Safe as Milk

Ubuntu to move to Unity as default desktop for 11.04

At this stage, most people will have heard the news: Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with Unity as the default desktop shell. This raises a few questions: what does this mean for GNOME, and the adoption of GNOME Shell? Will this further affect the relationship between Canonical developers and others working on the same problems?

First things first: what Canonical is doing here is not new, by any means. Novell developed the slab on their own, based on their user testing and to their own design, before proposing it for inclusion in GNOME once it was released in Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop. Nokia have developed custom user interfaces on top of the standard Linux desktop shell for the past 5 years, built with GNOME technologies, and have actively participated in the development of core components through the GNOME project – they are now developing a custom interface based on Qt, for smartphones, using the same standard desktop stack. OpenMoko did the same thing with the Freerunner. Intel built a custom shell for netbooks in the Moblin project, which is now the netbook interface for MeeGo. OLPC built a custom designed user interface for educational computing devices. GNOME allows and enables this kind of work, because of the great platform and infrastructure we have provided over the years to all Linux software developers.

In such illustrious company, forgive me if I think that Canonical’s management has seriously underestimated the difficulty of the task in front of them.

At the time, the slab further damaged the relationship of Novell developers and the GNOME project – Dan Winship wrote a scathing mail to a GNOME list when asked why Novell had not worked in the open on such a significant development, saying in short that it was impossible to work in the open in the project – the logical conclusion of the siege mentality bred by the negativity around Mono development and the numerous acrimonious debates at the time.

Nokia have had repeated issues coming to terms with open development, and reconciling the need to differentiate and the desire to create an open collaborative project. Their conclusion – to increase the openness of their software platform and collaborate in the MeeGo project – bears witness to the difficulties they have had over the past five years developing a high quality, innovative mobile user experience alone.

OpenMoko repeatedly ran into performance and flexibility issues, and frequently changed software strategy, to the point where the project was no longer viable. Their success was in creating a vibrant independent developer community, which has allowed their dream to live on in projects like Hackable Devices, and its distribution Hackable:1.

Intel have followed a similar path to Nokia – creating an independent vendor-let user interface project, having trouble getting a high quality product out the door, and they are now in the process of opening up and collaborating on the netbook user interface through the MeeGo project.

OLPC had many teething problems with the Sugar desktop environment. Bugs, stability and performance issues plagued the project for many months, to the point where they abandoned the development of the stack as the primary target platform for the devices. The project lives on in Sugar Labs, thans to a broad and vibrant developer community.

There is not one out-and-out success story of a company building a great high-quality custom user interface on the standard Linux stack, except Android, which is hardly a model of collaborative software development.

Is this because of problems in out platform? A lack of developer tools? Insufficient documentation? Perhaps – but if that’s the case, don’t all of the aforementioned have a shared interest in improving those raw materials?

There is another possibility which seems to me more plausible: building a rock solid and functional desktop is hard. Really hard.

So why do people do it? Because working with old code is painful. After years of use, and bug fixes, and nasty hacks, the code gets to look ugly. Really ugly. I’ve been in the situation myself – you’re working on crusty, crumbling, slow code from 10 years ago, and you say to yourself “I could write better than this in a weekend”. And you do get to a decent proof-of-concept in a few days. And then you have to harden it. And you spend months and months fixing bugs until finally it does everything the old code did, better, and a few new things, but it took you 2 years of development. And it looks just as hairy as the old code did. As Joel Spolsky wrote: “there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time”.

Astute readers might notice that I did not include Red Hat and GNOME Shell in the list of “custom user interfaces” in my list. That is because of the way this project started, and is being developed. The project grew from the ideas of the Pyro Desktop and the Online Desktop & BigBoard, both show-cased at GUADEC back in 2007 in Birmingham, the core design grew from a User Experience Hackfest in 2008 which happened during the Boston Summit, and has evolved in a public wiki. The source code has been public from the start, with a public mailing list, and a designer who has been openly communicating design thinking, and crying out for outside contributors.

I have been telling people for a while that transparency does not equal democracy, that it is possible to have a coherent design in a community-developed project – all you need is a designer that the developers trust who can communicate what is important about his design, who is not afraid to adapt his design based on feedback, but who has the last word on what gets written.

Canonical, and other vendors, do this by appointing a designer, and basically forcing developers to implement what he comes up with. But there’s no reason it can’t be done in the community – as it has been in the past (Seth Nickell’s design of the desktop file chooser, mostly implemented by Federico Mena Quintero, comes to mind).

I fear, however, that this is just another step in a pattern which has been coming for a while. Jeff Waugh said it well today on Twitter: “Unity as default shell == brand before community, differentiation before collaboration.” Canonical values the Ubuntu brand, as they should – but in recent times there has been a move to favour that brand over a better core product that all can share. Unity and Ayatana are merely the most recent in a chain of projects pointing in that direction. Canonical has long had to defend a relatively low contribution level to upstream projects, preferring to position themselves as an integrator, adding fit & finish. Even for public projects like 100 paper cuts, I have been told that there has been limited success in getting patches integrated upstream – I have heard anecdotal accounts of patches that were “evil hacks”, or fixes which were expeditiously made to Ubuntu or worked around a symptom without fixing the root cause. I can’t attest to this – a spot check of 5 paper cuts showed me one Ubuntu-specific fix, one “CLOSED INVALID”, one fix which was rejected, and two fixes integrated upstream.

Back in July, when the GNOME census came out, I commented on Jono Bacon’s blog entry on the subject:

Canonical’s strategy is to develop new features for the desktop, which have not (yet) been included in GNOME.

This is a strategy which has back-fired on a couple of people in the past – it’s not enough to work on something and then propose it for GNOME as a “take it or leave it” choice – the GNOME developers often have feedback on design decisions and request some changes which you mighht not be prepared to make in developed software, but which might be OK to make in a spec […]

One thing I really want to avoid is the creation of a siege mentality of “Canonical vs Rest of the World”, which is counter-productive to the goal of increasing the contribution of Canonical to core GNOME. It’s good to be aware that Canonical are not maintaining core modules, and look for easy ways we can help that happen. Proposing new modules is one path toward that, and contributing to the maintenance of some modules which need it is another.

Unfortunately, this choice of Unity as the desktop user interface, instead of supporting the steadily progressing GNOME Shell project and trying to influence the direction of that project, is another step on the path to the siege mentality. This move will inevitably garner some support from within Ubuntu, and much criticism from the rest of the GNOME ecosystem, further isolating Canonical and the Ubuntu community from the rest of the free desktop development community.

The best possible outcome I can see is that one of the two projects will become an obvious choice within a year or so – and at that point either GNOME will adopt Unity (if Canonical drop the copyright assignment requirement) or Canonical will adopt GNOME Shell (if, as I expect, Canonical struggle to get Unity to the quality standard their users expect). A worst case scenario would see both projects suffer from the competition, putting the free software desktop another two years behind in its quest to beat Apple & Microsoft on features & functionality.

Oracle, OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice

There has been a lot of commentary in recent days about the OpenOffice.org community council decision to ask people who have aligned themselves with The Document Foundation (TDF) to resign their seats on the council. So, of course, what we need is a little bit more commentary.

First, when reading the minutes, it’s worth noting that this was not a voted decision. At 21:50, Louis Suarez-Potts proposed “that the TDF members of the CC consider the points those of us who have not joined TDF have made about conflict of interest and confusion [and] resign their offices, so as to remove the apparent conflict of interest their current representational roles produce”. He then proposed a deadline of Tuesday “to deal with this” – by emergency meeting of the council. So there was no decision to expel anyone, Louis made a proposal which did not obtain a consensus decision. That said, reading the minutes, there is clear alignment between supporters of TDF on one side and the rest of the council on the other side. And “the rest of the council” is Louis Suarez-Potts, Andreas Bartel, Eike Rathke, Juergen Schmidt, Matthias Huetsch and Martin Hollmichel on behalf of Stefan Taxhet – all Oracle employees.

Second, let’s put this in perspective. Louis is the OpenOffice.org community manager, and has been for several years. Andreas, Eike, Juergen, Matthias and Stefan are all former Sun employees, and as best as I can tell, also former StarDivision employees. So this is hardly an Oracle corporate decree. It is a group of long-time contributors to OpenOffice.org taking a position on the community council vis à vis LibreOffice. I have been telling people for years that corporations don’t get to be members of free software communities – although their employees might. Let’s apply that same standard when commenting on actions by individuals, and assume less cloak-and-dagger. “Oracle” have not decided anything here.

That said, looking at the council structure, it’s clear that it has been set up so as to make it very difficult for Oracle/Sun employees to ever find themselves in a minority on the council, if they do decide to act as a block.

Third, let’s look at the substance of the discussion itself. The Document Foundation defines itself as “an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community”. Implicit in this is a criticism of OpenOffice.org: the project is not independent, self-governing or meritocratic. Calls for OpenOffice.org to be managed by an independent not-for-profit are not new – in fact, I was one of those calling for it over the past few years. So clearly, the creation of The Document Foundation is a reaction to perceived and actual dysfunction in the operation of OpenOffice.org. In fact, in its initial communications, The Document Foundation clearly stated that the name LibreOffice was provisional, and that they hoped that Oracle would allow the foundation to use the traditional OpenOffice.org name – in other words, TDF wants LibreOffice to supersede OpenOffice.org as a project.

How, then, can people who have aligned themselves with the new initiative keep a straight face and say they are not trying to undermine OpenOffice.org? Traditional contributors to OpenOffice.org are now faced with a choice: will I update my source code daily from OOo, or from LibreOffice? I have met project volunteers who had no prior knowledge of the split who are now torn between two groups. They feel like they have to decide. For the instigators of the revolution to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

I’ve been told that I’m conflating “OpenOffice.org” the project, and the OpenOffice.org community council, which was created to represent “the OpenOffice.org community” – and that all of the non-Oracle community representatives feel it’s in the best interests of the OOo community to align with TDF, and as such it is Oracle representatives on the council who are in conflict of interest with what is best for the community they are representing. That may be the case, I’ll leave you to decide. It seems to me that supporting LibreOffice implies withdrawing support for OpenOffice.org, and thus forfeiting any mandate you might have to represent the OpenOffice.org community. Individual community members will surely make up their own mind.

A fork is like a schoolyard football game. Tommy brings a ball to school, and gets to be captain of a team every time, picks the best players for himself, because if he doesn’t, he threatens to take his ball away. After a few weeks of this, the other players get annoyed, and everyone chips in to buy a ball for the group. At this point, Tommy has lost all power – he still has his ball, but he’s not team captain any more. He gets left standing against the wall till the very end to teach him a lesson in humility. So he sits out the games for a while in protest, starts a competing game at the other end of the yard with his ball and his rules. All the best players go to the other game, though, and some of the kids make fun of “Tommy’s” game – invitations to give up his game & join the new one seem more like taunts than honest efforts to include him. After a while, he realises that playing football with others is more fun, and more important, than playing with his football.

I welcome the creation of The Document Foundation. I believe that it will be good for office software on the free desktop. I would prefer supporters of TDF to be dignified and forthright during the split, and to come straight out and say “we think TDF offers a better future for OOo than OOo does – so come join us”. Let the dust settle, and maybe in 6 months or a year, when the functionality gap between LO and OOo has widened a little, propose once more that Oracle and IBM engage with the foundation. At that point, such a proposal will seem like an honest effort at reconciliation. Right now, it feels more like rubbing Tommy’s nose in it.

Updated to reflect feedback, 11:30, 2010-10-21

GNOME Census report released

I was delighted to see that the GNOME Census presentation I gave yesterday at GUADEC has gotten a lot of attention. And I’m pleased to announce a change of plan from what I presented yesterday: The report is now available under a Creative Commons license.

Why the change of heart? My intention was never to make a fortune with the report, my main priority was covering my costs and time spent. And after 24 hours, I’ve achieved that. I have had several press requests for the full report, and requests from clients to be allowed to use the report both with press and with their clients.

This solution is the best for all involved, I think – I have covered my costs, the community (and everyone else) gets their hands on the report with analysis as soon as possible, and my clients are happy to have the report available under a license which allows them to use it freely.

You can download the full report now for free.

GNOME Training confirmed!

A few days ago, I took the risk of setting off alarm bells on the GNOME developer training sessions planned for GUADEC this year. It was a risk, and comments from the naysayers reminded me that it’s easier to do nothing than it is to take a risk. I’m happy to say that the risk paid off.

Thanks to all who spread the word, a couple of prospects I was aware of confirmed their presence on the course, and I received a new group booking. The training is now feasible, and we are confirming that it will happen. There is still room on the course, and I expect to sell a few more spots in the coming days.

I did get one interesting suggestion in a Twitter reply to the announcement, and I’ve adopted it. If you are interested in attending one or two of the modules (say, community processes and the GNOME platform overview, but not the practical session or Linux developer tools), you can do so for the much lower price of €400 per module and €750 for two modules, not including a GUADEC registration.

Anyone who would like to avail of this offer, please contact me, and we will take care of getting you signed up.

Thank you all for your help and support!

Sabotage and free software

Who knew that educating people in simple sabotage (defined as sabotage not requiring in-depth training or materials) could have so much in common with communicating free software values? I read the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (pdf) which has been doing the rounds of management and security blogs recently, and one article on “motivating saboteurs” caught my eye enough to share:

Personal Motives

• The ordinary citizen very probably has no immediate personal motive for committing simple sabotage. Instead, he must be made to anticipate indirect personal gain, such as might come with enemy evacuation or destruction of the ruling gov­ernment group. Gains should be stated as specifically as possible for the area addressed: simple sabotage will hasten the day when Commissioner X and his deputies Y and Z will be thrown out, when particu­larly obnoxious decrees and restrictions will be abolished, when food will arrive, and so on. Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.
• Since the effect of his own acts is limited, the saboteur may become discouraged unless he feels that he is a member of a large, though unseen, group of saboteurs operating against the enemy or the government of his own country and elsewhere. This can be conveyed indirectly: suggestions which he reads and hears can include observations that a particular technique has been successful in this or that district. Even if the technique is not applicable to his surroundings, another’s success will encourage him to attempt similar acts. It also can be conveyed directly: statements praising the effectiveness of simple sabotage can be contrived which will be pub­lished by white radio, freedom stations, and the sub­versive press. Estimates of the proportion of the population engaged in sabotage can be disseminated. Instances of successful sabotage already are being broadcast by white radio and freedom stations, and this should be continued and expanded where com­patible with security.
• More important than (a) or (b) would be to create a situation in which the citizen-saboteur acquires a sense of responsibility and begins to educate others in simple sabotage.

Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Trying to convince people that free software is good for them because of the freedom doesn’t work directly – you need to tie the values of that freedom to something which is useful to them on a personal level.

“You get security fixes better because people can read the code”, “You have a wide range of support options for Linux because it’s free software and anyone can understand it”, “Sun may have been bought by Oracle, but you can continue to use the same products because anyone can modify the code, so others have taken up the maintenance, support and development burden”, and so on.

Providing (custom tailored) concrete benefits, which comes from freedom is the way to motivate people to value that freedom.

In addition, the point on motivation struck a cord – you need to make people feel like they belong, that their work means something, that they’re not alone and their effort counts, or they will become discouraged. A major job in any project is to make everyone feel like they’re driving towards a goal they have personally bought into.

Finally, you will only have succeeded when you have sufficiently empowered a saboteur to the point where they become an advocate themselves, and start training others in the fine arts – and this is a major challenge for free software projects too, where we often see people with willingness to do stuff, and have some difficulty getting them to the point where they have assimilated the project culture and are recruiting and empowering new contributors.

For those who haven’t read it yet, the document is well worth a look, especially the section on “General Interference with Organisations and Production”, which reads like a litany of common anti-patterns present in most large organisations; and if you never knew how to start a fire in a warehouse using a slow fuse made out of rope and grease, here’s your chance to find out.

GNOME Developer Training at GUADEC

I’m delighted to announce the availability of GNOME Developer Training at GUADEC this year. It’s been brewing for a while, but you can now register for the training sessions on the GUADEC website.

Fernando Herrera, Claudio Saavedra, Alberto Garcia and myself will be running the two-day course, covering the basics of a Linux development environment and developer tools, the GNOME stack, including freedesktop.org components, and the social aspects of working with a free software project, being a good community citizen, getting your code upstream, and gaining influence in projects you work with.

The developer tools section will go beyond getting you compiling the software to also present mobile development environments, and the tools you can use to profile your apps, or diagnose I/O or memory issues, dealing with the vast majority of performance issues developers encounter.

This is the first time I have seen a training course which treats the soft science of working with free software communities, and given the number of times that people working in companies have told me that they need help in this area, I believe that this is satisfying a real need.

We are keeping the numbers down to ensure that the highest quality training & individual attention is provided – only 20 places are available. The pricing for the training course is very competitive for this type of course – €1500 per person, including training, meals and printed training materials, and a professional registration to GUADEC, worth €250.

If you register before June 15th, you can even get an additional discount – the early bird registration price is only €1200 per person.

I’m really excited about this, and I hope others will be too. This is the first time that we will have done training like this in conjunction with GUADEC, and I really hope that this will bring some new developers to the conference for the week, as well as being a valuable addition to the GUADEC event.

Comparing Maemo & Ubuntu

While I’ve occasionally been critical of Ubuntu as a project, it is a distribution with very open processes, for the most part.

I’d like to compare the experience of a casual Ubuntu user, an engaged Ubuntu user, an Ubuntu developer, and an upstream application developer to the equivalent MeeGo or Maemo experiences.

The casual Ubuntu user gets regular stable updates on a predictable schedule, with long-term supported versions less frequently, but still on a predictable schedule. Stability, releases, this user doesn’t want to know what happens behind the scene, he wants to get software when it’s “done”.

The engaged Ubuntu user can activate an unstable development distribution, and see the work going in as it’s being done! He updates daily, gets the latest and greatest, and occasionally stuff doesn’t work, but he doesn’t mind. The information how to do this isn’t on page one of ubuntu.com, but it’s there, and engaged users tell each other about it.

The Ubuntu developer can participate in the creation of the process by packaging his favourite software, pushing it through a public (although occasionally real-time & in-person) process for inclusion in the holy grail – default installation, or presence on the install CD. He can take care of packaging, shepherd the package through QA, ensure that problems get reported upstream and in general ensure that his package is a good Ubuntu citizen. Even if he doesn’t get the package in the default install, which is quite tough, he can follow public community processes to have it available in the Universe, available to every single Ubuntu user through a simple search of available applications.

The upstream developer doesn’t really care that much about Ubuntu. He develops his application, sees bug reports coming in from users & developers & downstream packagers. He adds features, and concentrates on what he loves best – coding the best app he can.

Now, compare that experience to Maemo, to see how we compare:

For the casual user, not much changes. He gets the software on a device, when it’s “done” (and the definition of done is considerably different for a phone than a PC distribution).

For the engaged user, who wants to follow the bleeding edge, the story gets murkier. In the Maemo world, hardware and software releases have been closely related. Without a Beagleboard or a prototype N900, Fremantle wouldn’t have been very useful. But even operating system updates like the upcoming long awaited PR1.2 are not packaged and prepared in public, so even existing N900 owners can’t follow along with the cutting edge.

There is a promise that the first release of MeeGo will work well on the N900, so potentially there is an opportunity for the engaged MeeGo user to follow along with unstable development – on condition that, like the engaged Ubuntu developer, they’re prepared for the occasional bricking & reflash. But the UX software for MeeGo is being prepared for release – we are told that some closed components are being opened, some others are not ready for release yet. So it is not (yet) possible for an engaged MeeGo or Maemo user to follow along & install a base alpha or beta distribution and update or reflash regularly.

For packagers who would like to propose their software for inclusion in the default repository, or even on the default install, of MeeGo or Maemo, there is not (yet) a clear path to get involved in the process. I could start working on a Maemo port of QuteCom, Shotwell or some other software, but if I did, there’s no way for me to get that software included by default. The current Extras/Extras-testing policy of Maemo has been heavily criticised by some developers – so it might not even be easy for me to make my software available to a large number of Maemo issues.

The upstream developer experience doesn’t change that much. Upstream developers still shouldn’t care about what packagers are doing, and should be concentrating on making the best apps possible. But for major parts of the MeeGo platform, namely the UX projects, the upstream and downstream will be hard to separate. As an upstream developer, I care about being able to follow commits, read Changelogs, do code review, develop and propose features, fix bugs and so on, in the open. For unrelated upstream projects, things also change – due to form factor and UX guidelines, the developer really needs to do a tailor-made UI for MeeGo or Maemo, requiring effort not being spent on features. And because you’re doing embedded development, your development environment becomes that much more complicated, with emulators and cross compilers and SDKs.

The embedded world is a special place, a lot of things change from desktop development, and some of those changes come with the territory. You’re going to have to work with a device emulator, and anything that requires a SIM card, the GPS, camera, accelerometer or any other hardware features, well, you’re going to have to wait for a device to make 100% sure those work. But we can certainly bear in mind the Ubuntu user experience(s) when we are designing the MeeGo community, and ensure that their experience is just as open.

That means open code, and more importantly open processes. It means an engaged user being able to use software that isn’t ready, a packager being able to propose software for inclusion in the OS and ensure its availability to all users of the distribution by following a well defined process, and a developer having a great experience helping to develop great applications.

Getting the hobbyist back

When I first installed a Linux distribution in 1996 or 97, it was a horrible experience. My friend who had started a few months before me thought it was great, though – I remember, it was Red Hat 5, the first version that had an ncurses installer that helped you through the process.

I was confronted with dozens of questions I knew nothing about and wasn’t equipped to answer. Did I want to create a primary or secondary partition? What was its mount point and filesystem type going to be? What was the manufacturer of my video card? What resolution & refresh rate did I need for my monitor (WARNING: the wrong answer can make your monitor explode!)? What was my IP address, netmask, gateway, DNS server? What keymap did I want for my keyboard? Was my NIC using ISA or PCI? Was it 10baseT or 100baseT? Which driver did it need? Was my mouse a PS/2, serial, Microsoft or “Other” (there was always an “Other”)? And on and on it went. How the hell did I know? What did I care?

But it was a learning experience. Installing Linux was the period in my life where I learned the most about how computers worked, hardware and software. Back then, if you wanted to try out an application you heard about, there was only one way to do it – download the source code and compile it. I had a wad of software in /usr/local, including MySQL, the GIMP, Scilab, and a bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten. There was no online distribution channel. Free software developers didn’t do packaging, there were no PPAs. If it didn’t come on the install CD, it needed compiling.

It wasn’t better. There were fewer of us. Linux had a name as a hobbyist’s toy for a reason. Those of us that there were had a certain minimum knowledge of our systems. You knew shell commands because there was no other way to do anything. Everyone knew about fstab and resolv.conf and ld.so.conf and compiling kernel modules, because you had to. And every time you installed software, you had the source code – right there on your computer. And you knew how to compile it.

I don’t know if I would ever made a patch for the GIMP if I didn’t have the source code and had already gone through the pain of compiling & installing all its dependencies. I doubt it very much. And yet that’s the situation that the vast majority of Linux users are in today – they have never compiled any software, or learned about the nuts & bolts of their OS, because they don’t have to.

I remember Nat Friedman talking about this in a presentation he made a few years ago about how to become a free software developer. Step 1 was “download some source code”, step 2 was “compile and install it”, step 3 was “Find something you want to change, and change it”. And I recall that Nat identified step 2 as the major stumbling block.

We have bred a generation of free software users who have never compiled software, and don’t particularly care to. Is it any wonder that recruitment of developers appears to be slowing, that prominent older projects are suffering something of a demographic crisis, with hoary old 30 year olds holding down the fort, with no young fiery whippersnappers coming up to relieve them?

Is this a problem? It seems like it to me – so I ask the question to a wider audience. With a second question: how can we get the hobbyist back into using free software, at least for some part of our community?

Interesting GNOME Census problems

We’ve been running into some interesting issues with the GNOME census, which are causing us to twist our tiny brains to get useful results. I thought it might be interesting to share some of them.

1. gnome.org – a large number of people commit with their gnome.org address (or src.gnome.org), but have also committed with a different address in the past. So many of you received our survey request twice or more (oops). gnome.org addresses pose another problem too – when attempting to identify a developer’s employer, gitdm uses domain name matching, and some many gainfully employed GNOME hackers use their gnome.org addresses to commit, that doesn’t work very well (oops). Finally, we have observed so far that the response rate among unpaid GNOME developers is much higher than the response rate among professional GNOME developers, which has made identifying employers for specific addresses even more difficult.
2. ubuntu.com – Some Canonical developers commit with their gnome.org address, some with their canonical.com address, and others apparently use their ubuntu.com address. Some unpaid Ubuntu hackers & packagers also commit with ubuntu.com email addresses. So identifying the exact number of Canonical developers & Canonical upstream commits has proven very difficult.
3. Time – many GNOME developers have changed employers at some point, or gone from being unpaid GNOME developers to paid GNOME developers, or changed companies through acquisition or merger. Old email addresses bounce. And yet, it’s the same person. Dealing with time has been one of our toughest challenges, and one where we still don’t have satisfactory answers.
4. Self-identity – One of the issues we’ve had running the survey is that simple domain name pattern matching doesn’t tell the whole story. Does someone who works for Red Hat on packaging and then spends his evenings hacking his pet project count as a volunteer or a professional? We have noticed a significant number of people who commit with their professional email addresses and consider themselves volunteers on the GNOME project. For a problem which is already complicated enough, this adds further nuance to any quantitative statistics which result.

Thank you all to everyone who has taken the time to answer the 3 to 7 questions (depending on how you self-identify) in the survey – the data has been interesting, and has led us to question some of our preconceptions. To those of you who have not answered yet, let me assure you that the email we sent was not a spam, and Vanessa is doing a great job collating your answers and (in some cases) preparing follow-up questions.

Any insights which people might be able to give in elucidating the issues we’ve noticed are welcome! Please do leave comments.

Maemo Community Council voting open

The voting tokens have just been sent out for the Q1 2010 Maemo Community Council elections.

I already have over 100 bounced emails, so if you think that you should have a vote and you have not received an email with a voting token yet, please send me an email or leave a comment, I will look up your Maemo username and send you on the voting token/email combo we have on record so that you can vote.

Voting runs until March 30th – you can find more information about the election and the council in the Maemo wiki.