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30 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Yeah, I totally agree. All of those Firefox community developers are totally unproductive. A new version of Firefox has come out in ages!
- fluoro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"The idea behind Launchpad is centralization: getting developers together so that they can talk about pieces of software as a package, instead of individual pieces of software onto themselves....Ironically, sometimes the best way to manage something Open Source is with Closed Source ideologies."
I disagree that closed-source is the best way to manage it. Have we forgotten BitKeeper so soon? - fluoro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Mr. Shuttleworth, why don't you open-source Launchpad and let the community develop the features it needs into it?
- scotty2012, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7how about a collaboration of open source programmers collaborating an open source collaboration software?
- mtzmtulivu, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9
whats wrong with sending an email asking where a particular project is and how soon its going to be released, if ever?
asking developers to release their projects based on release schedule of a single distro will be a disservice to other distros and i think it will do more harm than good overall.
On of the strengths of OSS development is that it allows parallel movement of software ..what he is asking is having a sequential movement and this will not be good overall (just imagine gnome holding out on a new release waiting for ubuntu release) ..if you use ubuntu, it will be great but not to the rest of us who dont - ardenr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yes, because productive people only give a ***** about money.
As true as your comment is for some people, the other people call them *****... And I'm gonna take a wild guess here... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I agree and it is ironic considering that Shuttleworth/Ubuntu doesn't have a problem with other "proprietary tainted" technology. OTHOH, maybe he wanted to keep the "proprietary tainted" tech to a bare minimum.
- schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3> whats wrong with sending an email asking where a particular project is and how soon its going to be released, if ever?
Sysadmins need to schedule upgrades and such.
> asking developers to release their projects based on release schedule of a single distro will be a disservice to other distros and i think it will do more harm than good overall.
Edgy edges one's mind. - newbill123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Because of the almost non-existent coupling between projects, Wouldn't an interoperable bug database communication format make schedule slips and coupled development problems more obvious and more painful?
If you depend on the work of another project (e.g. the APR library), then you need a developer working and integrating their work regardless of that team's schedule. If you need particular features added, then get your developers working on the project or at least dumping back their changes to the project for others to integrate into the trunk.
If you are just wanting to offer the opportunity for other projects to integrate with yours (a distribution, a library, a front-end) then all you can really do is be public, logical, and consistent about your project's release. Make deadlines clear and stick to them. Let the other projects decide what the benefits of your project are (publicity? default ease of install?) and whether or not they'll go out of their way to meet your schedule.
Would consistent bug reporting formats help this? Not if Bugzilla databases are any indication. It appears that "one size fits all" is just asking for trouble. Different projects track their problems and progress significantly differently. Even fields in bug databases take on different meanings in different projects. It wouldn't be just frustrating to encourage documentation standardization on everyone, it would be futile.
Start with what YOU have control over: your code, your goals, and your schedule. Publicize it. Work with others. And if anyone wants to coordinate a release deadline, give them your standards for bugs and deadlines to comply with. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"whats wrong with sending an email asking where a particular project is and how soon its going to be released, if ever?"
It requires asking, and then answering. It'd be much easier if we could just "peek" in and see how far the project is coming. Asking/Answering questions often is the biggest distraction to a software developer, trying to explain choices instead of just making them and getting on with the project can often be the difference between a project being on time and a project being months late.
"asking developers to release their projects based on release schedule of a single distro will be a disservice to other distros and i think it will do more harm than good overall."
That's just it, he's not saying "Let's ask developers to release at the same time". He's saying "Let's ask developers to collaborate better." Right now, as the Open Software world is, each project is its own little microcosm, and nobody's communicating outside of that microcosm except the Distros, the place where the software's actually shipping. In order to get a piece of software out of its microcosm and into a Distro, it requires some insight into where the project is going and how fast it's going to get there (as Distros have schedules, and software developers may or may not). By allowing better collaboration, we can *tell* if a project is going to be done, without needing to bug the developers. Distros can feed back bug reports to the software developers without trying to hunt them down through email and instant messenger and IRC and snail mail. This is the biggest failing of Open Source: realizing that most of the people using your software don't even know that YOU exist, but probably know what Distro they're running, and thusly go to them for help. If the Distros and the individual components can't get along, there's no point in including the component, as nobody can support it correctly. None of this is required to be tied down by a schedule, just a common point where people can talk and be relatively assured they will be answered in a timely fashion (and this means more communal sites, and hopefully centralized Bugzilla, something that should have existed from the get-go). - gravityboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@newbill123
So very true. I do work for a linux distro and I also do work with the upstream provider. While there are a few of the upstream people who watch our bug reports as they come in, a very large number of the reports we get aren't related to the software so much as the packaging or the distro-specific incompatibilities. These sorts of bugs tend to waste their time. If they have to go through these bug reports for each and every linux distro and version, it becomes a nightmare that prevents real work from getting done. It's really the distro maintainer's job to forward relevant bugs to upstream, thus acting as a filter for the problems. Mark's vision sounds lovely, but I don't think it's very practical, which is also probably why launchpad has failed to gain any usage outside of Ubuntu itself thus far. - truck87bp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Shuttleworth: Please tell us what component's your Ubuntu power desktop has in it. Part for part.
We all want to build the same machine....3 to 5 different desktops and laptops in your office would really be appreciated.
Thanx - cantormath, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2the only thing we need is hardware support for Linux.......
- ishmal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@geminitojanus (for some reason this didn't get nested) ^^
Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of multi-project umbrella organizations where they are beneficial. The "core" projects of Gnome and KDE are very intra-dependent, and need close cooperation among them. freedesktop.org, tigris.org, and jivesoftware.org, are good examples of synchronicity. And other groups exist only virtually; not officially organized in any proper form, yet have a close association because of their common missions and overlapping membership.
I'm just leery of the way he described it in his post. A project might not want to give up its autonomy for a larger goal to which it is not allied. - ishmal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Notice that the cooperation, as described, is one-way. Don't forget the "co" part. What would the ueber-manager give in return to the individual projects? Like a promise to bundle a given version of a shared lib? Or bundle additional non-mainstream libs? I don't think such a bargain would ever happen.
So, really, what he is describing is not cooperation, but conformity.
Also, he assumes that Ubuntu and Gnome are the intended final destinations of these projects. Many projects want to be as platform-agnostic as possible. They do not want to be constrained by any particular framework or interface guidelines. And they want to be able to run on Gnome, KDE, Windows, OSX, and other scary places. How can Ubuntu assist in -that-? - nxusername, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If only there was an easy to implement open source alternative similar to Exchange maybe they could communicate better.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The "uber-manager" returns to the developer thousands upon potential thousands of users worth of debug information and bug reports. Software gets better by developers listening to the problems of their users and tailoring the software to fit them better. He makes no assumptions that Ubuntu and Gnome are the intended targets, just that they're good role models for other projects to look up to (they're incredibly well managed and vastly productive).
The kinds of things Shuttleworth is talking about would benefit _any_ operating system, and in his very descriptive paragraph of Microsoft's own development, keys out the fact that the Redmond Teams already collaborate this way. After all, there's no point filing a bug report if it's never going to be read, and most people can't be bothered with trying to hunt down a developer just to tell him "hey, your software has a buffer overflow that causes my workflow to be interrupted, here's a patch I developed because I was bored" (I say most, because I've found myself in that position before). They'd rather just hit "Send Error Report" and rest assured someone is going to read it and know what to do with it. - macewan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is he referring to paid developers?
- elv1s77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This just in from the "No *****" files...
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4The idea behind Launchpad is centralization: getting developers together so that they can talk about pieces of software as a package, instead of individual pieces of software onto themselves. Open Sourcing it would decentralize it (everyone would start their own Launchpads and you'd have to go around and register with all of them to get the same information), and thusly defeat the point of Launchpad. Besides, Launchpad isn't that difficult a piece of software to develop, and the big independent distros have tools like it already, so Open Sourcing it would not benefit them (only the smaller distros that aren't very well supported/maintained/developed). A web developer with some forum/CMS backgrounds could easily drum up a version of it that works best for their distro.
Ironically, sometimes the best way to manage something Open Source is with Closed Source ideologies. - lampshade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well I think the interesting point that he is making that is different than what has been said before, is that he is pointing out the problem is between projects, not inside the projects. In other words there should be more collaboration between gnome and kde or Firefox and Gnome or Rhythmbox and Totem or etc
I think that is actually pretty insightful. - subgeniusd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That 's right. Generally the overall desktop enviroments of the top 20 distros are polished, pleasant and easy to use.
Remember "it's the economy, stupid!" then "it's the battery, stupid!" ?
For us the mantra needs to be "it's the hardware, stupid!" or "it's the drivers, stupid!" - GameGod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wasn't saying that all open source developers suck, I was saying that people need to be reminded to properly comment their code to make other peoples' lives easier.
- tehmoth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1thats because those developers are used to the linux way of doing things. Not all open source developers suck.
- GameGod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1How about getting software developers to properly comment their code? From my experience with open source software development, this is always the first complaint that anyone has when they try to borrow code from another project.
- gravityboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1To be fair, Mark funds the creation of bzr which helps prevent the exact problem that bitkeeper created. On the other hand, trying to get everyone to trap all their bug history and so forth in a proprietary system like launchpad doesn't really inspire much confidence.
- JQP123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The more Shuttleworth talks, the more apparent it becomes that the only real advantage he has is money.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2This is news?
Everyone knows this already. - flaire, on 10/12/2007, -12/+4why not use Microsoft Project?
- monergism, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3You can't expect productivity from the unpaid.
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