Celso

“There are any number of changes thrust upon Gnome by Red Hat for example, that then get whitewashed as “maintainers discretion” or “designers design”.”

Sigh. This is just _not true_.

I must have written this explanation a hundred times, but here it goes again.

Red Hat, as a company taken in full, cares very little about GNOME. What does Red Hat sell? Subscriptions and support. To large corporations. For large deployments. Of servers, and suchlike things. Notably, and infamously, not desktops, generally speaking.

I’m not in sales. I don’t even work on RHEL. But I don’t think I’d be very far wrong in saying that the vast majority of RH’s customers, measured any way you choose, don’t really give two figs about the desktop. They don’t care if it’s GNOME or KDE or Microsoft frickin’ Bob. Most of our deployments probably don’t even _have_ a desktop.

Red Hat pays people to work on GNOME for the same reason it pays people to work on the 3D graphics drivers that Ubuntu needs and the sound drivers that Ubuntu needs (while we’re taking cheap shots): from RH’s commitment to driving the whole F/OSS ecosystem. You think our major corporate developments need the freakin’ sound to work? You think they need 3D-accelerated graphics? You can say this is great for all humankind or you can say it’s just long-term self-interest, whatever. But RH doesn’t pay people to work on GNOME because RH has direct corporate requirements for a desktop that it wants to submarine into GNOME. RH doesn’t. Do you *really* think there’s some secret committee in RH somewhere telling our GNOME developer puppets that a million-dollar client _really needs_ an overview in the next major GNOME release? Please.

RH is the major sponsor of GNOME development these days more or less by default; there used to be Ximian, then there was Novell, there used to be Sun…all of those have more or less fallen by the wayside. If RH dropped its sponsorship of GNOME development to avoid the appearance of some sort of Evil Conspiracy it wouldn’t hurt RH much at all in the short or medium term. Hell, it’d save RH a few developer salaries. I doubt we’d lose any customers. I don’t think anyone else would be particularly pleased with the results, though. Including Ubuntu. It is famously the case that Canonical could have chosen to follow the RH path of giving existing GNOME contributors a paycheck to continue their self-directed work on GNOME, but it instead chose to hire engineers to create its own fork of (depending on your terms) the GNOME shell or GNOME itself. The direction of which is *very much* mandated in a top-down way by Canonical.

It really kind of narks me off when people somehow manage to contort themselves into a mental position where RH sponsoring the development of F/OSS software by giving people a full time paycheck to work on it, with a very strong degree of freedom of action – as we’ve been doing for years – is a bad thing. Give your head a shake. This kind of discourse really is not warranted or useful.

So new “opensource” projects are kept secret to the community and only a select few “trusted” contributors are invited to “know” what it is… and to help out?
This doesn’t seem so “transparent” to me and certainly isn’t what opensource development is about… If you are not in the big club you are left out…

Seems to me that Mark cannot handle so much criticism on new projects/announcements on blogs and news articles and wants to filter it out with secrecy to the regular folks of the community because it is somewhat ruining the reputation of Ubuntu……. that’s what it looks like to me….

I think the underlying problem here that set off unexpected negative reaction to the first post is that in Mark’s original announcement he didn’t really stress that he was talking primarily about Canonical’s in-house projects. In fact he didn’t say Canonical at all. Which is an interesting oversight. And I should add I didn’t really see a problem with his original post. This post, I have some issues with, but I’m letting them slide because there is no upside in beating him up about the inherent tribalism in his response. I recognize it as being a perfectly human emotional reaction to the unexpected reaction to his first post. My emotional reaction, to his reaction, to others reactions, is just a downward spiral. So I choose not to let my emotions get the the better of me…this time.

Anyways…
I also see how it is easy for people to accidentally infer that he was speaking about “Ubuntu the project” processes as Mark is the head of “Ubuntu the project.” when in fact he was talking about “Canonical, the company.” Though it is a bit unclear what is actual job title in the Canonical management structure is at this point in time, perhaps GodFather is currently the best fit for his role. Or one of the Darth’s.. Darth Fantabulous? Just throwing it out there for consideration.

Anyways…
There have been multiple posts now from multiple people who have had to re-explain what Mark meant, this is unfortunate, as the problem is and never was strictly the in-house nature of how Canonical does it works. The real problem is, the different expectations surrounding what happens after the projects are made public. Whether that be integration to a pre-existing upstream project not managed by Canonical or even in the process to integrate Canonical’s project into an Ubuntu release.

Speaking just of the Ubuntu release process. It should never, ever be necessary for Canonical to have to use an exceptional process to get a late landing project into Ubuntu. And double so for Mark specifically, as the project lead for Ubuntu.. should never, ever push for inclusion of an in-house Canonical project into an exceptional Ubuntu release integration process. His veto power as project lead is nullified when he doesn’t have the perspective necessary to use it. Everyone working on an in-house Canonical project should know what the timeframes are for Ubuntu and how the processes work and should be able to get features in by the stated deadlines with no excuses. If Canonical can’t land features in by the deadlines… features punt to the next release…that is the point of a time based release model. When things land late, the necessary feedback process is short-circuited.

As long as these skunkwork projects show up as ppas or optional tech previews before being submitted for default inclusion into the Ubuntu release, there really isn’t anything negative here.
But if the skunkworks results are more often than not revealed late (after UDS for the target Ubuntu release) and the time for feedback is compressed into the last 3 weeks of the run up to the Ubuntu release, then there will be problems and those problems will blow up with otherwise avoidable heat levels.

And whether or not that happens has nothing to do with how skunkworks is developed and everything to do with how Mark chooses to act as Ubuntu project leader and whether he is committed to the Ubuntu feature integration processes as they are laid out and is willing to let skunkwork projects have the time to be discussed to address the integration issues ahead of the Ubuntu release team decision to greenlight them.

But its no fun for him to have to hear that. Just as its no fun for people to have to tell him that.
But it is what it is.

-jef

Balanced, and well put counter-point.

Mark seems to take Ubuntu continuously on this edge of OSS v proprietary, community v closed. As long as he has detractors and protractors on both sides I figure he thinks they are doing things right as long as people are willing to continue to follow him in Ubuntu development and Ubuntu usage.

Every distro I tried and left in the past (for reasons that were relevant to me at that time) I never went back to (Fedora was one of them) I am looking for an opportunity to break free from Ubuntu (I am on Ubuntu’s LTS cycle at the moment with no plans to upgrade till the next LTS) but so far Ubuntu hasn’t given me enough reason to dump it entirely (yet?).

I suppose the nastier (and raving) comments (mine included) on this blog are more directed to Mark than to Ubuntu. I respect Mark for being open enough to discuss what’s on his mind and to then take follow-up comments. Are we (the Ubuntu users/devs) getting slowly cooked as the water around us heats up or is this the natural evolution of another mainstream OSS project – time will tell.

So far Ubuntu, and Mark, has more users/devs on their side so they seem to be doing it right

Mark.