[124001470010] |<title>Belgium was brilliant</title>
[124001470020] |A big thank-you to everyone who came along, or participated virtually.
[124001470030] |And to Benjamin, for the nicely packaged memories <img/>
[124001480010] |<title>Linaro: Accelerating Linux on ARM</title>
[124001480020] |At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture.
[124001480030] |There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different.
[124001480040] |I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks.
[124001480050] |That’s new.
[124001480060] |So I’m very excited at <a>today’s announcement of Linaro</a>, an initiative by the <a>ARM partner ecosystem</a> including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM.
[124001480070] |That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.
[124001480080] |The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented –multiple different ARM-based CPU’s from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them.
[124001480090] |Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there’s additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.
[124001480100] |Having played with a prototype ARM netbook, I was amazed at how cool it felt.
[124001480110] |Even though it was just a prototype it was super-thin, and ran completely cool.
[124001480120] |It felt like a radical leap forward for the state of the art in netbooks.
[124001480130] |So I’m a fan of fanless computing, and can’t wait to get one off the shelf <img/>
[124001480140] |For product developers, the big benefit from Linaro will be reduced time to market and increased choice of hardware.
[124001480150] |If you can develop your software for “linux on ARM”, rather than a specific CPU, you can choose the right hardware for your project later in the development cycle, and reduce the time required for enablement of that hardware.
[124001480160] |Consumer electronics product development cycles should drop significantly as a result.
[124001480170] |That means that all of us get better gadgets, sooner, and great software can spread faster through the ecosystem.
[124001480180] |Linaro is impressively open: www.linaro.org has details of open engineering summits, an open wiki, mailing lists etc.
[124001480190] |The teams behind the work are committed to upstreaming their output so it will appear in all the distributions, sooner or later.
[124001480200] |The images produced will all be royalty free.
[124001480210] |And we’re working closely with the Linaro team, so the cadence of the releases will be rigorous, with a six month cycle that enables Linaro to include all work that happens in Ubuntu in each release of Linaro.
[124001480220] |There isn’t a “whole new distribution”, because a lot of the work will happen upstream, and where bits are needed, they will be derived from Ubuntu and Debian, which is quite familiar to many developers.
[124001480230] |The nature of the work seems to break down into four different areas.
[124001480240] |First, there are teams focused on enabling specific new hardware from each of the participating vendors.
[124001480250] |Over time, we’ll see real convergence in the kernel used, with work like Grant Likely’s device tree forming the fabric by which differences can be accommodated in a unified kernel.
[124001480260] |As an aside, we think we can harness the same effort in Ubuntu on other architectures as well as ARM to solve many of the thorny problems in linux audio support. 
[124001480270] |Second, there are teams focused on the middleware which is common to all platforms: choosing APIs and ensuring that those are properly maintained and documented so that people can deliver any different user experience with best-of-breed open tools.
[124001480280] |Third, there are teams focused on advancing the state of the art.
[124001480290] |For example, these teams might accelerate the evolution of the compiler technology, or the graphics subsystem, or provide new APIs for multitouch gestures, or geolocation.
[124001480300] |That work benefits the entire ecosystem equally.
[124001480310] |And finally, there are teams aimed at providing out of the box “heads” for different user experiences.
[124001480320] |By “head” we mean a particular user experience, which might range from the minimalist (console, for developers) to the sophisticated (like KDE for a netbook).
[124001480330] |Over time, as more partners join, the set of supported “heads” will grow –ideally in future you’ll be able to bring up a Gnome head, or a KDE head, or a Chrome OS head, or an Android head, or a MeeGo head, trivially.
[124001480340] |We already have goot precedent for this in Ubuntu with support for KDE, Gnome, LXE and server heads, so everyone’s confident this will work well.
[124001480350] |The diversity in the Linux ecosystem is fantastic.
[124001480360] |In part, Linaro grows that diversity: there’s a new name that folks need to be aware of and think about.
[124001480370] |But importantly, Linaro also serves to simplify and unify pieces of the ecosystem that have historically been hard to bring together.
[124001480380] |If you know Ubuntu, then you’ll find Linaro instantly familiar: we’ll share repositories to a very large extent, so things that “just work” in Ubuntu will “just work” with Linaro too.
[124001490010] |<title>200 issues of Ubuntu Weekly News –wonderfully done!</title>
[124001490020] |Let’s celebrate this milestone in Ubuntu reporting for and by the community.
[124001490030] |<a>UWN</a> is my favourite way to keep up with waht’s going on across the full length and breadth of the community.
[124001490040] |If you want a single read per week to know what you are part of, this is it.
[124001490050] |And if you’re doing something cool, these are the guys to tell about it, they’ll tell the world.
[124001490060] |A big thank you from me to the team who makes it real every week.
[124001490070] |Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 200 for the week June 27 –July 3rd, 2010.
[124001490080] |The purpose of this newsletter is to let everyone know what is happening in all the different corners of the vast Ubuntu community.
[124001490090] |It’s a snapshot of the Ubuntu Community one week at a time.
[124001490100] |The first issue was unleashed June 4th, 2006, and a little over four (4) years and seven (7) releases later UWN and the Ubuntu Community continues to mature and grow together.
[124001490110] |The Ubuntu News Team, which includes both UWN and Fridge, continues to report what happens, effects, and relates to the the vast and ever growing Ubuntu community, including information from the different teams, LoCos, forums, mailing lists, IRC universe, and newsworthy press coverage and blogs.
[124001490120] |A very important and helpful contribution many LoCo Teams continue to do is spread the news by translating UWN.
[124001490130] |It has undoubtedly been a fun and rewarding experience for all involved!
[124001490140] |We would like to thank all our readers for your continued support and feedback and encourage you to keep sending the Ubuntu News Team your comments and corrections (yes, we do make mistakes!). 
[124001500010] |<title>Tribalism is the enemy within</title>
[124001500020] |Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”.
[124001500030] |It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.
[124001500040] |And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone’s “birth tribe” and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which linux distribution they love.
[124001500050] |There are a couple of hallmarks of tribal argument:
[124001500060] |<strong>1. “The other guys have never done anything useful”.</strong>
[124001500070] |Well, let’s think about that.
[124001500080] |All of us wake up every day, with very similar ambitions and goals.
[124001500090] |I’ve travelled the world and I’ve never met a single company, or country, or church, where *everybody* there did *nothing* useful.
[124001500100] |So if you see someone saying “Microsoft is totally evil”, that’s a big red flag for tribal thinking.
[124001500110] |It’s just like someone saying “All black people are [name your prejudice]“.
[124001500120] |It’s offensive nonsense, and you would be advised to distance yourself from it, even if it feels like it would be fun to wave that pitchfork for a while.
[124001500130] |<strong>2. “Evidence contrary to my views doesn’t count.”</strong>
[124001500140] |So, for example, when a woman makes it to the top of her game, “it’s because she slept her way there”.
[124001500150] |Offensive nonsense.
[124001500160] |And similarly, when you see someone saying “Canonical didn’t actually sponsor that work by that Canonical employee, that was done in their spare time”, you should realize that’s likely to be offensive nonsense too.
[124001500170] |Let’s be clear: <strong>tribalism makes you stupid</strong>.
[124001500180] |Just like it would be stupid not to hire someone super-smart and qualified because they’re purple, or because they are female, it would be stupid to refuse to hear and credit someone with great work just because they happen to be associated with another tribe.
[124001500190] |The very uncool thing about being a fanboy (or fangirl) of a project is that you’re openly declaring both a tribal affiliation and a willingness to reject the work of others just because they belong to a different tribe.
[124001500200] |One of the key values we hold in the Ubuntu project is that we expect everyone associated with Ubuntu to treat people with respect.
[124001500210] |It’s part of our code of conduct –it’s probably the reason we *pioneered* the use of codes of conduct in open source.
[124001500220] |I and others who founded Ubuntu have seen how easily open source projects descend into nasty, horrible and unproductive flamewars when you don’t exercise strong leadership away from tribal thinking.
[124001500230] |Now, bad things happen everywhere.
[124001500240] |They happen in Ubuntu –and because we have a huge community, they are perhaps more likely to happen there than anywhere else.
[124001500250] |If we want to avoid human nature’s worst consequences, we have to work actively against them.
[124001500260] |That’s why we have strong leadership structures, which hopefully put people who are proven NOT to be tribal in nature into positions of responsibility.
[124001500270] |It takes hard work and commitment, but I’m grateful for the incredible efforts of all the moderators and council members and leaders in LoCo teams across this huge and wonderful project, for the leadership they exercise in keeping us focused on doing really good work.
[124001500280] |It’s hard, but sometimes we have to critique people who are associated with Ubuntu, because they have been tribal.
[124001500290] |Hell, sometimes I and others have to critique ME for small-minded and tribal thinking.
[124001500300] |When someone who calls herself “an Ubuntu fan” stands up and slates the work of another distro we quietly reach out to that person and point out that it’s not the Ubuntu way of doing things.
[124001500310] |We don’t spot them all, but it’s a consistent practice within the Ubuntu leadership team: our values are more important than winning or losing any given debate.
[124001500320] |<h3>Do not be drawn into a tribal argument on Ubuntu’s behalf</h3>
[124001500330] |Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world.
[124001500340] |It’s sad.
[124001500350] |It’s not constructive.
[124001500360] |It’s ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn’t forget.
[124001500370] |It’s certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be.
[124001500380] |I would like to say this to everyone who feels associated with Ubuntu: <strong>hold fast to what you know to be true</strong>.
[124001500390] |You know your values.
[124001500400] |You know how hard you work.
[124001500410] |You know what an incredible difference your work has made.
[124001500420] |You know that you do it for a complex mix of love and money, some more the former, others the more latter, but fundamentally you are all part of Ubuntu because you think it’s the most profound and best way to spend your time.
[124001500430] |Be proud of that.
[124001500440] |There is no need to get into a playground squabble about your values, your ethics, your capabilities or your contribution.
[124001500450] |If you can do better, figure out how to do that, but do it because you are inspired by what makes Ubuntu wonderful: free software, delivered freely, in a way that demonstrates real care for the end user.
[124001500460] |Don’t do it because you feel intimidated or threatened or belittled.
[124001500470] |The Gregs are entitled to <a>their opinions</a>, and folks like <a>Jono</a> and <a>Dylan</a> have set an excellent example in how to rebut and move beyond them.
[124001500480] |I’ve been lucky to be part of many amazing things in life.
[124001500490] |Ubuntu is, far and away, the best of them.
[124001500500] |We can be proud of the way we are providing leadership: on how communities can be a central part of open source companies, on how communities can be organised and conduct themselves, on how the economics of free software can benefit more than just the winning distribution, on how a properly designed user experience combined with free software can beat the best proprietary interfaces any day.
[124001500510] |But remember: we do all of those things because we believe in them, not because we want to prove anybody else wrong.
[124001520010] |<title>Making room in the sound indicator</title>
[124001520020] |In Maverick we’re adding the new Ayatana indicator for sound, Conor Curran’s very classy implementation of MPT’s very classy spec.
[124001520030] |It’s a Category Indicator, like the messaging menu, so it allows apps to embed themselves into it in a standard and appropriate way.
[124001520040] |You can have multiple players represented there, and control them directly from the menu, without needing a custom AppIndicator or windows open for the player(s).
[124001520050] |The integration with Rhythmbox and, via the MPRIS dbus API, several other players is coming along steadily.
[124001520060] |One issue I’ve noticed is that the layout of the track and album art means we are almost always ellipsizing some of the track / album /artist data.
[124001520070] |I wondered whether it wouldn’t be reasonable to lay the metadata over the album art, if one used a drop shadow to ensure a more readable text:
[124001520080] |Here’s the current layout:
[124001520090] |Note the tight space for the track data, and hence the ellipsis
[124001520100] |And here’s a GIMPfication, showing:
[124001520110] |–the metadata right aligned, –allowed to flow over the album art –with a drop shadow to preserve contrast with the artwork
[124001520120] |Metadata stretched over the artwork, with a drop shadow
[124001520130] |And finally, I was a bit worried about the drop shadow over the non-art portion of the menu.
[124001520140] |It’s too different to anything else in the menu, so I cropped the shadows to limit them just to the area over the art:
[124001520150] |Drop shadow is only used on the artwork
[124001520160] |Clearly, this is only appropriate in the case where one has artwork.
[124001520170] |The metadata should stay left-aligned (and use the full width of the menu, something it doesn’t currently do) when there is no artwork.
[124001520180] |Thoughts?
[124001520190] |I’m off to bed.
[124001520200] |Jetlagged, back from Debconf (lovely to see everyone again, if briefly).
[124001530010] |<title>Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10</title>
[124001530020] |Multitouch is just as useful on a desktop as it is on a phone or tablet, so I’m delighted that the first cut of Canonical’s UTouch framework has landed in Maverick and will be there for its release on 10.10.10.
[124001530030] |You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the <a>Dell XT2</a> as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today.
[124001530040] |By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad.
[124001530050] |The design team has lead the way, <a>developing a “touch language”</a> which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere.
[124001530060] |Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated “sentences”.
[124001530070] |The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions.
[124001530080] |It’s not quite the difference between banging rocks together and conducting a symphony orchestra, but it feels like a good step in the right direction <img/>
[124001530090] |The new underlying code is published on Launchpad under the GPLv3 and LGPLv3, and of course there are quite a lot of modules for things like X and Gtk which may be under licenses preferred by those projects.
[124001530100] |There’s a PPA if you’re interested in tracking the cutting edge, or just branch / push/ merge on LP if you want to make it better.
[124001530110] |Details in the <a>official developer announcement</a>.
[124001530120] |The bits depend on Peter Hutterer’s recently published update to the X input protocols related to multi-touch, and add gesture processing and gesture event delivery.
[124001530130] |I’d like to thank Duncan McGreggor for his leadership of the team which implemented this design, and of course all the folks who have worked on it so far: Henrik Rydberg, Rafi Rubin, Chase Douglas, Stephen Webb at the heart of it, and many others who have expanded on their efforts.
[124001530140] |In Maverick, quite a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling.
[124001530150] |We’ll enhance Evince to show some of the richer interactions that developers might want to add to their apps.
[124001530160] |Window management will be gesture-enabled in Unity, so 10.10 Netbook Edition users with touch screens or multi-touch pads will have sophisticated window management at their fingertips.
[124001530170] |Install Unity on your desktop for a taste of it, just <em>apt-get install ubuntu-netbook</em> and choose the appropriate session at login.
[124001530180] |The roadmap beyond 10.10 will flesh out the app developer API and provide system services related to gesture processing and touch.
[124001530190] |It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps –browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback –for 11.04, but that depends on you!
[124001530200] |So if you are interested in this, let’s work up some branches <img/>Here’s the official <a>Canonical blog post</a>, too.
[124001540010] |<title>N-imal?</title>
[124001540020] |Oh yes, it’s that time of year again, when numerate pollsters make nasal proclamations about the naming of the next next version of Ubuntu.
[124001540030] |When gazers of balls crystal provide nifty suggestions for new new features and, of course, suitable nomenclature to match.
[124001540040] |What will it be?
[124001540050] |A Naiant Nailtail would make a fine coat of arms, but we’re not really in the business of arms.
[124001540060] |Most of our businesses have legs.
[124001540070] |Most, I say.
[124001540080] |We could hedge our bets and go with the Neutral Newt, but it’s placing bets and seeing them through that raises the game for the free software desktop, and now’s a time of great change and invention, not a time for fence-sitting.
[124001540090] |I’ve been procrastinating.
[124001540100] |The N-evitable nature of our cadence means that calls for something nicer than “Maverick+1″ are increasingly noticeable.
[124001540110] |Naively, I always assume that the answer will leap off the page.
[124001540120] |Instead, what leaps off the page is a gazillion permutations and combinations of nubile, naughty, naiad and nymph.
[124001540130] |Moving swiftly onward I linger on the possibilities of the Numbat.
[124001540140] |Nah.
[124001540150] |There’s no doubt Fourecks can be a rich source of inspiration, now’s not the time to celebrate Van Diemen’s Land, we’ve better plans for that.
[124001540160] |And speaking of Fourecks, the Nobby Noctule sounds like something dreamed up by Terry Pratchett, perhaps a fitting way to move beyond Adam’s 10.10.10, but it really is hard to sing the praises of a bat.
[124001540170] |Especially one with (k)nobs.
[124001540180] |As you can imagine, after a few weeks with a dictionary and colouring in book of animals, I could draw this out N-definitely.
[124001540190] |The problem is NP-complete, which I’m now reliably informed by the good folks at HP means it’s provably quite difficult and not something that can be delegated to chips of the non-quantum kind.
[124001540200] |My chips are most definitely non-quantum though my bugs, strangely, are.
[124001540210] |Where did that leave us?
[124001540220] |Well, let’s look at what we want to get done.
[124001540230] |We have this whole <a>design thing</a> in full flow, which is making Ubuntu sleeker and more stylish, as well as making it smoother for those who just want to get stuff done.
[124001540240] |We’ll make the N release the best-dressed ever.
[124001540250] |But classy covers don’t equate to good reads –we want style and substance to meet and get along famously.
[124001540260] |Once Maverick is out the door we’ll be turning our attention to making the most of the amazing capabilities of modern graphics hardware, both for outer beauty and for inner efficiency.
[124001540270] |There’s a lot more to GL than glitz and glamour, though we won’t say no to either.
[124001540280] |We’re also putting a lot of work into <a>chips and architectures</a> (admittedly, not yet of the quantum sort) that keep cool, and help keep the planet cool in the process.
[124001540290] |So it would be nice to have a codename which reflects that goodness.
[124001540300] |Some sort of mascot for a cool planet would do the trick.
[124001540310] |And so, we come swiftly to a conclusion: allow me to introduce the <strong>Natty Narwhal</strong>, our mascot for development work that we expect to deliver as Ubuntu 11.04.
[124001540320] |The Narwhal, as an Arctic (and somewhat endangered) animal, is a fitting reminder of the fact that we have only one spaceship that can host all of humanity (trust me, a Soyuz won’t do for the long haul to Alpha Centauri).
[124001540330] |And Ubuntu is all about bringing the generosity of all contributors in this functional commons of code to the widest possible audience, it’s about treating one another with respect, and it’s about being aware of the complexity and diversity of the ecosystems which feed us, clothe us and keep us healthy.
[124001540340] |Being a <strong>natty</strong> narwhal, of course, means we have some obligation to put our best foot forward.
[124001540350] |First impressions count, lasting impressions count more, so let’s make both and make them favourable.
[124001540360] |While it may not in fact get you a pony, the world of free software is the platform upon which the future is being built.
[124001540370] |So the Narwhal, as the closest thing to a real live unicorn, is an auspicious figurehead as we lay down the fabric from which dreams will be woven.
[124001540380] |Dreams of someone’s first PC, dreams of someone’s first million instances in the cloud: whatever your vision of the future, we hope the Natty Narwhal will have something to offer.
[124001540390] |Test your gems against that unicorn –some will be glass, others of value.
[124001540400] |Perhaps the unicorn will bring you Luck, perhaps a cure for poisons proprietary.
[124001540410] |One thing is certain: we’ll be building it together with thousands of the most generous, insightful, fun people on the planet –not only those in the Ubuntu community, but those who participate in the whole of the free software ecosystem, from a2jmidid to zzliplib, with Debian (happy Birthday!, now longer in the tooth, wiser, but as potent and principled as ever) a special partner.
[124001540420] |I’m looking forward to the ride, and the result!
[124001550010] |<title>10.10.10.10.10…..</title>
[124001550020] |Saw this URL fly by today… wow and thank you to the Ubuntu Ads guys <img/>
[124001550030] |So, who’s up for making Maverick Movies?
[124001550040] |It would be great to have a “10 best features in 10.10″ video collection for release.
[124001550050] |Unity’s awesome and then there are things to show off in OO.o, Gnome, Firefox…. giving credit where it’s due.
[124001550060] |I put together <a>https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMovies</a> as a starting place to aggregate content.
[124001550070] |Have subscribed, so if you update that page I’ll see it.
[124001550080] |If that goes nicely, we can beef the process up in the runup to release.
[124001560010] |<title>Open textbooks to the rescue</title>
[124001560020] |Mark Horner is a Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation.
[124001560030] |The model of the Foundation is unusual: we identify interesting change agents, like Mark, who are articulating powerful ideas that seem like the offer a hint of the future, and we fund them to work on those for a year.
[124001560040] |We also offer them an investment multiplier: if they put their personal money into a project, we multiply that by 10x or more, up to a maximum amount.
[124001560050] |In short, find good people, back them when they put skin in the game.
[124001560060] |Mark’s specialty is open content for education: figuring out how to produce textbooks collaboratively.
[124001560070] |He’s done amazing work in the past, independently, leading an initiative to produce free high school science textbooks, and has lead the acquisition of a full set of textbooks in SA and their publication under an open content licence by the Foundation.
[124001560080] |Today, he’s been presented with a really awesome opportunity: provide open content to all of SA, with full backing from the department of education.
[124001560090] |That’s a huge step forward, putting open content much more at the center of mainstream thinking.
[124001560100] |In part, this is precipitated by a crisis, the strike action that is affecting many public services like education in South Africa.
[124001560110] |But it’s nevertheless a valuable opportunity to show how open content can change the dynamic of the rigid world of education.
[124001560120] |He needs help, though, to make sure the current drafts of the Maths and Science textbooks are free of typos:
[124001560130] |I really need some extremely urgent help, I’ve been approached by national government to try to help make free educational resources available to support education during the current crisis!
[124001560140] |We have an opportunity to distribute free educational resources to all schools that cover:
[124001560150] |<li>Grade R – 9 for ALL learning areas in English and Afrikaans</li>
[124001560160] |<li>Grade 10 – 12 Mathematics</li>
[124001560170] |<li>Grade 10 – 12 Physical Science</li> 
[124001560180] |All that is required is another edit of the Free High School Science Texts before they will release them to all the schools in South Africa.
[124001560190] |We have ONE WEEK to complete this process and desperately need volunteers who have post-graduate degrees in Maths, Physics, Chemistry or related fields that can help out. 
[124001560200] |So, if you’re inclined, he has <a>details on how to help</a>.
[124001560210] |For the moment, looks like participation requires being present in Cape Town, but perhaps he has a solution for that too.
[124001570010] |<title>Daily dose of Scribus trunk</title>
[124001570020] |We’ll be using Scribus for much of the DTP internal to Canonical.
[124001570030] |Our templates etc will be published in Scribus, so folks who need to knock up a flyer or brochure have the pieces they need ready to hand.
[124001570040] |However, there’s a problem, in that the stable Scribus package is really quite old.
[124001570050] |The Scribus team is making good progress on the next version of Scribus, but I couldn’t find an easy way to test their trunk.
[124001570060] |So I thought to make a PPA with a daily build.
[124001570070] |Whenever I’m testing or evaluating a new app I like to check out trunk, just to get a feel for the pace of activity and quality of the work.
[124001570080] |A crisp, clean, stable trunk is a sign of good quality work, which will likely mean good quality elsewhere like documentation and project governance.
[124001570090] |Chaos on trunk means… chaos generally, as a rule.
[124001570100] |I wrote to Oleksander Moskalenko, one of the upstream developers and Debian maintainer of the Scribus packages, including a complete set of Ubuntu packages with pretty awesome documentation for how to get the newer versions for testing.
[124001570110] |He kindly offered to review the package and made some suggestions for things to look out for.
[124001570120] |And then I got lucky, mentioning that I wanted to do this on #kubuntu-devel, because Philip Muskovac turns out to be in the middle of a quest to do daily build PPA’s of most of KDE!
[124001570130] |We already had a <a>Bzr import of Scribus trunk</a> for some reason, so tip is easily accessible via LP and bzr.
[124001570140] |Philip knocked up a <a>package recipe combining trunk with a clean packaging branch</a> based on Oleksandr’s scribus-ng package.
[124001570150] |Et voila, LP is now doing all the work to deliver us a <a>nice dose of Scribus goodness</a> every day.
[124001570160] |So here’s an invitation to DTP-heads everywhere: if you’d like to see the very latest work of the Scribus team, just add that PPA to your sources and grab scribus-trunk:
[124001570170] |sudo apt-add-repository ppa:scribus/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install scribus-trunk 
[124001570180] |Generally, if the packaging branch is clean, a daily build is pretty stable, it might need a tweak now and then but that work is useful to the packager as an early warning on packaging changes needed for the next version, anyway.
[124001570190] |And it’s usually easier to fix something if you know exactly what changed to break it <img/>
[124001570200] |I’d like to thank Philip and Oleksandr for rocking the park, and the Scribus folks for a wonderful tool that will get wider use now within Canonical and, hopefully, elsewhere too.
[124001570210] |The Scribus trunk packages seem to work very well on Unity, the Qt/dbusmenu integration is tight in this newer version, so it’s very usable with the panel menu and launching it full-screen feels right on my laptop.
[124001570220] |I’m enjoying the extra detailed control that Scribus gives with the use of fonts over apps like OO.o and AbiWord, since I’m becoming a font nerd these days with all the work on Ubuntu.
[124001570230] |There is a flag day transition to be aware of, though, as newer Scribus files are not compatible with those of the stable scribus.
[124001570240] |Nevertheless, both this trunk build and the scribus-ng packages Oleksandr maintains seem pretty stable to me, so we’ll be using the newer format and holding our breath till the actual release.
[124001570250] |No pressure, team Scribus <img/>
[124001570260] |<strong>Update:</strong> Philip’s published Lucid packages as well!
[124001580010] |<title>Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption</title>
[124001580020] |Prompted in part by the critique of Canonical’s code contributions to the kernel and core GNOME infrastructure, I’ve been pondering whether or not I feel good about what I do every day, and how I do it.
[124001580030] |It’s important for me to feel that what I do is of service to others and makes the world a better place for it having been done.
[124001580040] |And in my case, that it’s a contribution commensurate with the good fortune I’ve had in life.
[124001580050] |Two notes defined for me what I feel I contribute, in this last month.
[124001580060] |One was a thank-you from New Zealand, from someone who is watching Ubuntu 10.04 make a real difference in their family’s life.
[124001580070] |For them it seems like a small miracle of human generosity that this entire, integrated, working environment exists and is cared for by thousands of people.
[124001580080] |The other was a support contract for tens of thousands of desktops running Ubuntu 10.04 in a company.
[124001580090] |Between those two, we have the twin pillars of the Ubuntu Project and Canonical: to bring all the extraordinary generosity of the free software community to the world at large, as a gift, free of charge, unencumbered and uncrippled, and to do so sustainably.
[124001580100] |The first story, from New Zealand, is about someone who is teaching their children to use computers from a young age, and who has observed how much more they get done with Ubuntu than with Windows, and how much more affordable it is to bring computing to all the kids in their community with Ubuntu.
[124001580110] |For them, the fact that Ubuntu brings them this whole world of free software in one neat package is extraordinary, a breakthrough, and something for which they are very grateful.
[124001580120] |It’s a story that I hope to see replicated a hundred million times.
[124001580130] |And it’s a story which brings credit and satisfaction not just to me, and not just to the people who make Ubuntu the focus of their love and energy, but to all of those who participate in free software at large.
[124001580140] |Ubuntu doesn’t deserve all the credit, it’s part of a big and complex ecosystem, but without it that delivery of free software just wouldn’t have the same reach and values.
[124001580150] |We all understand that the body of free software needs many organs, many cells, each of which has their own priorities and interests.
[124001580160] |The body can only exist thanks to all of them.
[124001580170] |We are one small part of the whole, it’s a privilege for us to take up the responsibilities that we do as a distribution.
[124001580180] |We have the responsibility of choosing a starting point for those who will begin their free software journey with Ubuntu, and we work hard to make sure that all of those pieces fit well together.
[124001580190] |Ubuntu, and the possibilities it creates, could not have come about without the extraordinary Linux community, which wouldn’t exist without the GNU community, and couldn’t have risen to prominence without the efforts of companies like IBM and Red Hat.
[124001580200] |And it would be a very different story if it weren’t for the Mozilla folks and Netscape before them, and GNOME and KDE, and Debian, and Google and everyone else who have exercised that stack in so many different ways, making it better along the way.
[124001580210] |There are tens of thousands of people who are not in any way shape or form associated with Ubuntu, who make this story real.
[124001580220] |Many of them have been working at it for more than a decade –it takes a long time to make an overnight success <img/>while Ubuntu has only been on the scene six years.
[124001580230] |So Ubuntu cannot be credited solely for the delight of its users.
[124001580240] |Nevertheless, the Ubuntu Project does bring something unique, special and important to free software: a total commitment to everyday users and use cases, the idea that free software should be “for everyone” both economically and in ease of use, and a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there.
[124001580250] |I feel that commitment is a gift back to the people who built every one of those packages.
[124001580260] |If we can bring free software to ten times the audience, we have amplified the value of your generosity by a factor of ten, we have made every hour spent fixing an issue or making something amazing, ten times as valuable.
[124001580270] |I’m very proud to be spending the time and energy on Ubuntu that I do.
[124001580280] |Yes, I could do many other things, but I can’t think of another course which would have the same impact on the world.
[124001580290] |I recognize that not everybody will feel the same way.
[124001580300] |Bringing their work to ten times the audience without contributing features might just feel like leeching, or increasing the flow of bug reports 10x.
[124001580310] |I suppose you could say that no matter how generous we are to downstream users, if upstream is only measuring code, then any generosity other than code won’t be registered.
[124001580320] |I don’t really know what to do about that –I didn’t found Ubuntu as a vehicle for getting lots of code written, that didn’t seem to me to be what the world needed.
[124001580330] |It needed a vehicle for getting it out there, that cares about delivering the code we already have in a state of high quality and reliability.
[124001580340] |Most of the pieces of the desktop were in place –and code was flowing in –it just wasn’t being delivered in a way that would take it beyond the server, or to the general public.
[124001580350] |The second email I can’t quote from, but it was essentially a contract for services from Canonical to help a company move more than 20,000 desktops from Windows to Ubuntu.
[124001580360] |There have been several engagements recently of a similar scale, the pace is accelerating as confidence in Ubuntu grows.
[124001580370] |While Linux has long proven itself a fine desktop for the inspired and self-motivated developer, there is a gap between that and the needs of large-scale organisations.
[124001580380] |There isn’t another company that I’m aware of which is definitively committed to the free software desktop, and so I’m very proud that Canonical is playing that role in the free software ecosystem.
[124001580390] |It would be sad for me if all the effort the free software community puts into desktop applications didn’t have a conduit to those users.
[124001580400] |There’s nothing proprietary or secret that goes into the desktops that Canonical supports inside large organisations.
[124001580410] |The true wonder for me is that the story from New Zealand, and the corporate story, both involve exactly the same code.
[124001580420] |That to me is the true promise of free software; when I have participated in open source projects myself, I’ve always been delighted that my work might serve my needs but then also be of use to as many other people as possible.
[124001580430] |Ubuntu is a small part of that huge ecosystem, but I feel proud that we have stepped up to tackle these challenges.
[124001580440] |Canonical takes a different approach to the other companies that work in Linux, not as an implicit criticism of the others, but simply because that’s the set of values we hold.
[124001580450] |Open source is strengthened by the fact that there are so many different companies pursuing so many different, important goals.
[124001580460] |In recent weeks it’s been suggested that Canonical’s efforts are self-directed and not of benefit to the broader open source community.
[124001580470] |That’s a stinging criticism because most of us feel completely the opposite, we’re motivated to do as much as we can to further the cause of free software to the benefit both of end-users and the community that makes it, and we’re convinced that building Ubuntu and working for Canonical are the best ways to achieve that end.
[124001580480] |It’s prompted a lot of discussion and consideration for each of us and for Canonical as a whole.
[124001580490] |And this post is a product of that consideration: a statement for myself of what I feel I contribute, and why I feel proud of the effort I put in every day.
[124001580500] |What do we do for free software?
[124001580510] |And what do I do myself?
[124001580520] |For a start, we deliver it.
[124001580530] |We reduce the friction and inertia that prevent people trying free software and deciding for themselves if they like it enough to immerse themselves in it.
[124001580540] |Hundreds of today’s free software developers, translators, designers, advocates got the opportunity to be part of our movement because it was easy for them to dip their toe in the water.
[124001580550] |And that’s not easy work.
[124001580560] |Consider the effort over many years to produce a simple installer for Linux like http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/08/massive-changes-coming-to-ubuntu-1010.html which is the culmination of huge amounts of work from many groups, but which simply would not have happened without Canonical and Ubuntu.
[124001580570] |There are thousands of people who are content to build free software for themselves, and that’s no crime.
[124001580580] |But the willingness to shape it into something that others will find, explore and delight in needs to be celebrated too.
[124001580590] |And that’s a value which is celebrated very highly in the Ubuntu community: if you read planet.ubuntu.com you’ll see a celebration of *people using free software*.
[124001580600] |As a community we are deeply satisfied to see people *using* it to solve problems in their lives.
[124001580610] |That’s more satisfying to us than stories about how we made it faster or added a feature.
[124001580620] |Of course we do bits of both, but this is a community that measures impact in the world rather than impact on the code.
[124001580630] |They are very generous with their time and expertise, with that as the reward.
[124001580640] |I’m proud of the fact that Ubuntu attracts people who are generous in their contributions: they feel their contributions are worth more if they are remixed by others, not less.
[124001580650] |So we celebrate Kubuntu and Xubuntu and Puppy and Linux Mint.
[124001580660] |They don’t ride on our coattails, they stand on our shoulders, just as we stand on the shoulders of giants.
[124001580670] |And that’s a good thing.
[124001580680] |Our work is more meaningful and more valuable because their work reaches users that ours alone could not.
[124001580690] |What else?
[124001580700] |We fix it, too.
[124001580710] |Consider the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut Papercuts project, born of the recognition that all the incredible technology and effort that goes into making something as complex as the Linux kernel is somehow diminished if the average user gets an incomprehensible result when they do something that should Just Work.
[124001580720] |Hundreds of Papercuts have been fixed, across many different applications, benefiting not just Ubuntu but also every other distribution that ships those applications.
[124001580730] |If you think that’s easy, consider the effort involved to triage and consider each of thousands of suggestions, coordinating a fix and the sharing of it.
[124001580740] |The tireless efforts of a large team have made an enormous difference.
[124001580750] |Consider this: saving millions of users one hour a week is a treasury of energy saved to do better things with free software.
[124001580760] |While the Canonical Design team played a leading role in setting up the Papercuts project, the real stars are people like http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/maverick-papercut-hunting-season-opens.html Vish and Sense who rally the broader papercuts team to make a difference.
[124001580770] |Every fix makes a difference, on the desktop http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/ubuntu-server-papercuts-project/ and the server.
[124001580780] |At a more personal level, a key thing I put energy into is leadership, governance and community structure.
[124001580790] |When we started Ubuntu, I spent a lot of time looking at different communities that existed at the time, and how they managed the inevitable tensions and differences of opinion that arise when you have lots of sharp people collaborating.
[124001580800] |We conceived the idea of a code of conduct that would ensure that our passions for the technology or the work never overwhelmed the primary goal of bringing diverse people together to collaborate on a common platform.
[124001580810] |I’m delighted that the idea has spread to other projects: we don’t want to hoard ideas or designs or concepts, that would be contrary to our very purpose.
[124001580820] |We setup a simple structure: a technical board and a community council.
[124001580830] |That approach is now common in many other projects too.
[124001580840] |As Ubuntu has grown, so that governance has evolved, there are now multiple leadership teams for groups like Kubuntu and the Forums and IRC, who provide counsel and guidance for teams of LoCo’s and moderators and ops and developers, who in turn strive for technical perfection and social agility as part of an enormous global community.
[124001580850] |That’s amazing.
[124001580860] |When people start participating in Ubuntu they are usually motivated as much by the desire to be part of a wonderful community as they are to fix a specific problem or ease a specific burden.
[124001580870] |Over time, some of those folks find that they have a gift for helping others be more productive, resolving differences of opinion, doing the work to organise a group so that much more can be achieved than any one individual could hope to do.
[124001580880] |Ubuntu’s governance structures create opportunities for those folks to shine: they provide the backbone and structure which makes this community able to scale and stay productive and happy.
[124001580890] |A project like Ubuntu needs constant care in order to defend its values.
[124001580900] |When you are tiny and you put up a flag saying “this is what we care about” you tend to attract only people who care about those things.
[124001580910] |When the project grows into something potent and visible, though, you tend to attract EVERYONE, because people want to be where the action is.
[124001580920] |And then the values can easily be watered down.
[124001580930] |So I continue to put energy into working with the Ubuntu community council, and the Canonical community team, both of which are profoundly insightful and hard-working which makes that part of my work a real pleasure.
[124001580940] |The Ubuntu community council take their responsibility as custodian of the projects community values very seriously indeed.
[124001580950] |The CC is largely composed of people who are not affiliated with Canonical, but who nevertheless believe that the Ubuntu project is important to free software as a whole.
[124001580960] |And the awesome Jono Bacon, the delightful Daniel Holbach, and unflappable Jorge Castro are professionals who understand how to make communities productive and happy places to work.
[124001580970] |Something as big as the Ubuntu community cannot be to the credit of me or any other individual, but I’m proud of the role I’ve played, and motivated to continue to play a role as needed.
[124001580980] |In more recent years I’ve come to focus more on championing the role of design in free software.
[124001580990] |I believe that open source produces the best quality software over time, but I think we need a lot more cogent conversations about the experiences we want to create for our users, whether it’s on the desktop, the netbook or the server.
[124001581000] |So I’ve put a lot of my leadership energy into encouraging various communities –both Ubuntu and upstream –to be welcoming of those who see software through the eyes of the new user rather than the experienced hacker.
[124001581010] |This is a sea change in the values of open source, and is not something I can hope to achieve alone, but I’m nevertheless proud to be a champion of that approach and glad that it’s steadily becoming accepted.
[124001581020] |There were designers working in free software before we made this push.
[124001581030] |I hope they feel that Canonical’s emphasis on the design-lead approach has made their lives easier, and the community at large more appreciative of their efforts and receptive to their ideas.
[124001581040] |But still, if you *really* care about design in free software, the Canonical design team is the place to be.
[124001581050] |I do some design work myself, and have participated most heavily in the detailed design of Unity, the interface for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10.
[124001581060] |That’s an evolution of the older UNR interface; most importantly, it’s a statement that Linux desktops don’t need to be stuck in the 90′s, we can and will attempt to build new and efficient ways of working with computers.
[124001581070] |I’ve been delighted with the speed at which some of Unity’s facilities have been adopted by hundreds of projects, their goal is to make using Linux easier and classier for everyone, so that pace of adoption is a measure of the speed at which we are reducing the friction for new users discovering a better way to use their PC’s.
[124001581080] |Design without implementation would leave us open to accusations of wanting others to do our work for us, so I’m proud also to lead a wonderful team that is doing the implementation of some of those key components.
[124001581090] |Things like dbusmenu have proven useful for bringing consistency to the interfaces of both GNOME and KDE applications running under Unity, and I very much hope they are adopted by other projects that need exactly the facilities they provide.
[124001581100] |I’d credit that engineering team with their focus on quality and testability and their desire to provide developers with clean API’s and good guidance on how best to use them.
[124001581110] |If you’ve used the full set of Indicators in 10.10 then you know how this quiet, persistent work that has engaged many different projects has transformed the panel into something crisp and efficient.
[124001581120] |Utouch is coming up for its first release, and will continue to evolve, so that Ubuntu and GNOME and KDE can have an easy road to multi-touch gesture interface goodness.
[124001581130] |Beyond my own personal time, I also support various projects through funding.
[124001581140] |Putting money into free software needs to meet a key test: could that money achieve a better outcome for more people if it were directed elsewhere?
[124001581150] |There are lots of ways to help people: $100,000 can put a lot of people through school, clothed and fed.
[124001581160] |So I really need to be confident that the money is having a real, measurable impact on people’s lives.
[124001581170] |The thank you notes I get every week for Ubuntu help sustain that confidence.
[124001581180] |More importantly, my own observation of the catalytic effect that Ubuntu has had on the broader open source ecosystem, in terms of new developers attracted, new platforms created, new businesses launched and new participants acknowledged, make me certain that the funding I provide is having a meaningful consequence.
[124001581190] |When Ubuntu was conceived, the Linux ecosystem was in a sense fully formed.
[124001581200] |We had a kernel.
[124001581210] |We had GNOME and KDE.
[124001581220] |We had X and libc and GCC and all the other familiar tools.
[124001581230] |Sure they had bugs and they had shortcomings and they had roadmaps to address them.
[124001581240] |But there was something missing: sometimes it got articulated as “marketing”, sometimes as “end-user focus”.
[124001581250] |I remember thinking “that’s what I could bring”.
[124001581260] |So Ubuntu, and Canonical, have quite explicitly NOT put effort into things which are obviously working quite well, instead, we’ve tried to focus on new ideas and new tools and new components.
[124001581270] |I see that as an invigorating contribution to the broader open source ecosystem, and I hear from many people that they perceive it the same way.
[124001581280] |Those who say “but Canonical doesn’t do X” may be right, but that misses all the things we do, which weren’t on the map beforehand.
[124001581290] |Of course, there’s little that we do exclusively, and little that we do that others couldn’t if they made that their mission, but I think the passion of the Ubuntu community, and the enthusiasm of its users, reflects the fact that there is something definitively new and distinctive about the project.
[124001581300] |That’s something to celebrate, something to be proud of, and something to motivate us to continue.
[124001581310] |Free software is bigger than any one project.
[124001581320] |It’s bigger than the Linux kernel, it’s bigger than GNU, it’s bigger than GNOME and KDE, it’s bigger than Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian.
[124001581330] |Each of those projects plays a role, but it is the whole which is really changing the world.
[124001581340] |So when we start to argue with one another from the perspective of any one slice of free software, we run the risk of missing the bigger picture.
[124001581350] |That’s a bit like an auto-immune disease, where the body starts to attack itself.
[124001581360] |By definition, someone else who is working hard all day long to bring free software to a wider audience is on the same side as me, compared to 99% of the rest of the world, if I want to think in terms of sides.
[124001581370] |I admire and respect everyone who puts energy into advancing the cause of free software, even if occasionally I might differ on the detail of how it can be done.
[124001590010] |<title>GMailWatcher for webmail lovers</title>
[124001590020] |Owais Lone wanted this mentioned on Planet Ubuntu, so I’m proxying for his <a>blog announcement</a> since he isn’t yet an Ubuntu Member:
[124001590030] |In case you don’t already know, GmailWatcher is a Gmail notifier specifically designed for the Ubuntu Operating System.
[124001590040] |It relies heavily on Ubuntu specific packages like MeMenu, Notifications, DesktopCouch but I’m planning a stock Gnome version also so that people on Fedora, Suse and other rocking distribution can use it too.
[124001590050] |Most notable features are:
[124001590060] |<li>Multiple Accounts</li>
[124001590070] |<li>Google Apps support</li>
[124001590080] |<li>Secure password storage using Gnome-Keyring support</li>
[124001590090] |<li>Themable unread emails page</li>
[124001590100] |<li>Preferences sync using U1</li> 
[124001590110] |Right now, my target is to make it stable/usable enough in time for Maverick.
[124001590120] |This post is essentially a call for user feedback.
[124001590130] |I would like to know what you don’t like about the way GmailWatcher works.
[124001590140] |Bugs, usability issues, appearance, anything that doesn’t count as a new feature. 
[124001600010] |<title>A kind invitation</title>
[124001600020] |Delighted to receive this today, and to proxy it through to Planets U and G:
[124001600030] |Dear Ubuntu Community Council members,
[124001600040] |on behalf of the openSUSE Board, I would like to extend this invitation to you and your community to join us at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany October 20-23, 2010.
[124001600050] |This year more than seventy talks and workshops explore the theme of ‘Collaboration Across Borders‘ in Free and Open Source software communities, administration and development.
[124001600060] |We believe that the program, which includes tracks about distributions, the free desktop and community, reaches across the borders between our projects and we would like to ask you to encourage your community to visit the conference so we get the chance to meet face to face, talk to and inspire each other.
[124001600070] |More information including the program and details about the event you can find in our announcement at http://bit.ly/oconf2010
[124001600080] |Thank you in advance and see you in October! <img/>
[124001600090] |Henne Vogelsang openSUSE Board Member 
[124001600100] |We’ll gladly sponsor a member of the Ubuntu community council to go, busy finding out if anyone can make it.
[124001600110] |I can’t, but appreciate the sentiment and the action and think it would be great if members of the Ubuntu community can take up the invitation.
[124001600120] |Regardless, best wishes for the conference!
[124001620010] |<title>10.10 10:10:10 –thank you and Happy Maverick Day!</title>
[124001620020] |I spent a lot of time observing our community, this release.
[124001620030] |For some reason I was curious to see how our teams work together, what the dynamic is, how they work and play together, how they celebrate and sadly, also how they mourn.
[124001620040] |So I spent a fair amount more time this cycle reading lists from various Ubuntu teams, reading minutes from governance meetings for our various councils, watching IRC channels without participating, just to get a finger on the pulse.
[124001620050] |Everywhere I looked I saw goodness: organised, motivated, cheerful and constructive conversations.
[124001620060] |Building a free OS involves an extraordinary diversity of skills, and what’s harder is that it requires merging the contributions from so many diverse disciplines and art forms.
[124001620070] |And yet, looking around the community, we seem to have found patterns for coordination and collaboration that buffer the natural gaps between all the different kinds of activities that go on.
[124001620080] |There are definitely things we can work on.
[124001620090] |We have to stay mindful of the fact that Ubuntu is primarily a reflection of what gets done in the broader open source ecosystem, and stay committed to transmitting their work effectively, in high quality (and high definition <img/>) to the Ubuntu audience.
[124001620100] |We have to remind those who are overly enthusiastic about Ubuntu that fanboyism isn’t cool, I saw a bit of “We rock you suck” that’s not appropriate.
[124001620110] |But I also saw folks stepping in and reminding those who cross the line that our values as a community are important, and the code of conduct most important of all.
[124001620120] |So I have a very big THANK YOU for everyone.
[124001620130] |This is our most valuable achievement: making Ubuntu a great place to get stuff done that has a positive impact on literally millions of people.
[124001620140] |Getting that right isn’t technical, but it’s hard and complex work.
[124001620150] |And that’s what makes the technical goodness flow.
[124001620160] |In particular, I’d like to thank those who have stepped into responsibilities as leaders in large and small portions of our Ubuntu universe.
[124001620170] |Whether it’s organising a weekly newsletter, coordinating the news team, arranging the venue for a release party, reviewing translations from new translators in your language, moderating IRC or reviewing hard decisions by IRC moderators, planning Kubuntu or leading MOTU’s, the people who take on the responsibility of leadership are critical to keeping Ubuntu calm, happy and productive.
[124001620180] |But I’d also like to say that what made me most proud was seeing folks who might not think of themselves as leaders, stepping up and showing leadership skills.
[124001620190] |There are countless occasions when something needs to be said, or something needs to get done, but where it would be easy to stay silent or let it slip, and I’m most proud of the fact that many of the acts of leadership and initiative I saw weren’t by designated or recognised leaders, they were just part of the way teams stayed cohesive and productive.
[124001620200] |I saw one stroppy individual calmly asked to reconsider their choice of words and pointed to the code of conduct by a newcomer to Ubuntu.
[124001620210] |I saw someone else step up and lead a meeting when the designated chairman couldn’t make it.
[124001620220] |That’s what makes me confident Ubuntu will continue to grow and stay sane as it grows.
[124001620230] |That’s the really daunting thing for me –as it gets bigger, it depends on a steady supply of considerate and thoughtful people who are passionate about helping do something amazing that they couldn’t do on their own.
[124001620240] |It’s already far bigger than one person or one company –so we’re entirely dependent on broader community commitment to the values that define the project.
[124001620250] |So, to everyone who participates, thank you and please feel empowered to show leadership whenever you think we could do better as a community.
[124001620260] |That’s what will keep us cohesive and positive.
[124001620270] |That’s what will make sure the effort everyone puts into it will reach the biggest possible audience.
[124001620280] |With that said, well done everyone on a tight but crisp post-LTS release.
[124001620290] |Maverick was a challenge, we wanted to realign the cycle slightly which compressed matters but hopefully gives us a more balanced April / October cadence going forward based on real data for real global holiday and weather patterns <img/>.
[124001620300] |There was an enormous amount of change embraced and also change deferred, wisely.
[124001620310] |You all did brilliantly.
[124001620320] |And so, ladies an gentlemen, I give you <a>Mr Robbie Williamson</a> and the <a>Maverick Release Announcement</a>.
[124001620330] |Grab your towel and let’s take the Meerkat out on a tour of the Galaxy <img/>
[124001640010] |<title>Linaro at work: porting, testing, and Android</title>
[124001640020] |Congratulations to Team Linaro on their first full release yesterday.
[124001640030] |For those not yet in the know, Linaro is a collaborative forum with dedicated engineers making sure that Linux rocks on ARM (and potentially other architectures).
[124001640040] |Staffed by a combination of Canonical and new Linaro engineers, together with secondees from the major ARM silicon vendors, it’s solving the problems of fragmentation in Linux across that ecosystem and reducing the time to market for ARM devices.
[124001640050] |Linaro uses the same cadence as Ubuntu and we’re able to collaborate on the selection, integration and debugging of key components like the kernel, toolchain, X.org (still <img/>), and hundreds of small-but-important libraries and tools in between.
[124001640060] |Team Linaro was @UDS and it was very cool to see the extent to which their sessions drew attendance from the wider Ubuntu community –I think there’s a growing interest in efficient computing across the Ubuntu landscape.
[124001640070] |The Linaro team is pleased to announce the release of Linaro 10.11.
[124001640080] |10.11 is the first public release that brings together the huge amount of engineering effort that has occurred within Linaro over the past 6 months.
[124001640090] |In addition to officially supporting the TI OMAP3 (Beagle Board and Beagle Board XM) and ARM Versatile Express platforms, the images have been tested and verified on a total of 7 different platforms including TI OMAP4 Panda Board, IGEPv2, Freescale iMX51 and ST-E U8500.
[124001640100] |The advances that have happened in this cycle are numerous but include a completely rebuilt archive using GCC 4.4.4 and the latest ARM optimised tool chain, the Linux kernel version 2.6.35, support for cross-compiling, a new hardware pack way of building images, 3D acceleration improvements, u-boot enhancements and initial device tree support, a new QA tracking structure, the list goes on.
[124001640110] |<h3>Android in the house</h3>
[124001640120] |The road ahead looks even more interesting.
[124001640130] |For the next cycle, the Linaro team is going to build an Android environment on the same kernel and toolchain that we collaborate on with Ubuntu.
[124001640140] |For folks building devices, picking a board that’s part of the Linaro process means you’ll be able to get either an Ubuntu-style or Android-style core environment up and running at Day 1, which should reduce time to market for everyone.
[124001640150] |If the Linaro team pulls this off, it will mean that Linaro provides an intersection point for the majority of the consumer electronics x86 and ARM ecosystem, regardless of the end OS. I’m sure over time we’ll find more groups that are interested in joining the process, and I see no reason why they couldn’t be accommodated in this cadence-driven model.
[124001640160] |<h3>More players, more diversity in services</h3>
[124001640170] |It was also good to see folks from Montavista and Mentor at Linaro@UDS this year.
[124001640180] |Whether the Linaro kernel and toolchain plug into their own distros, or they start to offer their services around the Linaro/Ubuntu/Android BSP’s, the result is a healthier ecosystem with fewer snags and gotchas for device makers.
[124001640190] |One group asked me explicitly if Linaro was a Canonical show, and I was glad to say it isn’t. Canonical can’t possibly do everything that embedded Linux needs done, but our competence in cadence and release management makes us good custodians of a public project, which is what we do with Ubuntu itself.
[124001640200] |Participation and collaboration are at the heart, and they benefit from being partnered with a commitment to delivery and deadlines.
[124001640210] |We can’t do everything in a single cycle, but we can provide a roadmap for things like kernel defragmentation, the device-tree work, enablement of an ever-increasing cross-section of the ARM ecosystem, and transitions between versions of GCC or Python or X or even Wayland.
[124001640220] |So Canonical makes a good anchor, but Linaro has room for lots of other service-providers.
[124001640230] |Having multiple companies participate in Linaro means that the products we’re all shipping get better, faster.
[124001640240] |<h3>Testing</h3>
[124001640250] |The Linaro team is also going to focus on repeatable, rigorous testing of the core platform in the next cycle.
[124001640260] |That harmonises nicely with our growing focus on quality in Ubuntu, and the need for better quality and testing in open source in general.
[124001640270] |I’m interested to see what tools and results the Linaro team can produce in the next six months.
[124001640280] |Open source *can* be bulletproof, but it can also degrade in quality if we don’t put the right processes in place upstream and downstream, so this is a very welcome initiative.
[124001650010] |<title>Qt apps on Ubuntu</title>
[124001650020] |As part of our planning for Natty+1, we’ll need to find some space on the CD for Qt libraries, and we will evaluate applications developed with Qt for inclusion on the CD and default install of Ubuntu.
[124001650030] |Ease of use, and effective integration, are key values in our user experience.
[124001650040] |We care that the applications we choose are harmonious with one another and the system as a whole.
[124001650050] |Historically, that has meant that we’ve given very strong preference to applications written using Gtk, because a certain amount of harmony comes by default from the use of the same developer toolkit.
[124001650060] |That said, with OpenOffice and Firefox having been there from the start, Gtk is clearly not an absolute requirement.
[124001650070] |What I’m arguing now is that <strong>it’s the values which are important, and the toolkit is only a means to that end</strong>.
[124001650080] |We should evaluate apps on the basis of how well they meet the requirement, not prejudice them on the basis of technical choices made by the developer.
[124001650090] |In evaluating an app for the Ubuntu default install, we should ask:
[124001650100] |* is it free software?
[124001650110] |* is it best-in-class?
[124001650120] |* does it integrate with the system settings and preferences?
[124001650130] |* does it integrate with other applications?
[124001650140] |* is it accessible to people who cannot use a mouse, or keyboard?
[124001650150] |* does it look and feel consistent with the rest of the system?
[124001650160] |Of course, the developer’s choice of Qt has no influence on the first two.
[124001650170] |Qt itself has been available under the GPL for a long time, and more recently became available under the LGPL.
[124001650180] |And there’s plenty of best-in-class software written with Qt, it’s a very capable toolkit.
[124001650190] |System settings and prefs, however, have long been a cause of friction between Qt and Gtk.
[124001650200] |Integration with system settings and preferences is critical to the sense of an application “belonging” on the system.
[124001650210] |It affects the ability to manage that application using the same tools one uses to manage all the other applications, and the sorts of settings-and-preference experience that users can have with the app.
[124001650220] |This has traditionally been a problem with Qt / KDE applications on Ubuntu, because Gtk apps all use a centrally-manageable preferences store, and KDE apps do things differently.
[124001650230] |To address this, Canonical is driving the development of dconf bindings for Qt, so that it is possible to write a Qt app that uses the same settings framework as everything else in Ubuntu.
[124001650240] |We’ve contracted with Ryan Lortie, who obviously knows dconf very well, and he’ll work with some folks at Canonical who have been using Qt for custom development work for customers.
[124001650250] |We’re confident the result will be natural for Qt developers, and a complete expression of dconf’s semantics and style.
[124001650260] |The Qt team have long worked well in the broader Ubuntu community –we have great Qt representation at UDS every six months, the Kubuntu team have deep experience and interest in Qt packaging and maintenance, there is lots of good technical exchange between Qt upstream and various parts of the Ubuntu community, including Canonical.
[124001650270] |For example, Qt folks are working to integrate uTouch.
[124001650280] |I’d draw a distinction between “Qt” and “KDE” in the obvious places.
[124001650290] |A KDE app doesn’t know anything about the dconf system configuration, and can’t easily integrate with the Ubuntu desktop as a result.
[124001650300] |So we’re not going to be proposing Amarok to replace Banshee any time soon!
[124001650310] |But I think it’s entirely plausible that dconf, once it has great Qt bindings, be considered by the KDE community.
[124001650320] |There are better people to lead that conversation if they want, so I’ll not push the idea further here <img/>.
[124001650330] |Nevertheless, should a KDE app learn to talk dconf in addition to the standard KDE mechanisms, which should be straightforward, it would be a candidate for the Ubuntu default install.
[124001650340] |The decision to be open to Qt is in no way a criticism of GNOME.
[124001650350] |It’s a celebration of free software’s diversity and complexity.
[124001650360] |Those values of ease of use and integration remain shared values with GNOME, and a great basis for collaboration with GNOME developers and project members.
[124001650370] |Perhaps GNOME itself will embrace Qt, perhaps not, but if it does then our willingness to blaze this trail would be a contribution in leadership.
[124001650380] |It’s much easier to make a vibrant ecosystem if you accept a certain amount of divergence from the canonical way, so to speak <img/>Our work on design is centered around GNOME, with settings and preferences the current focus as we move to GNOME 3.0 and gtk3.
[124001650390] |Of course, this is a perfect opportunity for those who would poke fun at that relationship to do so, but in my view what matters most is the solid relationship we have with people who actually write applications under the GNOME banner.
[124001650400] |We want to be the very best way to make the hard work of those free software developers *matter*, by which we mean, the best way to ensure it makes a real difference in millions of lives every day, and the best way to connect them to their users.
[124001650410] |To the good folks at Trolltech, now Nokia, who have made Qt a great toolkit –thank you.
[124001650420] |To developers who wish to use it and be part of the Ubuntu experience –welcome.
[124001670010] |<title>Mistakes made, lessons learned, a principle clarified and upheld</title>
[124001670020] |We made some mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share with the Banshee team.
[124001670030] |Thanks to everyone who helped make sure we were aware of ‘em <img/>
[124001670040] |Money is particularly contentious in a community that mixes volunteer and paid effort, we should have anticipated and been extra careful to have the difficult conversations that were inevitable up front and in public, at UDS, when we were talking about the possibility of Banshee being the default media player in Ubuntu.
[124001670050] |We didn’t, and I apologise for the consequential confusion and upset caused.
[124001670060] |The principles from which we derive our policy are straightforward:
[124001670070] |The bulk of the direct cost in creating the audience of Ubuntu users is carried by Canonical.
[124001670080] |There are many, many indirect costs and contributions that are carried by others, both inside the Ubuntu community and in other communities, without which Ubuntu would not be possible.
[124001670090] |But that doesn’t diminish the substantial investment made by Canonical in a product that is in turn made available free of charge to millions of users and developers.
[124001670100] |The business model which justifies this investment, and which we hope will ultimately sustain that effort for the desktop without dependence on me, is that fee-generating services which are optional for users provide revenue to Canonical.
[124001670110] |This enables us to make the desktop available in a high quality, fully maintained form, without any royalties or license fees.
[124001670120] |By contrast, every other commercial Linux desktop is a licensed product –you can’t legally use it for free, the terms for binaries are similar to those for Windows or the MacOS.
[124001670130] |They’re entitled to do it their way, we think it’s good in the world that we choose to do it our way too.
[124001670140] |We know that we need a healthy and vibrant ecosystem of application developers.
[124001670150] |We think services should work for them too, and we’re committed to sharing revenue with them.
[124001670160] |We want to be entirely aligned in our interests: better code means a better result for both of us, better revenue means more resources to do what we love even better.
[124001670170] |Our interests, and upstream interests, should be perfectly aligned in this.
[124001670180] |So we have consistently had the view that revenue we can attribute to a particular upstream should create a revenue share for that upstream.
[124001670190] |We support Mozilla in this way, for example.
[124001670200] |The numbers are not vast, but nor are they insubstantial, and while we are not obliged to do so, we do so happily.
[124001670210] |Those are the principles, the policy is straightforward: <strong>Canonical seeks to earn revenue from services delivered to Ubuntu, and we will share a portion of that revenue with relevant projects who help make that possible.</strong>
[124001670220] |Our interests, and those of the projects, should be aligned to the greatest extent possible.
[124001670230] |In engaging with Banshee leads at UDS, we should have been absolutely clear about our expectations and commitment.
[124001670240] |Apparently, we weren’t, and for that I apologise.
[124001670250] |There was certainly no conspiring or maliciousness, it apparently just never came up.
[124001670260] |But it was my expectation that we would share revenue with Banshee, I mentioned it briefly to someone closer to the conversation, but I failed to follow up until I heard rumours of a potential disagreement on the subject in recent days.
[124001670270] |We also made a mistake, I believe, as this blew up in private conversations, when a well-meaning person presented a choice to the Banshee developers, who then of course made a choice.
[124001670280] |But our position isn’t at all what was communicated.
[124001670290] |Our position is that we’ll deliver the best overall experience to users, we’ll derive services revenue from that, and we’ll share it with upstreams where we can attribute it efficiently.
[124001670300] |It wasn’t in the mandate of that person to offer a choice outside of that framework, but it was an honest mistake.
[124001670310] |So, every free software project out there should be confident of a few things:
[124001670320] |Canonical would like you to succeed, would like to make it as easy as possible for many, many users to adopt your software, and is willing to share the benefits of that with you.
[124001670330] |Whether your software is promoted as the default in Ubuntu, or simply neatly packaged for easy consumption, we’d like our interests to be well aligned.
[124001670340] |We have a bug tracker that helps us pass issues to you if they are reported in Ubuntu first, we have a revenue model which matches that with passing through a share of revenues, too.
[124001670350] |And that goes for any kind of revenue that we can attribute to your project; for example, if we offer a support service specially tailored to people using your code, you can reasonably expect to agree a revenue share of that with us.
[124001670360] |Canonical invests heavily in creating a big, addressable ecosystem that you can easily reach.
[124001670370] |That’s worth something.
[124001670380] |We also want a big, vibrant upstream community that innovates and makes its own investments.
[124001670390] |We know that contributions come both from volunteers and paid staff, and it’s good to be able to have a bit of both in the mix, for the sake of both the volunteers and the paid staff!
[124001670400] |Documenting this position is obviously a priority; we should have done so previously, but we just relied on internal precedent, which is a dumb idea when you’ve grown as quickly as we have in the past few years.
[124001670410] |So we’ll do that.
[124001670420] |As for the revenue share we’ve offered the Banshee team, I would love to see them use that to make Banshee even better.
[124001670430] |That’s what it should be for.
[124001670440] |Don’t be shy, don’t be nervous of taking the money and using it for your own project.
[124001670450] |Canonical has already provided much more in the way of funding to the Gnome Foundation than this is likely to, through initiatives like the bugzilla.gnome.org work that we funded, and many other forms of support.
[124001670460] |I think money generated by an app should go towards making that app rock even harder.
[124001670470] |But the offer stands for Banshee devs to take up if they’d like, and use as they’d like.
[124001670480] |If they don’t want it, we’ll put it to good use.
[124001670490] |This certainly won’t be the last word on the subject.
[124001670500] |I expect these situations to become more common, not less.
[124001670510] |But I think that represents a great opportunity to see sustained investment in desktop free software, which we have been sorely lacking.
[124001670520] |I think our model gives projects a nice, clear roadmap: build awesome stuff, partner with Canonical and be confident you will share in the success of Ubuntu.
[124001670530] |This is the model which catalysed the founding of Ubuntu, seven years ago, this is what we’re here to do: make free software available freely, in the best quality, to the widest audience we can.
[124001670540] |That’s an opportunity for every project that cares about how many people get to use their stuff, and under what terms.
[124001680010] |<title>Ayatana overlay scrollbars: something truly Natty</title>
[124001680020] |A wit said of Google Wave “if your project depends on reinventing scrollbars, you are doing something wrong.”
[124001680030] |But occasionally, just occasionally, one gets to do exactly that.
[124001680040] |Under the Ayatana banner, we’ve been on a mission to make the desktop have less chrome and more content.
[124001680050] |The goal is to help people immerse themselves in their stuff, without being burdened with large amounts of widgetry which isn’t relevant to the thing they are trying to concentrate on.
[124001680060] |And when it comes to widgetry, there are few things left which take up more space than scrollbars.
[124001680070] |For example, I spend plenty of time in a full screen terminal, and it’s lovely to see how clean that experience is on Natty today:
[124001680080] |…but that scrollbar on the right seems heavy and outdated.
[124001680090] |We took inspiration from mobile devices, and started exploring the idea of making scrollbars be more symbolic, and less physical.
[124001680100] |Something like this:
[124001680110] |Of course, since the desktop isn’t often a touch device, we need to think through pointer interactions.
[124001680120] |We wanted to preserve the idea of keeping content exposed as much as possible, while still providing for pointer interaction when needed.
[124001680130] |We also decided to drop the “one line scroll” capability, while preserving the ability to page up and down.
[124001680140] |Take a look at the result:
[124001680150] |<a>Overlay Scrollbars in Unity –implementation</a> from <a>Canonical Design</a> on <a>Vimeo</a>.
[124001680160] |The design work behind this has been done by Christian Giordano, who worked through the corner cases (literally) and provided a mockup for testing purposes.
[124001680170] |And the heavy lifting for Natty is being done by the indefatigable Andrea Cimitan, who is currently polishing up a gtk implementation of the concept for the release.
[124001680180] |Christian put together <a>a blog post on the subject</a>, and a great video which talks through the design process and a few of the challenges and solutions found:
[124001680190] |<a>Overlay Scrollbars in Unity</a> from <a>Canonical Design</a> on <a>Vimeo</a>.
[124001680200] |Code is available on launchpad, <code>bzr branch lp:ayatana-scrollbar</code> and <a>in a PPA</a>:
[124001680210] |sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ayatana-scrollbar-team/release; sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0 LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=foo gnome-appearance-properties 
[124001680220] |Well done, guys.
[124001690010] |<title>Next after Natty?</title>
[124001690020] |The naming of cats is a difficult matter It isn’t just one of your holiday games.
[124001690030] |- T S Eliot, <a>The Naming of Cats</a> 
[124001690040] |For the next cycle, I think we’ll leave the oceanic theme behind.
[124001690050] |The “oddball octopus”, for example, is a great name but not one we’ll adopt this time around.
[124001690060] |Perhaps in 13 years time, though!
[124001690070] |The objective is to capture the essence of our next six months work in a simple name.
[124001690080] |Inevitably there’s an obliquity, or offbeat opportunism in the result.
[124001690090] |And perhaps this next release more than most requires something other than orthodoxy –the skunkworks are in high gear right now.
[124001690100] |Fortunately I’m assured that if one of Natty’s successors is a skunk, it would at least be a sassy skunk!
[124001690110] |So we’re looking for a name that conveys mysterious possibility, with perhaps an ounce of overt oracular content too.
[124001690120] |Nothing too opaque, ornate, odious or orotund.
[124001690130] |Something with an orderly ring to it, in celebration of the crisp clean cadence by which we the community bring Ubuntu forth.
[124001690140] |There’s something neat in the idea that 11.10 will mark eight years since Ubuntu was conceived (it took a little longer to be born).
[124001690150] |So “octennial” might suit… but that would be looking backwards, and we should have an eye on the future, not the past.
[124001690160] |Hmm… an eye on the future, perhaps ocular?
[124001690170] |Or oculate?
[124001690180] |We’re certainly making our way up the S-curve of adoption, so perhaps ogee would do the trick?
[124001690190] |Alternatively, we could celebrate the visual language of Ubuntu with the “orange okapi”, or the welcoming nature of our community with the “osculant orangutan”.
[124001690200] |Nothing hugs quite like dholbach, though, and he’s no hairy ape.
[124001690210] |What we want is something imaginative, something dreamy.
[124001690220] |Something sleek and neat, too.
[124001690230] |Something that has all the precision of T S Eliot’s poetry, matched with the “effable ineffability” of our shared values, friendship and expertise.
[124001690240] |Something that captures both the competence of ubuntu-devel with the imagination of ayatana.
[124001690250] |Which leads us neatly to the <strong>Oneiric Ocelot</strong>.
[124001690260] |Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.
[124001690270] |We’ll need to keep up the pace of innovation on all fronts post-Natty.
[124001690280] |Our desktop has come together beautifully, and in the next release we’ll complete the cycle of making it available to all users, with a 2D experience to complement the OpenGL based Unity for those with the hardware to handle it.
[124001690290] |The introduction of Qt means we’ll be giving developers even more options for how they can produce interfaces that are both functional and aesthetically delightful.
[124001690300] |In the cloud, we’ll have to tighten up and make some firm decisions about the platforms we can support for 12.04 LTS.
[124001690310] |UDS in Budapest will be full of feisty debate on that front, I’m sure, but I’m equally sure we can reach a pragmatic consensus and start to focus our energies on delivering the platform for widespread cloud computing on free and flexible terms.
[124001690320] |Ubuntu is now shipping on millions of systems from multiple providers every year.
[124001690330] |It makes a real difference in the lives of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people.
[124001690340] |As MPT said, “what we do is not only art, it’s performance art”.
[124001690350] |Every six months the curtains part, and we have to be ready for the performance.
[124001690360] |I’d like to thank the thousands of people who are actively participating in the production of Natty: take the initiative, take responsibility, take action, and your work will make a difference to all of those users.
[124001690370] |There are very few places in the world where a personal intellectual contribution can have that kind of impact.
[124001690380] |And very few places where we have such a strong social fabric around those intellectual challenges, too.
[124001690390] |We each do what we do for our own reasons, but it’s the global impact of Ubuntu which gives meaning to that action.
[124001690400] |Natty is a stretch release: we set out to redefine the look and feel of the free desktop.
[124001690410] |We’ll need all the feedback we can get, so please test today’s daily, or A3, and file bug reports!
[124001690420] |Keep up the discipline and focus on the Narwhal, and let’s direct our daydreaming to the Ocelot.
[124001700010] |<title>Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership</title>
[124001700020] |Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else.
[124001700030] |We like competitive markets, competitive technologies, competitive sports, because we feel the end result for consumers or the audience is as good as it possibly could be.
[124001700040] |In larger organisations, you get an interesting effect.
[124001700050] |You get *internal* competition as well as external competition.
[124001700060] |And that’s healthy too.
[124001700070] |You get individuals competing for responsibility, and of course you want to make sure that the people who will make the wisest choices carry the responsibilities that demand wisdom, while those who have the most energy carry the responsibilities for which that’s most needed.
[124001700080] |You get teams competing with each other too –for resources, for attention, for support elsewhere, for moral authority, for publicity.
[124001700090] |And THAT’s the hardest kind of competition to manage, because it can be destructive to the organisation as a whole.
[124001700100] |Even though it’s difficult to manage, internal competition is extremely important, and should not be avoided out of fear.
[124001700110] |The up side is that you get to keep the best ideas because you allowed them to compete internally.
[124001700120] |If you try and avoid it, you crowd out new ideas, and end up having to catch up to them.
[124001700130] |Usually, what goes wrong is that one group gets control of the organisation’s thinking, and takes the view that any ideas which do not come from within that group are a threat, and should be stopped.
[124001700140] |That’s very dangerous –it’s how great civilisations crash; they fail to embrace new ideas which are not generated at the core.
[124001700150] |In Ubuntu, we have a lot of internal competition.
[124001700160] |Ubuntu and Kubuntu and Xubuntu and Edubuntu and *buntu-at-large have to collaborate and also, to a certain extent, compete.
[124001700170] |We handle that very well, I think, though occasionally some muppet calls Kubuntu the blue-headed-stepchild etc etc.
[124001700180] |It’s absolutely clear to everyone, though, that we have a shared interest in delivering ALL these experiences together with as much shared vision and commonality as possible.
[124001700190] |I consider the competition between these teams healthy and constructive and worth maintaining, even though it requires some fancy footwork and causes occasional strains.
[124001700200] |<h2>The challenge for Gnome leadership</h2>
[124001700210] |The sound and fury writ large in blog comments this week is all about how competition is managed.
[124001700220] |Gnome is, or should be, bigger than any of the contributing individuals or companies.
[124001700230] |Gnome leadership should be in a position to harness competition effectively for the good of the project.
[124001700240] |That does, however, require very firm leadership, and very gutsy decisions.
[124001700250] |And it requires vigilance against inward thinking.
[124001700260] |For example, I’ve seen the meme reiterated multiple times that “one should not expect Gnome to embrace ideas which were not generated and hosted purely within Gnome”.
[124001700270] |That’s chronic inward thinking.
[124001700280] |Think of all the amazing bits of goodness in the free software stack which were NOT invented in Gnome but are a part of it today.
[124001700290] |Think how much better it is when goodness is adopted across multiple desktop environments, and how much harder it is to achieve that when something is branded “K” or “G”.
[124001700300] |When we articulated our vision for Unity, we were very clear that we wanted to deliver it under the umbrella of Gnome.
[124001700310] |We picked Gnome-friendly technologies by and large, and where we felt we needed to do something different, that decision required substantial review.
[124001700320] |We described Unity as “a shell for Gnome” from the beginning, and we have been sincere in that view.
[124001700330] |We have worked successfully and happily with many, many Gnome projects to integrate Unity API’s into their codebase.
[124001700340] |This is because we wanted to be sure that whatever competitive dynamics arose were *internal* to Gnome, and thus contributing to a better result overall in Gnome in the long term.
[124001700350] |We’ve failed.
[124001700360] |Much of the language, and much of the decision making I’ve observed within Gnome, is based on the idea that Unity is competition WITH Gnome, rather than WITHIN Gnome.
[124001700370] |The key example of that is the rejection of Unity’s indicator API’s as external dependencies.
[124001700380] |That was the opportunity to say “let’s host this competition inside Gnome”.
[124001700390] |Even now, there’s a lack of clarity as to what was intended by that rejection, with some saying “it was just a reflection of the fact that the API’s were new and not used in any apps”.
[124001700400] |If that were the case, there would be no need for prior approval as an external dependency; the rejection was clearly an attempt to prevent Gnome applications from engaging around these API’s. It’s substantially failed, as many apps have happily done the work to blend in beautifully in the Unity environment, but there has been a clear attempt to prevent that by those who feel that Unity is a threat to Gnome rather than an opportunity for it.
[124001700410] |Dave Neary has to his credit <a>started to ask</a> “what’s really going on here”?
[124001700420] |In his blog post, he quoted the rationale given for the rejection of Canonical’s indicator API’s, which I’ll re-quote here and analyze in this light:
[124001700430] |<em>it doesn’t integrate with gnome-shell</em>
[124001700440] |That’s it –right there.
[124001700450] |Remember, this was a proposal for the indicator API’s to be an *external* dependency for Gnome.
[124001700460] |That means, Gnome apps can use those API’s *optionally* when they are being run on a platform where they are useful.
[124001700470] |It has NOTHING to do with the core Gnome vision.
[124001700480] |External API’s exist precisely BECAUSE it’s useful to encourage people to use Gnome apps on all sorts of platforms, including proprietary ones like Windows and MacOS and Solaris, and they should shine there too.
[124001700490] |So the premier reason given for the rejection of these API’s is a reason that, as best we can tell, has never been used against an external dependency proposal before: “it’s different to Gnome”.
[124001700500] |At the heart of this statement is something deeper: “it’s competition with an idea someone in Gnome wants to pursue”.
[124001700510] |What made this single statement heartbreaking for me to see was that it spoke clearly to the end of one of Gnome’s core values: code talks.
[124001700520] |Here we had API’s which were real, tested code, with patches to many Gnome apps available, that implemented a spec that had been extensively discussed on FreeDesktop.org.
[124001700530] |This was real code.
[124001700540] |Yet it was blocked because someone –a Gnome Shell designer –wanted to explore other ideas, ideas which at the time were not working code at all.
[124001700550] |There’s been a lot of commentary on that decision.
[124001700560] |Most recently, Aaron Seigo <a>pointed out</a> that this decision was as much a rejection of cross-desktop standards as it was a rejection of Canonical’s code.
[124001700570] |Now, I can tell you that I was pretty disgusted with this result.
[124001700580] |We had described the work we wanted to do (cleaning up the panel, turning panel icons into menus) to the Gnome Shell designers at the 2008 UX hackfest.
[124001700590] |McCann denies knowledge today, but it was a clear decision on our part to talk about this work with him at the time, it was reported to me that the conversation had happened, and that we’d received the assurance that such work would be “a valued contribution to the shell”.
[124001700600] |Clearly, by the time it was delivered, McCann had decided that such assurances were not binding, and that his interest in an alternative panel story trumped both that assurance and the now-extant FreeDesktop.org discussions and spec.
[124001700610] |But that’s not the focus of this blog.
[124001700620] |My focus here is on the management of healthy competition.
[124001700630] |And external dependencies are the perfect way to do so: they signal that there is a core strategy (in this case whatever Jon McCann wants to do with the panel) and yet there are also other, valid approaches which Gnome apps can embrace.
[124001700640] |This decision failed to grab that opportunity with both hands.
[124001700650] |It said “we don’t want this competition WITHIN Gnome”.
[124001700660] |But the decision cannot remove the competitive force.
[124001700670] |What that means is that the balance was shifted to competition WITH Gnome.
[124001700680] |<em>probably depends on GtkApplication, and would need integration in GTK+ itself</em>
[124001700690] |Clearly, both of these positions are flawed.
[124001700700] |The architecture of the indicator work was designed both for backward compatibility with the systray at the time, and for easy adoption.
[124001700710] |We have lots of apps using the API’s without either of these points being the case.
[124001700720] |<em>we wished there was some constructive discussion around it, pushed by the libappindicator developers; but it didn’t happen</em>
[124001700730] |We made the proposal, it was rejected.
[124001700740] |I can tell you that the people who worked on the proposal consider themselves Gnome people, and they feel they did what was required, and stopped when it was clear they were not going to be accepted.
[124001700750] |I’ve had people point to this bullet and say “you should have pushed harder”.
[124001700760] |But proposing an *external* dependency is not the same as trying to convince Shell to adopt something as the mainstream effort.
[124001700770] |It’s saying “hey, here’s a valid set of API’s apps might want to embrace, let’s let them do so”.
[124001700780] |<em>there’s nothing in GNOME needing it</em>
[124001700790] |This is a very interesting comment.
[124001700800] |It’s saying “no Gnome apps have used these API’s”.
[124001700810] |But the Gnome apps in question were looking to this very process for approval of their desire to use the API’s.
[124001700820] |You cannot have a process to pre-approve API’s, then decline to do so because “nobody has used the API’s which are not yet approved”.
[124001700830] |You’re either saying “we just rubber stamp stuff here, go ahead and use whatever you want”, or you’re being asinine.
[124001700840] |It’s also saying that Unity is not “in GNOME”.
[124001700850] |Clearly, a lot of Unity work depends on the adoption of these API’s for a smooth and well-designed panel experience.
[124001700860] |So once again, we have a statement that Unity is “competition with Gnome” and not “competition within Gnome”.
[124001700870] |And finally, it’s predicating this decision on the idea being “in Gnome” is the sole criterion of goodness.
[124001700880] |There is a cross-desktop specification which defines the appindicator work clearly.
[124001700890] |The fact that KDE apps Just Work on Unity is thanks to the work done to make this a standard.
[124001700900] |Gnome devs participated in the process, but appeared not to stick with it.
[124001700910] |Many or most of the issues they raised were either addressed in the spec or in the implementations of it.
[124001700920] |They say now that they were not taken seriously, but a reading of the mailing list threads suggests otherwise.
[124001700930] |It’s my view that cross-desktop standards are really important.
[124001700940] |We host both Kubuntu and Ubuntu under our banner, and without such collaboration, that would be virtually impossible.
[124001700950] |I want Banshee to work as well under Kubuntu as Amarok can under Ubuntu.
[124001700960] |<h2>What can be done?</h2>
[124001700970] |This is a critical juncture for the leadership of Gnome.
[124001700980] |I’ll state plainly that I feel the long tail of good-hearted contributors to Gnome and Gnome applications are being let down by a decision-making process that has let competitive dynamics diminish the scope of Gnome itself.
[124001700990] |Ideas that are not generated “at the core” have to fight incredibly and unnecessarily hard to get oxygen.
[124001701000] |Ask the Zeitgeist team.
[124001701010] |Federico is a hero, but getting room for ideas to be explored should not feel like a frontal assault on a machine gun post.
[124001701020] |This is no way to lead a project.
[124001701030] |This is a recipe for a project that loses great people to environments that are more open to different ways of seeing the world.
[124001701040] |Elementary.
[124001701050] |Unity.
[124001701060] |Embracing those other ideas and allowing them to compete happily and healthily is the only way to keep the innovation they bring inside your brand.
[124001701070] |Otherwise, you’re doomed to watching them innovate and then having to “relayout” your own efforts to keep up, badmouthing them in the process.
[124001701080] |We started this with a strong, clear statement: Unity is a shell for Gnome.
[124001701090] |Now Gnome leadership have to decide if they want the fruit of that competition to be an asset to Gnome, or not.
[124001701100] |<h2>A blessing in disguise</h2>
[124001701110] |Aaron’s blog post made me think that the right way forward might be to bolster and strengthen the forum for cross-desktop collaboration: FreeDesktop.org.
[124001701120] |I have little optimism that the internal code dynamics of Gnome can be fixed –I have seen too many cases where a patch which implements something needed by Unity is dissed, then reimplemented differently, or simply left to rot, to believe that the maintainers in Gnome who have a competitive interest on one side or the other will provide a level playing field for this competition.
[124001701130] |However, we have shown a good ability to collaborate around FD.o with KDE and other projects.
[124001701140] |Perhaps we could strengthen FreeDesktop.org and focus our efforts at collaboration around the definition of standards there.
[124001701150] |Gnome has failed to take that forum seriously, as evidenced by the frustrations expressed elsewhere.
[124001701160] |But perhaps if we had both Unity and KDE working well there, Gnome might take a different view.
[124001701170] |And that would be very good for the free software desktop.
[124001710010] |<title>All the other guys are not wrong</title>
[124001710020] |The discussion in blogs and comments on collaboration and standards is really important.
[124001710030] |It’s also easy to cast as “GNOME vs Canonical vs KDE”, and that would be incorrect.
[124001710040] |My critique here is not of the body of GNOME developers, it’s of specific decisions and processes, which in my view have let GNOME down.
[124001710050] |The reason I care is, to state the obvious, a well-functioning GNOME is important to Ubuntu and Canonical.
[124001710060] |And I don’t think we’re there.
[124001710070] |Alternatively, a well-functioning FreeDesktop.org is important, and we’re not there either.
[124001710080] |<strong>Dave Neary</strong>, who to his credit has been trying to understand how matters reached this point, blogged <a>his conclusions to date</a>.
[124001710090] |They warrant a response.
[124001710100] |He summarises:
[124001710110] |<em>FreeDesktop.org is broken as a standards body</em>
[124001710120] |That may be true today, but I think we should fix it.
[124001710130] |With Meego around, and other efforts that are lower profile, there are now even more reasons to have well specified standards for desktop interoperability.
[124001710140] |They won’t all work, but they deserve better respect and quality than they have today.
[124001710150] |So my response to Dave is: let’s fix that, rather than pretending “it’s broke so it don’t matter”.
[124001710160] |<em>Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t understand how GNOME works</em>
[124001710170] |Fortunately I’m apparently in good company because his next conclusion is <em>GNOME is not easy to understand</em>.
[124001710180] |Perhaps a more accurate summation would be “Gnome is not self-consistent, or deterministic, so it can often come to two quite contradictory conclusions at the same time, and Mr Shuttleworth didn’t understand the one we’d now like to promote.”
[124001710190] |Dave mailed me to say that he’d got a “definitive” perspective on how the appindicator API’s came to be rejected.
[124001710200] |It includes pointers as to the requirements for submitting external dependencies.
[124001710210] |These are “make the case for the dependency, which should be a few sentences or so, and wait a short while for people to check it out (e.g. making sure it builds)”.
[124001710220] |Now, a reading of the correspondence around the API’s suggests that Ted and others did a lot more than the “few sentences and make sure it builds”, yet the proposal was rejected.
[124001710230] |In addition, Dave got commentary from two members of the Gnome release team, who make these decisions.
[124001710240] |The two views disagree with one another.
[124001710250] |I’m not sure what to think, then, about Dave’s assertion that I don’t understand Gnome.
[124001710260] |Seems the follow-on conclusion is closer to the truth.
[124001710270] |Dave says:
[124001710280] |[...] to get things done in GNOME, you need to talk to the right people.
[124001710290] |That means, defining your problem, and identifying the stakeholders who are also interested in that problem, and working out a solution with them (am I repeating myself?).
[124001710300] |Mark seems to want GNOME to behave like a company, so that he can get “his people” to talk to “our people” and make it happen.
[124001710310] |I think that this misunderstanding of how to wield influence within the GNOME project is a key problem.
[124001710320] |But then again, over the years I have heard similar feedback from GNOME Mobile participants, and people in Nokia – so it’s not all Mark’s fault.
[124001710330] |As Jono says here: GNOME does have a reputation of being hard to work with for companies – no point in denying it (then again, so does the kernel, and they seem to get along fine). 
[124001710340] |Hold on a sec. There’s been ample documentation of conversations.
[124001710350] |Dave can’t even point to two stakeholder who agree with each other in the release team!
[124001710360] |I also understand that there is an interest in putting on a good face, and not airing your dirty laundry in public (ironic, eh?) – for the past few years, the party line in Canonical has been “We love GNOME, we’re a GNOME shop” while behind the scenes there have been heartfelt conversations about the various problems which exist in GNOME  how to address them.
[124001710370] |The problem is, because these discussioons happen behind the scenes, they stay there.
[124001710380] |We never get beyond discussions, agreeing there is a problem, but never working together on a solution.
[124001710390] |Yes, the stated line from Canonical has been exactly what Dave describes –we’ve worked hard to stay within the Gnome umbrella, even where we’ve felt that the deck was stacked against us.
[124001710400] |It’s tiring.
[124001710410] |After a year or so of being the public whipping boy for cutting commentary from competitors under the Gnome banner, a franker line is needed.
[124001710420] |<strong>Owen Taylor</strong>, desktop lead at Red Hat and the person to whom Jon McCann referred the app indicators API decision, then <a>weighed in</a>.
[124001710430] |He suggests several things:
[124001710440] |<em>Mark argues that GNOME should be a place where we have internal competition.
[124001710450] |But his idea of internal competition seems to be competition between different end-user experiences.
[124001710460] |His entrant into the competition is Unity, an environment with a user experience designed completely in isolation from GNOME.
[124001710470] |The other entrant would, I suppose, be the GNOME 3 desktop that GNOME has created.
[124001710480] |This competition doesn’t make sense to me: what would be left of GNOME if Unity “won” that competition?
[124001710490] |Not even the libraries are left, because every decision that is made about what goes into library should be driven by that same question “what does the user see?”
[124001710500] |No widget should go into GTK+ unless it makes sense in a GNOME application.
[124001710510] |GNOME cannot cede the user experience and still work as a project.</em>
[124001710520] |This is exactly why we proposed the app indicator API’s as *external* dependencies.
[124001710530] |They are capabilities which GNOME apps can take advantage of if they are around, but which are not essential if they are not there.
[124001710540] |Unity could quite easily move to the fore in GNOME, if it won this competition, just like lots of other ideas and pieces of code have started outside the core of GNOME but become essential to it.
[124001710550] |Owen’s argument reinforces the idea (which is in my view broken) that the only idea that matter are the ones generated internally to the GNOME project (defined very tightly by folks who maintain core modules or have core responsibilities).
[124001710560] |It’s precisely this inward view that I think is leading GNOME astray.
[124001710570] |Owen’s point that “no widget should go into Gtk if it is not needed by a GNOME application” is unlikely to be comforting to the XFCE folk, or other desktop environments which build on GNOME.
[124001710580] |If anything, it will make them feel that things in “core GNOME” are likely to be difficult to adopt and collaborate with, because their needs, apparently don’t matter.
[124001710590] |He also says “But I’ve never seen Canonical make the leap and realize that they could actually dive in and make GNOME itself better.”.. which is rather insulting to all the people from Canonical who spend a lot of their day doing exactly that.
[124001710600] |He talks about App Indicators, saying that “They didn’t even propose changes to core GNOME components to support application indicators.”
[124001710610] |Actually, we did, and those changes required App Indicators to be an external dependency.
[124001710620] |So we proposed that, and it was rejected.
[124001710630] |Repeat ad absurdum.
[124001710640] |In the end, in comments, Owen says that “[It] is a common misperception [that Gnome Shell and Gnome 3 can be separated].
[124001710650] |That somehow the work we’ve done on GNOME Shell is somehow separable from the rest of GNOME 3.
[124001710660] |The work on the GTK+ theme and the window manager theme is done on together.
[124001710670] |The work on GNOME Shell is done together work work on System Settings and on the internal gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-session components.”
[124001710680] |Well, that’s convenient.
[124001710690] |Define one piece –your piece –as critical, therefor making it above competition.
[124001710700] |I expect that Ubuntu will ship Gnome 3 perfectly well with Unity.
[124001710710] |Also in comments, Owen points out that the work Shell developers did around messaging was done as an update to an FD.o spec.
[124001710720] |An update that AFAICT was not discussed, just amended and pushed.
[124001710730] |He says, in a triumph of understatement, “We certainly haven’t done a good job discussing the small additions to the specification we needed”.
[124001710740] |Finally, Owen concludes that having Unity and Gnome Shell as separate desktops may be the only way forward.
[124001710750] |Seems like he’s worked hard to ensure that’s the case.
[124001710760] |Next up, <strong>Jeff Waugh</strong> is writing a set of related blog posts.
[124001710770] |One of them <a>walks through the app indicators timeline</a>, and is relatively comprehensive in doing so.
[124001710780] |Jeff draws a conclusion that we’re mistaken in feeling that App Indicators were deliberately blocked because Unity presented a risk of competition with Gnome Shell; but he draws that purely based on the timing of the conversation proposing App Indicators as an external dependency, which was four days *before* the name Unity was introduced.
[124001710790] |Yes, that’s true.
[124001710800] |But Unity was simply the new name for work which has been ongoing since 2007: The Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface.
[124001710810] |That work was very much in the frame throughout, and it’s been suggested that it was that work which catalysed Gnome Shell in the first place.
[124001710820] |So even though Jeff is right on the claim that app indicators were discussed *before* the Unity name was revealed, that’s not in any way material to a discussion of the motives of those who rejected app indicators.
[124001710830] |This was an API from Canonical, related to work in the Ubuntu Netbook interface, and it got rejected for reasons which are unlike any other response to a proposed external dependency.
[124001710840] |Perhaps, in the light of changed circumstances, Jeff will change his opinion.
[124001710850] |Good commentators do.
[124001710860] |Jeff also goes on to talk about Ted and Aurelien, who were proposing the app indicators work in GNOME and KDE respectively.
[124001710870] |KDE apps worked smoothly, Gnome rejected Ted’s proposal.
[124001710880] |Jeff says “I don’t believe the key difference here is between GNOME and KDE, it is in Canonical’s approach to engagement, and its commitment of developers to the task.”
[124001710890] |It’s worth pointing out that Ted and Aurelien were both working for the same manager under the same guidance with the same goals.
[124001710900] |Jeff draws the conclusion that Canonical could have done things differently.
[124001710910] |I would have drawn the conclusion that Gnome was less open to collaboration than KDE.
[124001710920] |Finally, Jeff looks at the requirements for dependencies, and notes that Canonical didn’t need to engage at all, though he (and we recognised the same) says that would have caused other problems.
[124001710930] |He concludes:
[124001710940] |Canonical barely made an effort to have libappindicator “accepted into GNOME” (which, in the context of his criticism, Mark believed was important or necessary) 
[124001710950] |As I’ve shown above, the stated requirements are a very low bar.
[124001710960] |We did that, and more, yet the App Indicator API’s were rejected.
[124001710970] |As I’ve said before, it’s bizarre that such a different standard was applied to this API, and not other API’s.
[124001710980] |The only rational explanation is that the decision is nothing to do with the API’s, and everything to do with politics.
[124001710990] |Those politics are bad for Gnome in the long run.
[124001711000] |I want Gnome to be healthy in the long run, ergo, my critique.
[124001711010] |It did not even need to go through this process anyway, because it did not need to be an “external dependency” in order to achieve Mark’s stated goals (ie. application adoption of the API)
[124001711020] |Unfortunately for Jeff, we’d been told in no uncertain terms that module owners and core apps were under pressure about these API’s.
[124001711030] |They wanted to see the external dependency blessed.
[124001711040] |So we proposed it.
[124001711050] |Owen says we “didn’t try to propose changes to core apps”… we did, and the external dependency was the blocker.
[124001711060] |So the rejection of libappindicator, for all the sturm und drang, is essentially meaningless — it had no bearing on the opportunity for collaboration between Canonical and GNOME
[124001711070] |In fact, it’s what’s left that collaboration in limbo.
[124001711080] |What to do with all the patches produced for GNOME apps that make them work with app indicators?
[124001711090] |Hmm… that would be collaboration, but the uncertainty created by the rejection as an external dependency creates a barrier to that collaboration.
[124001711100] |As Jeff says, those patches can land without any problems.
[124001711110] |But to land such a patch, after the refusal, takes some guts on the part of the maintainer.
[124001711120] |Lots have done it (thank you!) but some have said they are concerned they will be criticised for doing so.
[124001711130] |Unity did not exist in the public sphere when libappindicator was declared irrelevant to GNOME Shell, and was not ever the reason why: (a) there wasn’t much interest in libappindicator, or (b) GNOME Shell developers decided they were on a different path
[124001711140] |Correct, *Unity* was not the public name of the work at the time, Ubuntu Netbook Remix was.
[124001711150] |Not proven in this part of the series, but worth noting: the person Mark specifically chose to attack, Jon McCann, did not decide to exclude libappindicator because — being a design contributor to GNOME Shell — he felt threatened by Unity.
[124001711160] |In fact, he had no part in the decision, and didn’t know Unity existed!
[124001711170] |Jon certainly knew a great deal of work on interfaces was being done.
[124001711180] |That became branded Unity later, but the timing of the change in name is irrelevant.
[124001711190] |Phew.
[124001711200] |There are good faith efforts being made to bridge divides all over the show, for which I’m grateful and to which we’re contributing.
[124001711210] |My comments here are to address what I see as convenient papering over, which will not stand the test of time.
[124001711220] |It’s important –to me, to the members of the community working on Unity and Ubuntu (and there are substantial communities in both) that simplistic accusations against us are not left to stand unchallenged.
[124001711230] |The goal –for everyone, I think –is great free software.
[124001711240] |I know we’re committed to that, and doing what we think is needed to achieve it.
[124001720010] |<title>Celebrating Gnome 3.0</title>
[124001720020] |Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard to make Gnome 3.0 a reality.
[124001720030] |It’s a great accomplishment, excellent work by many people, and worthy of celebration.
[124001720040] |I know the PPA is popular and I’m sure it will be a hit in 11.10.
[124001720050] |Well done all!
[125000010010] |<title>About</title>
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[125000030170] |The GNU/Linux systems have reached an important level of maturity, allowing to integrate them in almost any kind of work environment, from a desktop PC to the sever facilities of a big company.
[125000030180] |In this ebook “The GNU/Linux Operating System”, the main contents are related with system administration.
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[125000030200] |The topics covered in this 500+ page eBook include Linux network, server and data administration, Linux kernel, security, clustering, configuration, tuning, optimization, migration and coexistence with non-Linux systems.
[125000030210] |A must read for any serious Linux system admin.
[125000030220] |<h2><a>The GNU/Linux Advanced Administration eBook</a></h2>
[125000030230] |In this ebook “The GNU/Linux Operating System”, the main contents are related with system administration.
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[125000030260] |<strong>Create your own Linux from Scratch (Download free PDF Guide)</strong>
[125000030270] |Linux from Scratch describes the process of creating your own Linux system from scratch from an already installed Linux distribution, using nothing but the source code of software that you need. 
[125000030280] |This 318 page eBook provides readers with the background and instruction to design and build custom Linux systems.
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[125000030300] |Users can dictate all aspects of their system, including directory layout, script setup, and security.
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