Ubuntu Governance: Reboot?

[Alan Pope]

Hi Ben & friends,

I do plan on a longer form reply to this thread once I have considered
my thoughts. However a couple of  paragraphs jumped out at me in the
thread and I felt like I needed to reply.

I would like to thank Jono for bringing this subject up and to
everyone else for weighing in to this discussion. I think it's a
valuable discussion to have.

On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 5:17 AM, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 8:56 PM, Nathan Haines <nhaines at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> If the Ubuntu developer community came together and started working on
>> changes, the only way they don't get into Ubuntu is if Canonical starts
>> dropping packages.  It's ludicrous to say the community at large doesn't
>> have an opportunity to try new things when they're the ones doing the
>> majority of the work.
> Wrong, there are entire portions of the desktop, phone and cloud that
> only Canonical influences production decisions on. Canonical and Mark
> for that matter can decide not to accept patches.

Which is excellent and no different to many other projects! I
personally don't want every single patch landed in any project.
Sometimes you need to be bold and say 'no' to a patch. We've rejected
single line patches and whole chunks of contributed code to various
projects over the years, and this is a good thing. Strong and
effective projects need bold leadership with a good sense of direction
and what should and shouldn't land. Not every patch is a precious
snowflake.

>> This is most starkly illustrated by the Ubuntu Core Apps project that
>> generated most of the useful apps that will ship as a core part of the
>> default phone experience.
>
> With guidance and hand holding from Canonical and the Design Team. If
> Canonical did not like certain aspects of the Core Apps they could
> advise that that wasn't going to work.

With an fast-moving & evolving platform, SDK, theme and confidential
agreements with partners delivering devices, this is inevitable, and
desirable. One of the notable things in any successful platform is
consistency. If we took on a bunch of core apps which were all
inconsistent with each-other and the base platform apps then they
would stand out like a sore thumb. Of course we have some gaps here
and there, and some work to do, but I'm personally very proud of the
work the community developers have done working along with design and
platform developers.

In addition, as a company with commercial partners we can advise
developers about things they may want to stay clear of for legal,
trademark, patent or other reasons. Again, a good thing because this
reduces the likely-hood that developers will create things that get
rejected for policy reasons or may put Canonical or the wider Ubuntu
project in legal jeopardy.

> Canonical controls the
> technical and design aspects of these projects.
>

To some degree, but that's not really the whole picture, and in many
cases it's the other way round. "Control" is certainly way too strong.

Over the last year the development of the core apps has actually
driven many parts of the phone. From the way alarms work in
indicator-datetime driven by the clock and calendar apps to the way
media-hub, libthumbnailer and mediascanner work, driven by the Music
App. The toolkit development has been affected by core apps regularly.
I've lost count of the number of discussions I've had with the
SDK/Toolkit team about how we need them to implement something
required by core apps.

The design of the core apps has also been a massively collaborative
effort. I can cite numerous examples, but lets have three.

In Malta Nekhelesh (and the rest of the core apps developers) were
shown a draft version of the Clock Reboot design for the first time.
During that meeting all eyes went to Nekhelesh as Mark and Giorgio
from the Canonical Design Team asked "What do you think?". They
listened to his feedback and the app design has been continually
revised based on that. Since then Nekhelesh has been working very
closely with design to deliver an excellent experience.

During multiple hangouts Andrew and Victor have worked with Jouni to
finalise the design of the Music App Remix. We've had a fully
collaborative session where it's far from Canonical controlling or
dictating the design. Far from it.

At Washington the Calendar app developers, Kunal and Mihir during a
lengthy session closely with Giorgio on every part of the Calendar
app. There was fantastic input from Giorgio on what works and doesn't
for certain use cases, and concrete design input from the developers.

In short, the core apps project is a collaborative project involving
community, sdk, design, platform, foundations, qa and the community
team. Canonical control, it absolutely isn't.

> Top down? So start at Mark? I know of things Jono was trying to make a
> case for to Mark and Jane and never happened and he probably held a
> lot more weight than the average contributor. It is hard to move
> things from the top down when you have a project so closely controlled
> by a company and one person at the top.
>

Can you cite examples of these cases?

Also note that Mark underwrote this project and Jane is the Canonical
CEO. I'm personally somewhat incredulous that you would think that the
sponsor and CEO wouldn't have some control, but again, I'd be
interested to hear your examples.

Cheers,
-- 
Alan Pope
Technical Project Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope at canonical.com
http://ubuntu.com/