A couple of rants about Launchpad

[Christopher Chan]

> 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:
>   
Nah. Like I said, I know squat about the Ubuntu community. The 
environment for Centos and OpenSolaris is pretty different.
>   
>> 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.
>
>   
Yeah, I see where things going...after reading the next part.
>> 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.
>
>   

Yup. Way too many hobbyists on certain lists and channels.


Is there one for system administrators and the like?