solution tends to arise only after
lengthy discussion.
And Bacon's post has elicited responses in the form
of blog posts from other Ubuntu contributors, in addition to the
mailing list thread. Some, like Charles Profitt, make
further speculation on what a revised governance model might
involve. Others, like Kerensa, remain
convinced that the governance model is adequate, but there is
plenty of room for improvement on the question of how those in
charge—including Canonical—provide leadership and
inspiration to the community.
It may be too early to tell whether Ubuntu will revisit its formal
committees and councils in the near future, but it does seem that
there is growing interest in reexamining how the distribution
operates, with an eye toward improving the motivation level of the
community.
guidance and leadership
", rather than
"
paper-shuffling and administrivia.
" He did not,
however, make a formal proposal: he suggested that rechartering the
existing governance bodies would be the first step, then asked for
further input on the ubuntu-community-team
mailing list.
Discussion
boring and
administrative
" tasks, but those tasks are important ones.
Meanwhile, there are already other areas where project members can
provide leadership and inspiration—but those teams and projects
are less than successful because they are short on
people-power. Specifically, she cited the Ubuntu Global Jam, the various
LoCo councils, and several teams that, traditionally, are volunteer-driven:
Documentation, Translations, and Flavors. All could benefit from additional
support, but without renovating Ubuntu's governance structure.
make
bold, Mark-like statements
"—especially in the phone and
cloud projects, where contributions are dominated by Canonical employees. "Instead, many of us instead lead by
example, doing real work in the community that's visible (insert
gushing about elfy's amazing work with QA here) and encouraging others
to do the same in our spaces.
"
Jono's argument seems like normal frustration with a widely-dispersed
volunteer community: It's hard to collaborate and get things done, and
it's often thankless to try.
" Perhaps, he argued, the issues
that concern Bacon could be resolved by simply bringing different
questions to the CC.
governance has got nothing to do
with it. The
belief that governance is relevant is actually part of the problem. In a free
software project like Ubuntu, you don't need any governance body to empower
you, you need to do it yourself.
"
I do not think the governance boards or community at large is
given much opportunity or support to explore, experiment and try new
things
", adding that "
Canonical needs to rethink its
relationship with governance and the community and start empowering
both and making both stakeholders.
"
Conclusions and the lack thereof
will be trying to be more
active in coordinate social activities this cycle
", as well as
taking an active involvement in the next Ubuntu Global Jam, trying to
consolidate various social-media channels, and working on other
community involvement tasks.
Brief items
Distribution quotes of the week
Debian used to be a lot better at that than it is now. This seems to have less to do with the size of the project, and more to do with the project having aged, ossified, and become comfortable with increasing layers of complexity around how it makes decisions. To the point that I no longer feel I can understand the decision-making process at all ... or at least, that I'd rather be spending those scarce brain cycles on understanding something equally hard but more useful, like category theory.
FreeBSD Foundation Announces Generous Donation and Fundraising Milestone
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the receipt of a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. "We're now in the process of working together as a team to decide how best to use this gift to serve the FreeBSD community. That plan will combine financial investment, to ensure the effects of this donation are felt for many years to come, and an acceleration of the Foundation's growth into new capabilities and services." (Thanks to Martin Michlmayr)
CyanogenMod 11 M12
CyanogenMod has announced a new milestone release of the 11.0 "KitKat" branch. The announcement also looks forward to the 12.0 "Lollipop" branch. "No doubt the big news at the beginning of November was the release of the Android 5.0 Lollipop source code. AOSP began seeing the code on the 3rd, and completed the majority of the push on the 4th, with some remaining stragglers seeing code uploaded midday on the 12th. Work on CM12 began in earnest at the end of last week, and you can now successfully sync and build the work in progress against a handful of devices."
Live kernel patching for SUSE Enterprise Linux
SUSE has announced that it is now using kGraft to make live kernel patches available for its enterprise distribution. "Unlike some other Linux kernel live patching technologies, SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching doesn't require stopping the whole system while it performs the patching. And because it is a fully open source solution, it allows for easy code review of the patch sources. SUSE is engaging with the upstream community to help ensure a sustainable future for kernel live patching on Linux in general and SUSE Linux Enterprise specifically."
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
Results for the Debian init system coupling GR
The preliminary results have been announced for the Debian general resolution on init system coupling. The winning option was #4, the one saying that no general resolution is required in this situation. So there will be no change in Debian policy resulting from this vote.Colin Watson resigns from Debian Technical Committee
Colin Watson announced his resignation from the Debian Technical Committee before Russ. "I appreciate that the timing is such that this looks like a response to Joey's mails, or perhaps to some other recent discussions. That isn't the case. I've been doing a good deal of refactoring of my life recently as a result of realising that I was burning out, and right now it's important that I make an effort to spend my Debian time on things I find relaxing rather than things I've been finding stressful." (Thanks to Jeff Schroeder)
Russ Allbery leaves the Debian technical committee
Another resignation in the Debian camp: Russ Allbery has become the second member of the project's technical committee to leave that committee. "I think project governance is a hard problem, and a worthwhile problem, and I hope that someone with good ideas will step forward and work on that problem. Debian is one of the largest free software projects, and one that faces a large number of hard decisions. If we can do that work well, it would be a valuable contribution to the broader community. But, right now, I don't feel like I'm helping that process, and at times am making it worse."
Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer
Here are Tollef Fog Heen's comments following his resignation as one of the systemd maintainers in Debian. "I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence."
Today's Debian technical committee resignation: Ian Jackson
Ian Jackson has announced his immediate resignation from the Debian technical committee. "While it is important that the views of the 30-40% of the project who agree with me should continue to be represented on the TC, I myself am clearly too controversial a figure at this point to do so. I should step aside to try to reduce the extent to which conversations about the project's governance are personalised. And, speaking personally, I am exhausted." (Thanks to Mattias Mattsson).
Bits from Debian Med team
Andreas Tille provides some information from the Debian Med team. The upcoming release will include some support for Hospital Information Systems. The team was able to get some bioinformatics tools released with a DFSG free license so those packages are now in the main archive. Other topics include metapackages, autopkgtests, general quality assurance, updated team metrics, and more.Bits from the Debian Publicity Team
The publicity team presents a few bits on how to use Debian advertisement channels, such as Debian Project News, bits.debian.org, Developer News, and social media. As the Jessie release approaches, the team will be increasingly busy. Help is always appreciated and anyone can help out.Updating the list of Debian Trusted Organizations
Lucas Nussbaum has released an updated list of Debian Trusted Organizations. In particular, Debian.ch has been added to the list.Call for nominations for Debian technical committee seats
Three people have now resigned from the technical committee and the call for nominations has gone out. This announcement predates Ian Jackson's resignation, so it says there are two seats to be filled instead of three. "We anticipate starting our selection process on or about the first of December. After the selection, the committee will then recommend nominees to the project leader, who may appoint the nominees."
Fedora
Fedora Council Elections candidate interviews
Fedora Magazine has interviewed the candidates for the Fedora Council. There are five candidates for two open seats and voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The candidates are Rex Dieter, Haïkel Guémar, Michael Scherer, Pete Travis, and Langdon White.
Mageia Linux
Mageia 3 End Of Life
Mageia version 3 will reach its end of support on November 26, 2014. "Enjoy Mageia 4!"
Newsletters and articles of interest
Distribution newsletters
- Debian Project News (November 14)
- DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 585 (November 17)
- 5 things in Fedora this week (November 14)
- Gentoo Monthly Newsletter (October)
- Linux Mint Monthly News (October)
- Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 392 (November 16)
The Long and Winding Road (Mageia Blog)
Over on the Mageia Blog, Rémi Verschelde explains why the Mageia 5 Beta 1 took a month and a half longer than planned—but is now available. Upgrading to RPM 4.12 during the release process caused some problems, but there were other troubles along the way. "Still, while fixing our core tools during this first mass rebuild, some important changes were made to our RPM setup. As a consequence, half of the rebuilt packages (the ones built before our RPM setup changes) were lacking some important metadata. We then decided to do a second mass rebuild in October, which went quite fine apart from some issues with the Java stack. It was already late October when the first Beta 1 ISOs could be spun and delivered to the QA team for pre-release testing." Beta 2 has been pushed back to December 16, with a final release of Mageia 5 expected on January 31.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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