Growing pains for FOSS, Ubuntu, Jono (and the rest of us)
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| Author | Content |
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| Steven_Rosenber Nov 15, 2010 2:03 AM EDT |
As Carla pointed out in her article, Jono did and does have a lot going on. Yeah, Ubuntu and Canonical aren't exactly playing it safe, and the connection between the for-profit company, the community-supported Linux distribution and the community manager who has to try to put out innumerable fires is fraught with tension. Having to be the intermediary between thousands of geeks and a company that's throwing continual handfuls of who knows what against the wall to see what sticks — it seems like an impossible job, and I don't envy Jono having to do it. I don't know him personally, but from listening to him on a couple dozen podcasts, I'm sure he will admit to more than a few mistakes, mis-statements, and the like. I'm not sure how the non-Ubuntu world will feel about this seemingly unilateral attempt to bring some civility to inter-distribution dialog — in his view anyway. Maybe more thought, more collaboration and less haste would have been the way(s) to go. It also strikes me how Jono has the title "community manager," but he's pretty much looked upon as "distro spokesman," meaning his profile resembles that of a public-relations/media-relations person. Does Canonical/Ubuntu have such a person other than Jono? If not, they might consider getting someone to fill that position. And if there is a PR/press person at Canonical, they should do a little work on boosting their own profile and not leave Jono as the main public voice of Ubuntu. While you can potentially see the entire world as "the community," that tends to water down the real meaning of "community," which in my view means the stakeholders of the project: users, developers, involved companies, other volunteers/paid employees, etc. If you've been in this game for any length of time, you realize that you'll never make everybody happy (unless you make everybody's suspend/resume work perfectly, to leave the topic ever so swiftly). Just as many in the FOSS community are uncomfortable with Canonical the company's sway over Ubuntu the distribution (and what this dynamic means for the Community, capital C, that Jono Bacon is fostering), so are many not so comfortable with the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora, the latter of which has undergone a not-insignificant number of changes over the years to appease their own community. While both projects yield a Linux distribution, the companies and communities for each are quite different. And there are many dozen other distributions, plus hundreds of upstream projects, that all have a hand in the world of FOSS. I still want "the community," whatever it may be, to hold all of these companies' and projects' collective feet to the fire. I think we can keep it civil and constructive yet open, inclusive and honest. And with so many projects run so many different ways, we can all become involved with those with which we feel comfortable while respecting the others' wish to do things another way. |
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