brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 3:40 PM, Krzysztof Klimonda <kklimonda at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> What we should work on is getting more Ubuntu developers to interact
> with upstream - not only forwarding bugs to their BTS, packaging new
> versions etc. but also make sure that upstream know who they are, that
> they can be their point of contact for Ubuntu-related questions and
> problems (and people are already working on it - see
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Upstream/Adopt ).

This is difficult and hard to scale. We've been trying to grow this
project for going on three cycles now. I think what Evan is getting at
that if we took the time to break down barriers for application
developers that they can have a more direct relationship with their
users that we can do a better job for users AND app developers by
knowing when we can step out of their way.

> Okay, but what about our users? Are they supposed to deal with errors
> made by developers?

They say "Wow, this app sucks, -1, let me leave a comment and
uninstall it" and the junk apps get buried in the USC and let the
cream float to the top.

> The can add software to the current development release and request a
> backport to previous releases.

... and yet we're not exactly flooded with application developers
doing this. On competing platforms app developers get their releases
out to users in hours and days, not weeks and months.

> [1] I use "for our users" quite a lot - that's because what is good for
> developers (or even for us) is not always good for the users of our
> distribution - for example developers want to push their new software to
> as many people as possible in as little time as possible but, on the
> other hand, not all users are interested in the newest and greatest
> stuff.

Don't think of it in terms of what we have. Think of what we don't
have. Users want good apps. In order to make good apps we need a
strong development platform.

> I believe it would be much better to work closely with upstream projects
> (open source and, in fhe future, with closed projects) to make then
> understand what the "Linux Distribution" is about, how does it differ
> from Mac OS X and Windows and why is it, at least in our opinion, a
> better alternative.

We've been doing this for 6 years and it's not working. We need to get
out of the mindset that we're going to go tell app developers to
conform to our special way of doing things. We need to realize that we
need to BEND OVER BACKWARDS for app developers if we want people to
make great applications without them getting frustrated and continuing
to ignore our platform. This includes making sacrifices on how we do
things and realizing that there are no sacred anythings in how we do
those things.

We're not making a distribution, we're making an operating system.

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://twitter.com/castrojo
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