brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

Hi Jorge!

On 02/10/2010 15:42, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
>> 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.

Indeed, typical users don't necessarily care about getting involved and
fixing things.

>> 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.

Have you perhaps considered that there's a financial incentive for them
to do so in most (actually pretty much all) cases where it's successful
on other platforms?

>> [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 talked to someone who also works for Canonical recently that explained
to me that Apple basically put together their great iPhone app
development tools in as short period as 2 years. If Canonical could
actually pull that off, then Ubuntu could be a *great* platform for
making apps. Has it been considered to leverage off other successful
projects where possible? How difficult would it be to run Android apps
on Ubuntu? Why not just implement Google's app store (or whatever it is)
on Ubuntu for those kind of apps?

>> 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.

There's some words in that paragraph that sounds really scary. (btw
correlation does not imply causation, just because what you want to see
isn't happening, doesn't mean that the current way is failing)

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

That's quite a statement! I just want to confirm that I understand it
correctly; you're thinking of Ubuntu as something like Mac OS X: Provide
a good platform, make it easy for people to create and ship
applications, then just provide a good way for users to actually get
these apps?

If so, I don't agree with you there. Ubuntu is very much a distribution
and all the processes built around it imply that. Perhaps that's just
not where some people would like to see it anymore?

-Jonathan