Can we refocus on the issues at hand?

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

I've debated sending this email for a while but as much as I want to
mute these conversations in my mail client I feel like it's my duty to
speak out about the project I love.

We've just had a multi-week discussion on a how we should run a
mailing list and launchpad group. We're literally arguing about
nothing. I refuse to believe that us, as stewards of Ubuntu and more
importantly, as friends, cannot have a productive discussion. Our
success has a project has always been about being smart for the users
we represent.

Our mission is to make _Ubuntu a wonderful place to participate in_.
There's nothing on this list in the past few weeks that is doing
anything that is making that mission possible. Today, if I ran into an
Ubuntu enthusiast on the street, would you send them to this list? My
answer is "No, absolutely not."

Let's stop being so pedantic about our tools; we are arguing about how
to manage a mailing list. A mailing list. A thing that takes messages
from people and sends it to other people. Over SMTP. A problem that
was solved _20 years ago_. If we were to publish a team report on how
we helped Ubuntu this month, we would say "we argued about a mailing
list".

Is anyone else proud of this? I'm not.

I wish we were this disgruntled about the review queue of actual, real
contributions made by developers that are sitting in queues in
launchpad, and how we're going to fix that, or about the unanswered
user questions on Ask Ubuntu or the forums, or how we're going to
actively help the desktop team get out of their bug hole, or any of
the hundreds of problems we could actually be fixing in a project as
large and complex as Ubuntu a whole.

Can we please get out of this funk now and get back to work?

Ugh crap, this is the part I didn't want to write:

As far as the other thing goes, it's a simple decision. Ben, I think
you're a nice guy, and I'll always be the first to buy you a beer, but
this is not the first time you've taken private conversations people
have had with you that you've quoted out of context to push your
personal agenda of what you think Ubuntu should be.

You've ragequit the project so many times that I can't even get a
decent google result of what the reason was last time. I get it, I've
even ragequit Ubuntu once myself, but you don't have the right to do
it every 3 months for the last two years and expect us to take it
seriously when you've spent most of that time going out of the way to
hurt the project. I really, really want to believe that you still care
about the things we've all accomplished together as a team, but I'm
just not getting that vibe from you anymore, I get the feeling that
you sit there and wait for something mildly controversial to happen so
you can exploit it for your own benefit.

I totally get that Ubuntu might not be going the way you want it to
go. I know right, I wish I could just randomly control every
engineering manager in Canonical, their engineers, and all their
community contributors to do what I want. Then I'd have the most
awesome system in the world. (btw, it'd be amazing).

I've known you long enough to know that I think your heart is in the
right place; but your behavior makes me not believe this is true.
Please prove me wrong.  And if not and you want to move on and do
other things, that's cool too, I respect that, but please don't just
randomly show up on mailing lists and try to armchair quarterback the
project. Either be here and care, and be productive, or break it off,
no one will think any lesser of you. This awkward middle ground just
confuses everyone.

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com/ - Automate your Cloud Infrastructure