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Tim Lee

Shuttleworth Speaks at Google

Via Patri Friedman, here’s a video of a very interesting talk Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth gave at Google:

It gives a nice overview of the current state of the Ubuntu community. He makes it clear that emphasis in free software discussions on “community” is not just a rhetorical flourish. His team spends an enormous amount of time and effort communicating and coordinating with the hundreds of different projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution.

I also found this interesting:

There are lots of people out there now who work with free software, but they work in a slightly proprietary way. They have their own internal view of the piece of free software, but they want to keep track of what’s going on in that community. And more often than not, nowadays especially, they’re getting smart to the fact that it’s not good to hoard indefinitely. There are things that are strategic and you want to keep internal, but more often than not, that’s a rolling window, and you want to push code out. And they’re learning that if you want to push a tarball [An archived file with code changes] out six months or a year later, with very nicely written document that this is a whole list of bugs you’ve fixed in that tarball, then they’re just going to end up fixing those bugs again, because people can’t integrate that.

This echoes the point I made last month: for a company that uses free software intensively, a strong relationship with the relevant developer community is often quite valuable. Much of the value in a free software project doesn’t rest in the code, but in the network of people and relationships that together produce and maintain that code.

December 1, 2006 | Comments |

  • That quote sounds archaic. The norm is for the public to have (read) access to the same revision control system developers use. I can't think of a significant free software project that only occasionally releases a tarball off the top of my head.

    I did listen to some of the video and found a couple things interesting:

    * Focus on preinstallation (very welcome), but only outside the U.S. Shuttleworth claimed that in the U.S. PC market margins are too tight to support anything other than Windows installation (one person who complains after mistakenly ordering Linux eats up the margin from 10 customers he said). This sounds bogus to me. a) are margins really thinner in the U.S. PC market than elsewhere? b) it would seem easy to segreate linux orders, e.g., only available through linux.dell.com (which does exist, but only leads to a few (desktop) systems available with Linux, or at least without Windows).

    * Claim toward the end that once open source reaches feature parity with proprietary software, the former's superior innovativeness becomes readily apparent, and the Linux desktop is reaching that stage.
  • Mike, I think you're getting thing backwards: Shuttleworth isn't talking about an open source project releasing its project as a tarball every six months. He's talking about an outside developer with a private version of an open source project submitting bugfixes to the project every six months. His point is that if those bugfixes are too stale, then the community won't be able to integrate them into the codebase, which will force the outside developer to fix the bugs again the next time he upgrades to a new version of the project.
  • Tim, you're completely right, I misread. The outside version need not even be private, just stale, which is the case with many distros. It's great that Ubuntu is trying to avoid this problem, though I wonder how they'll do so with their "long term support" versions.
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