Should Ubuntu announcements seem like a comedy show? As far as HUD goes, I like the idea. I just find the idea of it replacing menus completely to be bonkers mad.

Over the years in the Ubuntu community I’ve grown to dislike this particular metaphor. Not just because we cant seem to learn anything useful from it to enable our community to succeed, but also because its a very weird way to look at the problem. The problem is not number of users or products sold per year, but how your ideas are spread through the population by other people.

For example if we were to think of the chasm as just about getting the majority of people to use your product, then we can consider Apple to have failed to cross the chasm in their desktop computer market. But if you change the concept of success to “people think and talk about” my product then apple is wildly successful. Even the legions of windows users aspire to and understand ownership of an Apple computer. Many of these people will have never used a Apple computer in their lives but will actually change
their way of thinking about desktop computers in order to incorporate Macs into that world view.

So what is the role of advertising? Well that depends on how good the advertising is by how much of an effect advertising has on the population. So if you produce a perfect advert, it can only have a certain effect on the people who see it and then you have to run it a lot or hope those that saw the advert will pass on the ideas your trying to communicate. Since adverts are known for being fairly weak forms of idea transmission you would have to run a lot of adverts for a long period of time to basically force the population to adopt a new set of ideas. This is also known as “throwing money at the problem” since you don’t have to do much leg work with your message in order to get it out there.

What is a strong form of idea transmission is word of mouth. This is easy you might think, anyone who uses your product would be naturally inclined to tell their friends about it! Ah, just because a set of ideas find a home doesn’t mean they’ll find a good way of spreading. You will get a set of customers who enjoy using your product, but no one outside of that group will really know about it. This forms them chasm in the metaphor mentioned above. Its created by a reluctance of your users to communicate your ideas
to the people they know.

As an example i present to you RedHat. Way back before Ubuntu, it was very uncool to run a server with linux, only really technical people did so and usually not with the knowledge of their bosses. Then a company comes along and spreads the idea that Linux can be brilliant on the server, they’ve done something to it or cast a spell of invincibility or something. But even if Linux was exactly the same technically, it was now completely different and new in the eyes of many more people.

The technical users started telling their bosses, other professionals, the word got out not because the technology changed, but because the message was sent with a renewed vitality and conviction that it was new, improved, important and could save you a bag of money to boot.

And that particular war drum has been beating ever since.

Then comes Ubuntu many years later. The same thing happens in fact, Ubuntu creates hope and a renewed vitality for spreading the message. “hey did you know you could run Ubuntu on your desktop computer?” it became cool to tell your friends you used Ubuntu, that maybe they should give it a try or let you
give them a try with a helping hand. Ubuntu wasn’t massively better that Mandrake, Mandriva or SuSE, it was just getting out a clearer and more easily spread message.

Spreading the meme over the chasm

What we’ve done is incredible. Many more people run a Free Desktop now than in 2004. But the message got old over the years, the faith and the vitality has waned and public relations issues have made the message of spreading Ubuntu to everyone you know less appealing and seem more risky.

Nothings really changed. Ubuntu is really getting better and better as a technology, but its message, its “meme spreading” capabilities aren’t what they used to be. New products like Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu phones are interesting and renew some of the flagging faith and in a bring back the old religion in seeing a Free and Open Source platform flourish somewhere.

We secularists tend to think of religion and faith as nasty, dirty emotionally charged system and we should focus instead on proving with data that we are the best and only supporting Ubuntu if it really is the best. But that’s not how humans work, we’re far more emotional and biased and working with that is what produces this chasm effect in the market; if you’re before the chasm then the bias is working against you, if you’re over the chasm then the bias is working for you.

We want to take on the world, and it can be done. Ubuntu can be installed on every computer within a mile of
where you live, that there is nothing it cant do without a bit of persistence and faith that Ubuntu can work. Each and every member of the community is a mass of human interaction; chance after chance to spread our ideas and get the message out there that “you may not use Ubuntu, but think of Ubuntu when you think of computer desktops”.

My special shout out has to go to a tour-de-force in Ubuntu passion, stead fast community support and on going involvement in any and all LoCo teams she’s within ten miles of. Of course I’m talking about Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2). Thank you pleia2 for your wonderful involvement and may we benifit from your wisdom for many years to come.

Note: I know I’m not terribly good at capturing people yet, but with practice I can get better, if you’d like to be a test model, send me a message and I will sketch away.

A warning to those new to web stats: they can be unreliable and not very scientific, there could be many reasons for the following data, in addition this is a limited data sample using data from people’s browsers who visit wikipedia.

Taking data just for Ubuntu in the months just previous to a new release. So March and September of each year to give lagards 5 months to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, I put together the data to compare the past 4 releases and over their in context previous stats: Download PDF Here Spreedsheet Here

Jeff politely says “Ubuntu has been trending downward”, but to me over the cadence of the release it looks worse.

The other interesting comparison and the reason for the graph is the percentage of users upgrading to the next release. You can see 66% upgraded to Karmic while 18% stayed behind on Jaunty. For the LTS release Lucid we get a strong 69% upgrade while 15% stayed put, Maverick was still quite strong even coming after an LTS release with 42% of users upgrading and 41% staying with the LTS as expected. But with Natty we have a huge tumble to 13% of users upgrading and 21% staying with the pre-unity 10.10 release as well as 49% of remaining users sticking to the LTS release.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, what do you think we should talk about at UDS to try and pick up the adoption a bit and get Ubuntu on track for world domination? Are we failing and should we just pack up and install Android? Your thoughts as always below…

Update: Thanks to the comments about the Firefox user string, it does appear as if 11.04 was the start of the great Mozilla bleaching, removing any identifying marks from the browser agent. So all those identified as using Ubuntu 11.04 are actually using Chromium or one of the other browsers. The last data point is impossible to gauge now and it’s probably not that low. Still an estimated 15% of users aren’t using Firefox, not bad.

It’s not so bad when people move away from Ubuntu and move to Fedora or Debian, but it breaks my heart when people move to Windows XP or 7. Hey they gave Ubuntu a go right? But we couldn’t keep them.

Is anyone else doing more fire-fighting with instability issues in Ubuntu? I know all of my computers have issues with Ubuntu, unresolved, although I can cope or fix them as they come up. Not something everyone can do. It worries me because Ubuntu was our fresh brand, to try and get out there and if we bugger it up we’ll have to make a whole new brand to get away from bad experiences people have had.

Thoughts?

• Bug fixes for administrators and other infinate time periods
• Uses gnome’s SessionManager API to logout instead of SIGKILL
• Pauses a logout until logging of logout event has completed
• Correctly logs methods of logging out (session timeout, logoff button, off switch)

You can get your hands on the PPA and give it try here: DoctorMo’s Greeter PPA, Let me know what you think below in the comments.

The brief asked to use some of the tag lines and terms which have been successful in the past as well as attempting to invoke questions in the reader so they are prompted to ask and become more interested in exactly what all this free and open source stuff is.

We reused some sembrandolibertad.org.ar graphics as well to give it a nice family feel. I wanted to match the similar styles found in earthy crunchy markets.

If this is successful as a target, then I could try using these at other earthy crunchy shops. You know the kind, with herbs, buckets of flour and great cheese.

Update: Updated evil computer to be more friendly, rounded and smiling and link to svg added. Licensed as Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike.

Thoughts or ideas? Comment below.

Si Nini by Johantri

Only just today I have noticed that the Canonical contributor agreement has changed from a copyright assignment to a broad license. Creators get to keep their copyright and Canonical doesn’t have it’s hands tied by the GPL. I’m not sure how long it’s been this way, but I am happy to see it has changed.

Balancing this difficult policy with the views and feelings of the wider community is an unenvious job, various people in a number of different Free Software communities try their best to get solid legal frameworks in place, while maintaining the rights of contributors with the need to keep things protected in the open.

I’m certainly happier to contribute under the harmony agreement, than I was under the old CA. Even though this does permit Canonical to make proprietary versions of the software. The main factor there being that their reputation would be shredded so quickly as to damage the very fabric of the community endeavour.

What are your thoughts?