As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.

This represents one of the most extraordinary, and to me somewhat unexpected, benefits of free software to those who deploy it. Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts - and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery. But in fact the reverse is true -  free software distributions or OSV’s can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV’s, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle - core component feature development. This is in my mind a very compelling reason for distributions to focus on distribution - that’s the one thing they do which the upstreams don’t, so they need to invest heavily in that in order to serve as the most efficient conduit of upstream’s work.

We also committed, for the first time, to a regular set of point releases for 8.04 LTS. These will start three months after the LTS, and be repeated every six months until the next LTS is out. These point releases will include support for new hardware as well as rolling up all the updates published in that series to date. So a fresh install of a point release will work on newer hardware and will also not require a big download of additional updates.

Gerry Carr at Canonical put together this diagram which describes the release management plan very nicely:

The Ubuntu team does an amazing job of ensuring that one can update from release to release, and from LTS release to LTS release directly, too. I’m very proud to be part of this community! With the addition of some capability to support newer hardware in LTS releases, I think we are doing our part in the free software community - helping to deliver the excellent work of thousands of other teams, from kernel.org to GNOME and KDE, safely to a huge audience.

There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.

I’m very conscious of the fact that Ubuntu is the pointy edge of a very large wedge - we are the conduit, but we exist only because of the extraordinary dedication and effort of thousands of other communities and projects. We all owe a great deal to the team who make Debian’s “unstable” repository possible, and of course to the upstream projects from GNOME and KDE through to the Linux kernel. We hope you will be proud of the condition in which we have carried your excellent work through to the users of Ubuntu.

So, well done everybody! I hope that friends, family, colleagues and others will have the opportunity to try it out and understand why we have all devoted so much to this project. Our work is deeply important - we are helping to bring free software to a new level of acceptance and adoption in the wider world.  Ubuntu’s success adds to the success of free software. So as much as it is fun, challenging, the opportunity of a lifetime, a profession for some and a passion for others, it’s also changing the world. I don’t exactly want to shout “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” but to me you are all Heroes.

Mark

Firefox, for example, is an inspiring free software success story, and I’m certain that a key driver of that success is their excellent support for the Windows environment. It’s a quick download and an easy install that Just Works, after which people can actually FEEL that free software delivers an innovative and powerful browsing experience that is plainly better than the proprietary alternatives. I’ve noticed that many of the best free software projects have a good Windows story. MySQL and PostgreSQL both do. Bazaar works well too. And users love it - users that may then be willing to take a step closer to living in the GNU world entirely.

So, I was absolutely delighted with the way Agostino Russo and Evan Dandrea steered the Windows-native installer for Ubuntu into 8.04 LTS. What I think is really classy about it is the way it uses the Windows Boot Manager sensibly to offer you the Ubuntu option. If I was a Windows user who was intrigued but nervous about Linux, this would be a really great way to get a taste of it, at low risk. Being able to install and uninstall a Linux OS as if it were a Windows app is a brilliant innovation. Kudos to Agostino and Evan, and of course also to the guys who pioneered this sort of thinking (it’s been done in a number of different ways). It looks crisp, clean and very professional:

I’m a little daunted at something as new as WUBI being the very first experience that people have of Linux, free software and Ubuntu, but initial reports are positive.  I did have a question from the media that started with “it didn’t work for me but…” which makes me a wee bit nervous.

So - yesterday I suggested folks hammer on the Heron for servers, today, here’s a call for folks who have a Windows machine and would like to see WUBI in action to test it out and let the developers know if there are any last-minute gotchas. Happy hunting!

The coolest part of the firewall upgrade is the fact that Michael has made the release upgrade tool independent of the GUI, so you can use it for server upgrades too.

So, now would be a great time to test the upgrade! File bugs if you run into any issues with your particular configuration. Apparently, this is upported on both Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), so feedback on either upgrade path would be most welcome.

sudo aptitude install update-manager-core

That should make sure you have the release upgrade tool installed. Now you can trigger the upgrade process to the current beta:

sudo do-release-upgrade --devel-release

This should fetch the latest version of the update tool, which knows about various transitions in library versions etc so that it can attempt to update your machine smoothly without leaving large amounts of dangling packages. You can say “no” if you don’t like the proposed package install and removal plan (in which case, your feedback would be very valuable!).

For fresh installs, 8.04 LTS should be good to go on any high-volume server platform available in the market today - let the server team know if you run into any problems at all. They are hoping to meet the desktop team’s “Just Works” standard, so the bar is set pretty high. From my perspective, the upgrade was smooth - full marks and my thanks to everyone involved.

Whoever is President at the conclusion of this increasingly nasty standoff inherits an economy that is wounded, a parliament that is angry and divided, and a populace that know their will has been disregarded. And he will face a much increased risk of personal harm at the hands of those who see assassination as no worse a crime than electoral fraud. That is at best a Pyrrhic victory. It will be extremely difficult to get anything done under those circumstances.

There is, however, some cause for optimism amidst all the gloom. It seems that many Kenyan MP’s who were fingered for corruption during their previous terms were summarily dismissed by their constituencies, despite tribal affiliations. In other words, if your constituents think you’re a crook, they will vote you out even if you share their ethnicity.

That shows the beginnings of independent-minded political accountability - it shows that voting citizens in Kenya want leaders who are not tainted with corruption, even if that means giving someone from a different tribe their vote. And that is the key shift that is needed in African countries, to give democracy teeth. Ousted MP’s and former presidents are subject to investigation and trial, and no amount of ill-gotten loot in the bank is worth the indignity of a stint in jail at the hands of your successor. As Frederick Chiluba has learned, there’s no such thing as an easy retirement from a corrupt administration.

Of course, that makes it likely that those with skeletons in their closets will try even harder to cling to power, for fear of the consequences if they lose their grip on it. Robert Mugabe is no doubt of the opinion that a bitter time in power is preferable to a bitter time after power. But increasingly, voters in Africa are learning that they really can vote for change. And neighboring countries are learning that it hurts their own investment and economic profiles to certify elections as free and fair when they are far from it. It would be much harder for Robert Mugabe to stay in power illegally if he didn’t have *nearly* enough votes to stay there legally. You can fudge an election a little, but it’s very difficult to fudge it when the whole electorate abandons you, and when nobody will lend your their credibility.

The best hope a current president has of a happy retirement is to ensure that the institutions which will pass judgement on him (or her) in future are independent and competent, to ensure that they will stay that way, and to keep their hands clean. It will take time, but I think we are on track to see healthy changes in governance becoming the norm and not the exception in Africa.

These are extremely testing times, and thus far, the US Fed under Bernanke has been found wanting. Historians may well lay the real blame for current distress at the door of Alan Greenspan, who pioneered the use of morphine to dull economic pain, but they will probably also credit him with a certain level of discretion in its prescription. During Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed, economic leaders became convinced that the solution to market distress was to ensure that the financial system had access to easy money.

This proved effective in the short term. When LTCM looked set to explode (private investments, leveraged up dramatically, managed by Nobel prize-winning financial theorists, placed a bet on a sure thing which didn’t pan out quite as expected) Greenspan engineered an orderly unwinding of its affairs. When the dot com bubble burst, Greenspan kept the financial system energised by lowering rates so far that they were, for a substantial period, at negative levels.

A negative real interest rate means we are effectively paid to take out loans. That might sound good, but how would you feel if I used the words “paid to take a few more hits of crack cocaine”? The underlying problem was that people had become accustomed to high rates of return and did not want to accept that real rates of return in the US were moving down. They had become accustomed to easy money, and Greenspan’s policy ensured that money remained accessible at a time when people had demonstrated a low ability to invest that easy money well.

Low rates give people an incentive to invest in stocks, even if those stocks are not earning very much. This meant stock prices recovered quickly, and the effect was amplified by the fact that low rates increased corporate earnings. This was a so-called “soft landing” - disaster averted. He must have known the risks, but the one big warning sign that would likely have convinced Greenspan to return to normal rates was missing: inflation. Low rates, and especially negative rates, have historically always resulted in inflation. Greenspan kept rates low because there were no signs of inflation. It seemed as if the US had entered a new era where the correlation of rates and inflation no long held true. People explained it by saying that the US was increasing its productivity dramatically (productivity increases are like anti-inflation medicine). Now, with hindsight, it appears that the real reason for the absence of inflation was that the Chinese were increasing their productivity dramatically, and that US consumers were spending so much on Chinese goods that Chinese productivity growth, not US productivity growth, was keeping US prices low.

When tech came off the boil and people should have been using the pause to clean up their affairs, Greenspan made it easy for people to get themselves into a worse position. Easy money made stock market prices artificially high, so stock market investors felt rich. Worse, easy money made house prices artificially high (by about 45%), so everybody felt wealthier than they had planned or expected to.

To make matters worse, a series of financial innovations created a whole industry designed to help people go back into debt on their houses. I remember trying to watch TV in the US and being amazed at the number of advertisements for “home equity withdrawals”. They made it sound like turning your major personal financial asset - your paid-off house - into an ATM machine was a good thing. In fact, it was a means to spend all of your primary store of wealth. And with inflated house prices, it was a way to spend money that you did not really have. A convenient way to get into a deep, dark hole of family debt. The result? The average American owns less of her home today than  she did 30 years ago - 55% as opposed to 68%. Easy money makes people poorer.The company with the most irritating ads, Ditech (and I feel ashamed to be contributing to their website search ranking with the mention, perhaps it will help instead to link to their customer feedback), has a tagline “People are smart” and a business model built on the idea that “People are dumb”. Their “most popular” product strikes me as being tailor-made to make it easy to turn home equity - an asset - into new debt.

Why did Greenspan do it? I think he genuinely believed that there was something different about the modern world that had altered the laws of economic gravity. I suspect he no longer feels that way.

But Greenspan is no longer Chairman of the Fed. Ben Bernanke blinked, yesterday, and in that blink we have the measure of the man.

Greenspan acted carefully, logically, and basically prudently. Several years of anomalous economic data are a reasonable basis to think that the rules have evolved. You would have to have a Swiss (700 years of stability) or Chinese (”we think it’s too early to tell if the French Revolution was a good idea”) approach to stick with economic theories that are at odds with the facts for very long. Greenspan made a mistake, and it will have huge consequences for the US for a generation, but he had reasons for that mistake. Bernanke just blinked, he panicked, despite knowing better.

We now have rigorous economic explanations for all that is happening. We have come to understand, quite clearly, what is going on in the world. The deflationary Eastern wind has been identified. We know there is no productivity miracle in the US, no change in the laws of physics or economics. So we know that the US patient is addicted to easy money morphine, medicine that was prescribed with good intentions by Dr Greenspan, medicine that has in the last 7 years made the patient more ill and not less. More morphine today constitutes malpractice, not economic innovation. We know the consequences of more morphine - stock prices will rise artificially (4% yesterday, on the news of the shot), house prices will stumble along, companies will take longer to default on their loans.

Bernanke might be hoping to do what Greenspan did - retire before the addiction becomes entirely obvious. Too late. While the Fed is clearly not willing to admit it, the markets have just as clearly taken their own view, that the prognosis is not good. They are smart enough to see that all Bernanke has done is cover up the symptoms of malaise, and many are using the temporary pain relief to head for safer territory. I expect that any relief will be brief, market recoveries will  fade, the rout has been deferred but not averted.

I started out by describing the Fed’s actions as a failure of economic leadership. Some folks are lucky enough to lead from the bottom of the cycle, up - they take over when things are miserable and can only really get better. They look like heroes even if their voodoo has no mojo, so to speak. Others are less lucky, they get handed custodianship of an asset that is at the peak. As for Bernanke, he’s in that latter category. He needs to be able to speak clearly and frankly about the hard work that lies ahead in the US. He needs to appeal to the very best of American industriousness - a traditional willingness to work hard, be smart, and accept the consequences of refusing to do so. He needs to lead under the most difficult circumstances. But that’s what leadership is about.

Fortunately for Bernanke, central bank independence is widely believed to be the only credible approach to economic governance. That independence gives Bernanke the right to stand at odds with political leaders if needed. Given the recent White House announcements - more morphine, further indebtedness for the worlds most indebted country - there’s no stomache for a real program of rehabilitation in the Bush Administration. Bernanke will have to lead without political support, a very difficult task indeed. Our greatest and most memorable leaders are those who lead through difficult times. The same is true of failures of leadership. Appeasement, or rehabilitation. Chamberlain, or Churchill. Thus far, Chamberlain.

The subtitle to the conference should probably be “Going into production at scale”, because it seems everywhere I look these days people are taking Ubuntu into production. Perhaps it’s the preparation for the April LTS release, perhaps its that more and more of their apps and solutions are certified on Ubuntu, or perhaps its just that confidence in Ubuntu for large-scale deployments on the server and the desktop has reached a tipping point, but either way I’m delighted with the ramping up of heavy-duty adoption of the platform that our community delivers with such metronomic precision.

So Ubuntu Live 2008 promises to be informative, as we start to reap the benefits of that experience. If you have interesting deployments or projects that you would like to share, UL2008 would be the right platform to do it! I’d be particularly interested in talks that describe:

• large-scale government deployments of Ubuntu on the desktop (there have now been several)
• specialist deployments, for example high-performance computing clusters, or vertical market solutions
• virtualisation-based deployments where Ubuntu is the host or the guest platform
• large-scale server farms for hosting or web edge-of-the-network deployments
• appliances based on Ubuntu

You can submit a proposal directly or read more about the conference. Hope to see you there!

I’ve observed a surge in the number of contributors to Bazaar recently, which has resulted in a lot of small but useful branches with bugfixes for various corner cases, operating systems and integrations with other tools. One of the most interesting projects that’s getting more attention is BzrEclipse, integrating Bzr into the Eclipse IDE in a natural fashion.

I think open source projects go through an initial phase where they work best with a tight group of core contributors who get the basics laid out to the point where the tool or application is usable by a wider audience. Then, they need to make the transition from being “closely held” to being open to drive-by contributions from folks who just want to fix a small bug or add a small feature. That’s quite a difficult transition, because the social skills required to run the project are quite different in those two modes. It’s not only about having good social skills, but also about having good processes that support the flow of new, small contributions from new, unproven contributors into the code-base.

It seems that one of the key “best practices” that has emerged is the idea of plug-in architectures, that allow new developers to contribute an extension, plug-in or add-on to the codebase without having to learn too much about the guts of the project, or participate in too many heavyweight processes. I would generalize that and say that good design, with clearly though-through and pragmatic layers, allow new contributors to make useful contributions to the code-base quickly because they present useful abstractions early on.

Firefox really benefited from their decision to support cross-platform add-ons. I’m delighted to hear that OpenOffice is headed in the same direction.

Bazaar is very nicely architected. Not only is there a well-defined plug-in system, but there’s also a very useful and pragmatic layered architecture which keeps the various bits of complexity contained for those who really need to know. I’ve observed how different teams of contributors, or individuals, have introduced whole new on-disk formats with new performance characteristics, completely orthogonally to the rest of the code. So if you are interested in the performance of status and diff, you can delve into working tree state code without having to worry about long-term revision storage or branch history mappings.

Layering can also cause problems, when the layers are designed too early and don’t reflect the pragmatic reality of the code. For example, witness the “exchange of views” between the ZFS folks and the Linux filesystem community, who have very different opinions on the importance and benefits of layering.

Anyhow, kudos to the Bazaar guys for the imminent 1.1, and for adopting an architecture that makes it easier for contributors to get going.

As you can see, the Inkscape community has been busy triaging and closing bugs, radically reducing the “new and unknown” bug count and giving the developers a tighter, more focused idea of where the important issues are that need to be addressed.

A lot of my personal interest in free software is motivated by the idea that we can be more efficient if we collaborate better. If we want free software to be the norm for personal computing software, then we have to show, among other things, that the open, free software approach taps into the global talent pool in a healthier, more dynamic way than the old proprietary approach to building software does. We don’t have money on our side, but we do have the power of collaboration.

I put a lot of personal effort into Launchpad because I love the idea that it can help lead the way to better collaboration across the whole ecosystem of free software development. I look for the practices which the best-run projects follow, and encourage the Launchpad guys to make it easy for everyone to do those things. These improvements and efficiencies will help each project individually, but it also helps every Linux distribution as well. This sort of picture gives me a sense of real accomplishment in that regard.

Bryce Harrington, who happens to work for Canonical and is a member of the Inkscape team, told me about this and blogged the experience. I’ve asked a few other Inkscape folks, and they seem genuinely thrilled at the result. I’m delighted. Thank you!

Billy Cina @Canonical has been making steady progress towards the goal of having a full portfolio of training options available for commercial users of Ubuntu. Companies that want to ensure that their staff are rigorously trained, and individuals who want to present their Ubuntu credentials in a formal setting, need to have a certified and trusted framework for skills assurance.

Most of the work we are doing in this line is following the traditional model, where content is funded as a private investment, and the content is then licensed to authorized training providers who sell courses to their local markets. These courses are usually sold to companies that have adopted a platform or tool and want to ensure a consistent level of skills across the organization. Many companies are moving to Ubuntu for both desktop and server, so demand is hotting up for this capability. We have a system builder course, and a system administrator course are now available from authorized training providers.

But we wanted also to try a different approach, that might be more accessible to the Ubuntu community and might also result in even higher quality materials. We think the key ingredients are:

• Use of an open format (Docbook)
• Content source available in a public Bazaar repository (here)
• Licensing under open terms (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Working with the Ubuntu doc-team, who have a wealth of experience

The license is copyleft and non-commercial, so that it is usable by any person for their own education and edification with the requirement that commercial use will involve some contribution back to the core project.

It’s already a 400 page book which gives a great overview of the Ubuntu desktop experience, a very valuable resource for folks who are new to Linux and Ubuntu.

We are getting to the point where we can publish a “daily PDF” which will have the very latest version (”trunk”) compiled overnight. So anyone has free access to the very latest version, and of course anyone can bzr branch the content to make changes that suit them.

If you want to have a look at the latest content, try this:

• install Bluefish (useful as a docbook editor)
• make sure you have bzr 1.0
• make sure Launchpad has an SSH key for you

Type:

bzr launchpad-login <your-lp-username
bzr branch lp:ubuntu-desktop-course

The source is huge (712MB, lots of images in a large book), so grab a cup of tea, and when you get back you will have the latest version of the content, hot and well-brewed This is a great set of materials if you are offering informal training. Corrections and additions would be most welcome, just push your branch up to Launchpad and request a merge of your changes.