Wishlist Ubuntu
I was on the Ubuntu forums yesterday checking out a couple of threads and it struck me that we still haven’t managed to get out of a weird feeling that the amorphous developer community surrounding Ubuntu somehow owes the users who post wishlist threads a free ride.
For instance in one thread there is a general complaint that developers are not doing enough new things for lucid, or not enough testing, or enough stabilisation. When in fact the developers are doing exactly the right amount of development and exactly the right amount of work, based upon what their own needs and feelings are.
Of course this part is hard to understand for users that have been told that Ubuntu is a free lunch. Developers are under no obligation to do anything unless paid to do so. It doesn’t matter how many wishlist threads there are, few developers are ever going these things for ideas and I wonder if it’s actually a cry for help that these users don’t know how to get involved. I’m reminded of this phrase:
“Too many Chefs and not enough Cooks”
Yes FOSS gives you the power to be your own Chef, to say what you like and don’t like, to use what you find useful and to dismiss anything you don’t. But along with that it gives you the responsibility to be your own cook too. You have to work at what you need and it’s only useful to complain when your hoping to strike up a decent and productive discussion.
Perhaps this is why the Opportunistic Developer project is important, to try and convince more Chefs to get down and do some of the grunt work in solving their problems. I just wish there was an Opportunistic Payment project that allows people who can’t contribute time, to at least be able to push development forward with good old fashioned money.
Thoughts?
Tags: development, Ubuntu, wishlist
“Too many Chiefs and not enough Native Americans”.
For a program called Alchemy I had an idea that I suggested on the forum. I then had to write a blog post to describe why this would be useful.
Too many times I see people writing “Implement feature X or I’ll go back to Windows. kthxbai” (especially in Songbird comments). What I think some people don’t realise is how to contribute to software development. Ideas are worth very little, but strategies and blueprints for implementation help best. Sure, creating these blueprints can take a lot of time but that’s software development: time consuming. I took the time/chance to create a blueprint and it paid off. I think more users who want features to be implemented could do the same.
Of course if you ask Jono Bacon, he’d say that’s exactly what happened with Ground Control. He wrote a specification for what he wanted and even got me on the phone to make sure it was doable and then as a developer I felt I had all the information to really achieve the goal.
Martin,
“Free-rideism” runs rampant on the forums.
What we’re seeing is a case of “learned helplessness”. The sad reality is that regular humans coming in from proprietary platforms really never had a voice in the design of their software. And when it comes to development, not only did they never have a voice, they never even had a whisper. They did however have forums before, where the normal behaviour was to “yell and scream” in the hopes of getting the attention of developers carefully hidden behind the walls of corperia.
Enter Ubuntu: Culture change.
Brainstorm is a great way to engage the “previously silent” and Launchpad is an even better way. As Ubuntu grows and becomes mainstream, regular humans will outnumber developers by an even more vast scale so promoting and lowering the barrier of entry to the use of these tools will become a matter of paramount importance.
The Opportunistic Developer project is a great step towards lowering the barriers for future developers. What we need to back this though is a way to get the entire community more engaged. I’m talking about those that have no idea where to look for what.
I’ve been advocating the further integration of well-designed tools like Brainstorm and Launchpad into the Ubuntu desktop experience. Let’s make it easier for everyone to contribute as constructively as possible, lowering the barrier to participation so low that people might not even realize that they are contributing
.
Cheers,
Randall
Ubuntu Vancouver Buzz Generator
I was going to write a longer response, but Randall did a nice job of expressing what I was thinking. I’ll only add that it isn’t the same people making these complaints year after year in the forums–we work hard to try to educate people, and most learn even if few become active with Launchpad and now Brainstorm, etc. We simply have a constant stream of new people, which is a wonderful problem to have. Some of our current teachers once started out as complainers.
Interesting ideas! I had a similar thought, but integrating it into the browser. So, for the default firefox homepage you could have sections that show the most popular/recent ideas on the brainstorm, the newest application, latest news from Canonical or even latest bugs. You could probably also have a daily voting system on things that affect future distributions of Ubuntu
It of course depends on Yahoo/Google allowing this, but it’d be a step towards bringing the community to the desktop
You have a very good point here: the most difficult part of writing software is not producing the code, it’s producing the spec and you don’t have to be a developer to do this. One way to deal with this would be to direct those users to Brainstorm and ask them to check for similar ideas and vote for them, add their own if it doesn’t exist and/or start a blueprint. I spend a lot of time at work with users who have no idea of how complex it is to produce software and who think that saying “I need this feature” is enough to get it done. I’ve found that asking them to explain in details what they require and to guide them through the process of writing specs 1) removes the confrontational element as it involves them, 2) makes them realise how complex it is to cater for other users’ needs who may not have the same requirements and 3) helps developers focus on development.
Good idea! Why don’t you start a blueprint on brainstorm?
I don’t mind paying for software, I mind software being nonFree.
Anyone should be able to spend $100, get a nice printed Ubuntu CD and sleeve, and have their bugs prioritized.
How effective is Brainstorm really? How many popular ideas from Brainstorm carry over to become good specifications and end up as priorities at UDS?
-jef
I completely agree. Getting your problems prioritised is the main attraction to funding development IMO.
> Too many times I see people writing “Implement feature X or I’ll go back to Windows. kthxbai”
Yeah, that’s irritating. It’s basically a silly form of extortion, which aside from being quite rude to the developers is also completely ineffective. Users need educated to not do this. If anything it tends to achieve the opposite of their objective, because it turns the developers off.
To combat the “free-riderism” it helps to talk not in terms of money but of “value flow”.
In traditional proprietary software, users are the source of value in the form of cash which they pay for software that meets their needs. This cash covers the cost of the developer salaries to write the code that increases the software’s value for those users. Since the code has to be written before the users can buy it, a businessman has to front the cash in speculation that his appraisal of what users need is correct and that he’ll make a handsome profit. He believes that making the software closed source could help him reduce risk of competition. Once the money is paid, the businessman may not have an incentive to add any more features since it would add to his costs without enhancing the profit.
So, every user who pays for the software is indirectly part of the value flow in the proprietary software model. They can have some influence on the development, if they express their needs early and clearly enough, but no control.
With open source, it works much differently. Patches or other contributions directly enhance the software’s value for the people who made the contribution. Users who make contributions like these are thus directly in the value flow. They have strong influence and (shared) control over the development. Users who can’t or don’t make contributions are not part of the value flow, and do not have control and quite minimal influence.
There are lots of ways to contribute to an open source project. Software patches are the most obvious way, but not the only way.
Sounds pretty close to what you get with the advanced support contract:
http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=529
However, this kind of support is more geared towards solving a specific user’s problem with any means possible, rather than prioritizing development work.
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/implemented_ideas/ <- Not many
Firstly, I want to say how much I appreciate all the work you are doing toward making Ubuntu easier to develop for with Ground Control. Jono has also made a big impact this release with Lernid. Still, I have to say that becoming a “chef” for Ubuntu is very difficult. I know, because I’ve tried.
I’m kind of old. I did machine language, assembly and BASIC in the late-70s/early-80s during high school and university, but didn’t do much of anything outside of some database and web stuff after that.
Although I have a full-time non-programming job that keeps me busy, I’ve tried several times in the last couple of years to get started with Python on Ubuntu in my spare time, but have been stymied by out-of-date tutorials where even cutting and pasting code failed to work for me. What libraries are still supported? I’m STILL not sure about Glade vs. GTKBuilder.
I have never developed for either Windows or OS X (my programming pre-dating them), but looking at the developer pages for both system, those platforms offer me tutorials and videos on how to get started. The Ubuntu Developer page tells me about packaging and some governance information. I’m left to Google for … what … PyGTK? Seed? Vala? C? GTK#? (I know that Shuttleworth prefers Python because I remember his announcements after 4.10 about Canonical’s prefered language for development, but no new user would know that information.)
You can read my post here: http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/2010/02/making-myself-clear-about-ubuntu.html
In light of your post, you can disregard anything I say and I won’t feel at all upset or threatened.
p.s. I also posted a month or two ago about how Ubuntu was doing _exactly the right things_ in planning for Lucid’s release.
I think there needs to be a really easy and efficient way of contributing money to Ubuntu and FOSS development. I contributed one suggestion to this brainstorm idea.
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23449/
I bet there are lots of people who’d like to help out, but would rather donate money than time.
I think you raise some good issues there.
I think in this case Canonical should start to push Python (and probably C) as their main programming language and possibly even go as far as offering paid support for it or training workshops.
I’m not even sure if that list of implemented ideas says anything about the effectiveness of Brainstorm. That list just looks like an archiving of implemented features that happen to be ideas..it doesn’t tell me anything about how Brainstorm helped lift up any of those ideas via its voting mechnism. For all I know all the implemented ideas are of mediocre to low popularity in the context of Brainstorm itself.
How does Brainstorm interact with the established Ubuntu release planning process? Are leading popular ideas from Brainstorm brought forward to be turned into workable specifications at UDS? Do active Canonical developers seed Brainstorm with ideas looking to see how popular they are? Or is Brainstorm being actively ignored in the planning and design process?
I think there is a huge problem with the routes to contribution. There is a zero-requirement entry to Launchpad and Brainstorm, meaning that the small proportion of useful contributions are swamped by noise.
Ubuntu would benefit from a route to contribution that filtered interested and committed third parties capable of significant contributions. An excellent example of filtered contribution would be the recent article on kernel patching in Linux Format magazine (http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/archives).
I’m no developer but I’ve seen the brainstorm affect the name of the software centre and its functions/features and the proposed . The list of actual implemented features could be larger.