Keynote
Mark Shuttleworth kicked off this week’s UDS with a couple of interesting messages.
First was the focus on quality now that we’ve got a fair way through both the cadence and design pushes which Mark has been keenly interested in. We’re told to be super attentive to little issues and to demonstrate this Mark got together all of the best Canonical people involved in the Maverick release and gave them ice cream as a special treat. He then revealed that one of the bowels of ice cream had a fly in it. “This sweet ice cream doesn’t look so sweet now” he said. We need to pay attention to all the little flies like flickering screens and slow shell use because no matter how sweet we make Ubuntu, it won’t be attractive if there is even one fly in there. “we can do much much more, and be much much better”
The Unity interface will be coming to the default desktop. Thanks to demand and feedback the unity interface will be enabled for all users who have the hardware support and it’s being promoted as an easy to use interface. I agree with this, I’ve had the netbook launcher on my mum’s desktop for years now.
There was a note about Ubuntu’s relationship with the Gnome project. Part of this was the emphasise that Unity is a shell on Gtk/Gnome just as much as gnome shell will be, everything is the same Gnome in all other regards. The second part was a short clip of Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the Judians People’s Front is raving about how their not any of the other groups. This is trying to show us that groups that are trying to change the world too often focus on the very small differences between themselves instead of the main goals. The main message is: “We’re here to fight the Romans”
I was personally very happy with the mention of Ubuntu economics. Mark affirmed that the Ubuntu Software Center will support Free and Open Source software sponsorship where anyone can push money into projects and programs in order to move development forward. Improving the position of Free Software projects in the software center and allowing non contributing members to still contribute to projects. I know this is a bit of a dirty subject to a lot of people, but economics is _really_ important for Free Software and we ignore it at our peril.
Content Media Library
A really interesting project to create a multimedia sharing and collaboration platform which involves sharing and streaming your content around. It’s early days but it’s looking like Shotwell, Ubuntu One and PiTiVi are all excited about the possibilities presented here.
Development Learning Events
We’re discussing the organisation of further events to teach people development skills and introduce them to key technologies in the FOSS ecosystem. Brought up was linking up more of the existing documentation, making screencasts and having the information available on the project pages. Having development sessions which focus on how to get involved with projects rather than the basics on some technology was also brought up.