Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

Nothing in yesterday’s post about inviting members of the community into some of the projects we work on in confidence implied that the Ubuntu development process is becoming less open.

Ubuntu set the standard for transparency as a company producing a distribution a long time ago, when we invited anybody who showed a passion and competence to have commit and upload rights, a strong contrast with the Fedora policy of the time, which required you to be a Red Hat employee. We continue that tradition with a leadership Community Council that has no requirement of Canonical employment, unlike our competitors. And we invite everyone to participate in the design and development of Ubuntu, which happens in public at UDS (week after next, as it happens) and online on IRC and Launchpad.

Every member of a community works on personal projects. Our competitors do so too. There are any number of changes thrust upon Gnome by Red Hat for example, that then get whitewashed as “maintainers discretion” or “designers design”. There are any number of reveals, prototypes, patents and other decisions that are taken in private, by all members of all communities. Even amongst volunteers its normal to see someone saying “I’ve been hacking on this for a while, now I want some feedback”.

What I offered to do, yesterday, spontaneously, is to invite members of the community in to the things we are working on as personal projects, before we are ready to share them. This would mean that there was even less of Ubuntu that was NOT shaped and polished by folk other than Canonical – a move that one would think would be well received. This would make Canonical even more transparent.

So please disregard the commentary by folk who assumed that the public discussion of Ubuntu development would somehow change. Instead, I hope you will welcome the idea that even Canonical’s most exciting initiatives will now be open to participation by members of the community. And I challenge you to find another place where you can participate at EVERY level in the design and construction of a free platform that is used by millions of people.

Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.

This would provide early community input and review, without spoiling the surprise when we think the piece is ready. It would allow community members to work on something that will be widely covered at release (at least, on OMG ;-))

The skunkworks approach has its detractors. We’ve tried it both ways, and in the end, figured out that critics will be critics whether you discuss an idea with them in advance or not. Working on something in a way that lets you refine it till it feels ready to go has advantages: you can take time to craft something, you can be judged when you’re ready, you get a lot more punch when you tell your story, and you get your name in lights (though not every headline is one you necessarily want ;)).

So, we thought we would extend the invitation to people who trust us and in whom we have reason to trust, to work together on some sexy 13.04 surprises. The projects range from webby (javascript, css, html5) to artistic (do you obsess about kerning and banding) to scientific (are you a framerate addict) to glitzy (pixel shader sherpas wanted) to privacy-enhancing (how is your crypto?) to analytical (big daddy, big brother, pick your pejorative). But they all make the Ubuntu experience better for millions of users, they are all groundbreaking in free software, they will all result in code under the GPL (or an existing upstream license if they are extensions to existing projects). No NDA’s needed but we will need to trust you not to talk in your sleep ;). We’ll also need to trust you to write code that is thorough and tested, stuff you’ll be as proud of as we are of the rest of the Ubuntu experience. Of course.

There’s also plenty going on that doesn’t warrant the magician’s reveal. But if you are game for a bit of the spotlight, bring some teflon and ping Michael Hall at mhall119 on Freenode.

The dash to Copenhagen combined with a dash across the Atlantic has me righteously ramfeezled, but the roisterous reception we got at the OpenStack summit (congrats, stackers, on a respectable razzmatazz of rugible cloud enthusiasm) made it worthwhile. A quick shout out to the team behind the Juju gooooey, that puts a whole new face on cloud agility – rousing stuff.

Nevertheless, it’s way past time to root our next rhythmic release in some appropriate adjective.

The challenge, of course, has been the number of entirely inappropriate adjectives that presented themselves along the way. Go read the dictionary. R is just loaded with juicy stuff we can’t use without invoking the radge wrath of the rinky-dink chorus. Sigh.

Nevertheless, somewhere between the risibly rambunctious and the reboantly ran-tan, the regnally rakish and the reciprocornously rorty, there was bound to be a good fit. Something radious or rident, something to rouse our rowthy rabble.

So what will we be up to in the next six months? We have two short cycles before we’re into the LTS, and by then we want to have the phone, tablet and TV all lined up. So I think it’s time to look at the core of Ubuntu and review it through a mobile lens: let’s measure our core platform by mobile metrics, things like battery life, number of running processes, memory footprint, and polish the rough edges that we find when we do that. The tighter we can get the core, the better we will do on laptops and the cloud, too.

So bring along a Nexus 7 if you’re coming to Copenhagen, because it makes a rumpty reference for our rootin’ tootin’ radionic razoring. The raving Rick and his merry (wo)men will lead us to a much leaner, sharper, more mobile world. We’ll make something… wonderful, and call it the Raring Ringtail. See you there soon.

Update: for clarity, this ringtail is no laconic lemur, it’s a ringtail raccoon. However, for the sake of sanity, it’s not a raring ringtail raccoon, just a raring ringtail. There.