A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:58:51 +0800
Chan Chung Hang Christopher <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:

[re: ubuntu-users list]

> The list says: Technical support questions only.
> 
> Can I use apt-get to upgrade from 8.04 -> 8.10 is a technical support 
> question.

That part is correct...
> 
> Since it says technical support, I assume some official presence of some 
> sort. If there are none, okay.

Not sure where you get the idea that Ubuntu mailing lists imply
"official" presence, or indeed what would constitute "official"
presence in the context of an Open Source operating system. I think you
are talking about support from Canonical, which is of course available,
at a price... See:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

with particular reference to:

"Buy Professional Support Services"

http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid

> I guess that goes for the ubuntu channel on freenode too then.

The Ubuntu channels on Freenode are run by volunteers. There will be
times when you will "meet" Ubuntu developers in #ubuntu, for example,
but as you would probably realise, user support is pretty
time-intensive (not to mention often thankless  and frequently
frustrating). Developers understandably tend to devote most of their
time to, well, development. There are routinely more than a thousand
people in #ubuntu, by the way, just to give you some idea of the
magnitude of the potential time sink.

Combine this with a tendency for help seekers to jump on anyone who
looks "offficial" and flood them with questions... You see where this
is going by now, I hope.

> I have been on the opensolaris channel and you get to meet Sun engineers 
> there. I thought things might be similar with Ubuntu.

See above. How large is the opensolaris channel, and what proportion of
those using it are either in IT or very knowledgeable about
Unix/Solaris? 

Compare and contrast the fact that the majority of participators and
help-seekers in #ubuntu are so-called "hobbyists", and many of the
questions are from people very new to the operating system, who often
have little or no *nix background. Explaining procedures to such people
can be both time-consuming and (often) infuriating. On the whole,
helpers do a pretty good job of remaining polite and helpful ;-)

I hope you see the point I am making here.

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 8.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html
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