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.

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