mon journal - par Vincent - Canonical & Upstream - Comments

Canonical & Upstream - genital wart treatment

genital wart treatment — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:56:50 +0100

You have got yourself a serious follower here. I really like your writing style, and especially the way you approached the subject. Crystal clear statements, compact writing and definitely inviting to other opinions as well, which is the most important. After all, the purpose of a blog is to have others react to your actions, isn’t that so?

Canonical & Upstream - Martín Soto

Martín Soto — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:58:22 +0000

Vincent: Regarding your last comment, do you really think GNOME is a good place for building consensus? I've been following the mailing lists for ages, and I don't remember a single instance where proper consensus was reached, and actions followed. The usual thing is that, whenever someone raises an (even mildly) controversial issue, a huge flame war erupts. The sad part is that such flame wars invariably die after a few days (because people grow tired of discussing "in circles", I guess) with no consensus reached or a clear action path being defined.

So, I ask again: given this situation, do you really think that the GNOME lists are the right place for defining the future of the GNOME user interface? Think of it twice. The few cool things hapenning in this area right now (I could mention Cheese, Gnome-do, and Empathy) didn't happen by consensus in any mailing list. It was just a few guys (sometimes even just one guy) having an idea, and developing it up to a point where upstream could judge it as appropriate for inclusion. And I really don't see the difference in what Shuttleworth is doing. The only thing is that he has money to support the development of his own ideas, where other people only have development skills and persuation power. But, at the end of the day, it is just the same: one guy with some ideas that must be developed, and that may or may not turn out to be good in the long run. So, we'll see what happens, but in the mean time, I don't think there is any reason to criticize Shuttelworth or Ubuntu.

Canonical & Upstream - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:04:12 +0000

Paul: I kind of agree with what you say. The thing is: in an existing community, you can't be a leader by just saying you are in a position to be a leader. You become a leader with time, based on what you did in the past.

What I understand from Mark's post is: "ok, there's a new team at Canonical, this team will work on some stuff and this will be where we are all going (because it's good)". My point is that it will likely not work well if this team doesn't work upstream.

(it certainly depends of the community -- it's more likely to work for the kernel than for GNOME, though)

Canonical & Upstream - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:56:34 +0000

Vadim: you're missing the point. If you want to be a good community player, you have to work with upstream. Just letting upstream try to follow everything you do and grab all your patches is not friendly.

Here's a concrete example: I can go and look for patches from Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, OpenSolaris, openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc. Sure. Now, I'm responsible for 5 modules. This means I have to check, periodically, if there are new interesting patches for me in at least 35 locations. It just doesn't work.

Now, most of the distributions are sending patches in bugzilla, which makes my life easier. But sometimes, I don't agree with the patch itself, or it just doesn't make sense -- and if the person who had worked on this had asked me, I could have made this person not lose some time. Isn't this b

Canonical & Upstream - Paul Kishimoto

Paul Kishimoto — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:42:24 +0000

As a student of leadership theory and an Ubuntu fan, I usually lap up the stuff that the SABDFL writes.

Something I don't see often in (free software|politics|small organizations) is a distinction between authority and leadership. Linus Torvalds, for example, has a lot of authority (commit/no commit) but actually exercises laissez-faire leadership; i.e. he does not say "for the next development kernel, we will spend 90% of our time on <blah>." This seems to be typical of free software; some people have varying degrees authority gained in a meritocratic way, but leadership is distributed and rarely concentrated in one or a few people.

There are different types of change. Various labels exist, but broadly we could say they are (1) incremental change, (2) continual-improvement change, and (3) transformative change. The last, by definition, is upheaval; things come out drastically different, people take time to adjust and are annoyed, confused or resistant in the interim, and it takes a lot of careful effort to do it right. The risks are greater for transformative change, but so are the potential benefits. The other catch is that transformative change requires strong leadership--a person or people who say, "OK, this is the way we are going, let's get there SOON."

I think Mark's post was about transformative change. Ubuntu and free software in general are more or less stuck with incremental/continual-improvement change (which have produced very good results; e.g. X is old but fantastically stable and highly polished). I think Mark realizes this, but in this instance (user interface for 9.04) he thinks the risk and difficulty of transformative change is worth the benefits--i.e. lots of reviewers and users waking up and saying, "Wow, the Linux desktop all of a sudden got really slick and sexy! Why did I ever use Windows/OS X, anyway?"

It seems you are excited by the prospect of the transformational change, but a bit worried about the strong leadership that goes with it. That kind of change can't be sustained forever, so probably after this push, user experience will once again go back to the community/upstream-driven development model, and Mark/Canonical will turn their focus to another issue. If you think, you can see this has happened repeatedly in the history of Ubuntu; the priorities for each release get strong leadership *only* during that release cycle, not before or after. For this reason, I'm certain the "B" in "SABDFL" is justified.

Canonical & Upstream - Vadim P.

Vadim P. — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:44:50 +0000

It's baffling to try and grasp why can't this "upstream" integrate openly-available code into their work, but sit there complaining.

I just can't get it.

Canonical & Upstream - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:06:14 +0000

Rob: sure, there are people who should take decisions based on the community discussions. I'm not denying that, and that's how it works. There are leaders in all communities, and they naturally emerge because of their actions.

Canonical & Upstream - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:00:55 +0000

Giacomo: I don't know a lot about the netbook remix. Actually, the only specific change I know about is the new application launcher. Sure, it's not that much of a major change made by Canonical (especially since it's a new application) -- but I'm still waiting to see the code even discussed upstream.

Why am I waiting for this? Because GNOME could have a netbook release, and this could be the base of it. In this specific case, Canonical could probably drive the change if nobody else works on it (which might not be the case). But Canonical didn't do the work upstream and I would guess that it was for business reasons (to make sure no other distro would use it before Ubuntu, eg). It might make sense from a business perspective -- although I'm not convinced it was required -- but it would have been upstream-friendlier to directly go upstream. Even starting a discussion about how GNOME could be used on netbooks could have been a good step...

Canonical & Upstream - Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:45:33 +0000

Ludovic & anonim: sure, what Novell did is a good example of what to avoid :-) I 100% agree with that and you can probably find some mail where I complain about how gnome-main-menu was announced to the community. People who followed the intlclock upstream integration also know how painful it was. And XGL is not developed anymore. So, yeah, good examples :-)

Canonical & Upstream - Rob J. Caskey

Rob J. Caskey — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:33:53 +0000

Bah, even if you have 100 "changers" someone has got to at least TRY to drive the change or you end up with too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

Canonical & Upstream - liberforce

liberforce — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:32:05 +0000

Good one, Vincent, kick him in the nuts ! :-)
I'm tired of his "I'm the one who decides for others" management. By the way, he should spend more time rewriting GNOME with Qt, and less for his megalomaniac vision of the Linux market.
derstandard.at/?url=/?id=...

Canonical & Upstream - Justin

Justin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:49:06 +0000

To be fair, Vincent wasn't at Novell when they did the Slab nor Intlclock.

Canonical & Upstream - anonim

anonim — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:48:53 +0000

<rant>
Novell did it with their enterprise distro: slab, xgl, intclock, etc. And slab is still not working 100% in distros other than Suse/Novell.
</rant>

Canonical & Upstream - FunkyM

FunkyM — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:32:23 +0000

Prototyping upstream? I'd be glad if at least those "ok-to/with-upstream" patches could be moved upstream instead of remaining exclusive to an Ubuntu package.

Canonical & Upstream - Frederic Peters

Frederic Peters — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:53:49 +0000

Ludovic: totally; the SuSE replacement for the GNOME menu is a good example of thing that should not happen again (just like the intlclock). But then Vincent is at Novell with the "work with upstream" message and that message should also be heard in the other distributions. Good weblog post then.

Canonical & Upstream - Ludovic Danigo

Ludovic Danigo — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:32:53 +0000

<provoke>
Maybe you could even put more weight on the "Do the work upstream. Even prototyping." by giving an example.
For instance, Suse 10 gnome menu ;-)
</provoke>

Canonical & Upstream - Giacomo Bordiga

Giacomo Bordiga — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:57:23 +0000

> Increasingly, though, Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu.

Thinking about "netbook remix" and all the sorroundig applications, it's not something you can "help drive": correct me if wrong, but it's just a "change" made by Canonical.

Canonical & Upstream - ethana2

ethana2 — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:34:55 +0000

Ubuntu. Change we can believe in ;)