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   1 Tony:  Welcome to Episode 6 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, I'm Tony and last week 
   2 Alan, Dave and I went to the Ubuntu Developers summit in Prague. In this 
   3 episode Alan and I talk about out impressions of UDS while sitting at the 
   4 airport waiting to go home. We also set a new competition and in a change from 
   5 our usual format we've got a great interview with Mark Shuttleworth, which 
   6 we've split in two. Sounds like a fun packed show, let's get on with it.
   7 
   8 Tony:  UDS for Intrepid is just finished, it's Saturday morning now and 
   9 definitely the morning after the night before. So what are you thoughts about 
  10 FOSS Camp and UDS?
  11 
  12 Alan:  Well I was lucky enough to get sponsored for FOSS Camp and UDS by 
  13 Canonical, they payed my hotel and travel and all that and I first of all want 
  14 to thank then for, you know, giving me the opportunity to come out here. This 
  15 is the third UDS I've been to and they're always a great event. The fist time 
  16 you go it's a bit overwhelming and it's somewhat strange because there are 
  17 someone people there who already know each other and you might know some of the 
  18 people through communication on-line via IRC, the Forums or mailing list but 
  19 then when you meet them for real it kind of cements those relationships. One of 
  20 the big things I like about UDS is cementing relationships that have been built 
  21 up on-line and at FOSS Camp we had an event where upstream, so that's people 
  22 who provide packages and people who provide application to the Ubuntu 
  23 distribution would come along and we'd talk to together about relationships 
  24 between distros, and relationships between distros and upstream and things that 
  25 we might want to fix. It was a good couple of days on Friday and Saturday last 
  26 week and then we had the five days of UDS, from Monday to Friday.
  27 
  28 Tony:  UDS is quite a big event similarly to FOSDEM in a way there's lots of 
  29 different threads and areas but unlike FOSDEM where it's talks and 
  30 presentations from people in the project to people who aren't in the project, 
  31 it's more of a sort of round table discussion, it really is a summit rather 
  32 than a conference so you can see why they chose that name.
  33 
  34 Alan:  Yes it's always quite clear on the Wiki page that describes each UDS 
  35 it's quite clear this isn't a conference. It's fine for people to come and if 
  36 they want to pay their own way and turn up and help out that's great, but it's 
  37 not like FOSDEM where you sit down and ingest information from people giving 
  38 talks It's more about contributing back and so these round table discussions 
  39 which are streamed over the Internet and people can join in via IRC and so on 
  40 during these conversations. And that's really what they are they're 
  41 conversations between relevant parties. During those conversation you form 
  42 preliminary plans for whats going to be in the next version of Ubuntu.
  43 
  44 Tony:  And decisions are made as well you know. Do we do this? Do we drop 
  45 support for this? Do we include this application. And it is actually really the 
  46 place where Intrepid will be given it's structure, a skeletal structure, and 
  47 things will change during the course of things but having come away from this 
  48 week I think the developers and things have got a really clear idea of the way 
  49 they're heading at the moment.
  50 
  51 Alan:  Yeah and that's always nice to see and in fact you do see change over 
  52 the following six months because new applications arrive and new packages 
  53 arrive in the repositories and that changes some of the feel and maybe the 
  54 artwork is under development and that gets changed part way through the cycle 
  55 and so on and so while yes there is a skeletal structure started here it's 
  56 certainly built upon over the next sixth months.
  57 
  58 Tony:  That was one of the things I hadn't expected to see, I assumed it would 
  59 basically be entirely developers but we had people like Ken who does the 
  60 artwork for Ubuntu and other people who do similar kind of design work, and 
  61 things like that, involved in discussions as well so it's not just a case of 
  62 "oh how do we code this?" or "How do we hack this stuff together?".
  63 
  64 Alan:  Yeah it's surprising there's surprisingly little, you know, ones and 
  65 zeros kind of like really deeply technical talk. I mean obviously there is some 
  66 fairly technical talk but a lot of it is at a higher level, like a view from a 
  67 thousand feet, of whats going to be happen. And yeah I've met people here who 
  68 are not developers, I'm not a developer I see myself as, if you think of a set 
  69 concentric circles you've got right in the middle the core team who some work 
  70 for Canonical and some don't and just outside that you've got all the 
  71 developers who are also contributing and then the further out you get you've 
  72 got people who are less and less involved in that development process. They may 
  73 be in the community and they help out in other ways but they are not 
  74 necessarily directly affecting packages in the system and I consider myself to 
  75 be on that outside periphery watching the developers so a lot of the time it's 
  76 difficult to join in with some of those development conversations but equally 
  77 there are other sessions where I have been able to contribute and it's been 
  78 very good to know that some of my input will help form a little part of what 
  79 goes on to become Intrepid in October later this year.
  80 
  81 Tony:  Yeah I agree although saying that there are concentric circles sets up a 
  82 sort of a boundary system that I didn't really see reflected but
  83 
  84 Alan:  It's kind of fuzzy lines.
  85 
  86 Tony:  Yeah but one of the nice things about UDS is that you can just walk up 
  87 and talk to people. I don't suppose you get any closer to the centre than Mark 
  88 Shuttleworth and he's just milling around and we went out to a club last night 
  89 and he was on the back row of the bus with us and chatting away and all the 
  90 other developers and the kind of the core team are just floating around people 
  91 like Scott James Remnant and Jono Bacon and people and hanging out and things 
  92 in the evening and talking to them during the day about Ubuntu and Ubuntu 
  93 related stuff so it's not like there's firm boundary and it does seem to be 
  94 really easy for people to get involved in bit's that they want to get involved 
  95 in. In particularly the being able to dial in to sessions, there's an Icecast 
  96 stream so you can listen into the session but there's also a VOIP number so you 
  97 can dial in and take part in a discussion if your not able to physically be 
  98 here which is great because you don't need a huge amount of infrastructure to 
  99 do that  it's just all using software supplied with Ubuntu.
 100 
 101 Alan:  And how many other platforms, how many other operating systems would 
 102 give you the opportunity to influence the direction of the next release? As a 
 103 complete, in inverted commas, 'outsider' being able to influence and being able 
 104 to talk to the core developers and, you know, ask them how things work and why 
 105 certain decisions were made and get the real inside track, it's unique, I don't 
 106 know of any other, I mean there are other Linux distributions who do similar 
 107 things, but I can't see Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer sitting on the back of the 
 108 bus with you and me going to a nightclub on a Friday night which is what 
 109 happened last night. It's the level of community and the closeness off the 
 110 community. When I say those concentric circles they're very fuzzy and I'm only 
 111 looking at it from one perspective but when you look at it at people level the 
 112 people are very close and there's a video that you shot of everyone running to 
 113 give Daniel Holbach a hug and this was organised because someone thought that 
 114 Daniel wasn't very happy one day so he organised every to give Daniel a big hug 
 115 and that kind of spirit, that kind of community spirit is great.
 116 
 117 Tony:  Yeah, I agree and it's, I think Jono said that that thing where we all 
 118 flash hugged Daniel was the essence of Ubuntu, was the spirit of Ubuntu, it was 
 119 just kind of getting involved in that sort of thing as much as it is the 
 120 technical stuff.
 121 
 122 Alan:  So the next UDS we have to look forward to will be after Intrepid. So 
 123 Intrepid releases or is scheduled to release in October 2008 and then usually a 
 124 few weeks of calm and then the next UDS which there's a rumor it's going to be 
 125 back across the pond in the U.S. It's funny I kind of look forward to each of 
 126 these UDSes and I try and schedule a bit of time in my calendar hoping that I 
 127 can get sponsored and get to go because it is such a great event.
 128 
 129 Tony:  Yeah, I really enjoyed the social stuff in the evenings, because of what 
 130 I was doing I was quite kind of in my little room doing my videoing and talks. 
 131 By the way you can see those at youtube.com/UbuntuDevelopers , that's what I've 
 132 been doing this week is interviewing various people and it's been really good 
 133 to meet those people and chat to them both on-camera and off.
 134 
 135 Tony:  We're here with Mark Shuttleworth, Hi Mark.
 136 
 137 Mark Shuttleworth:  Howdy, how are you?
 138 
 139 Tony:  Not too bad, Not too bad. Are you enjoying UDS then.
 140 
 141 Mark Shuttleworth:  Loving it, thank you.
 142 
 143 Tony:  OK, let's get on with the questions.
 144 
 145 Alan:  The first one I have is, one of the things about Ubuntu and Linux in 
 146 general is it's all about choice and I've noticed by reading the headers of 
 147 your mail that you use Mozilla Thunderbird.
 148 
 149 Mark Shuttleworth:  Emm hmm.
 150 
 151 Alan:  What software do you use on a daily basis you couldn't get by without?
 152 
 153 Mark Shuttleworth:  I guess the thing that defines me most from a software 
 154 perspective is Python because it's the tool that I've used for, gosh, ten - 
 155 fifteen to shape the things that I'm interested in and to try and articulate 
 156 the things that I'm interested in, in a way that will make sense to other 
 157 coders right and a way that will make sense to other developers so the biggest 
 158 personal software choice I guess I've made in my career has been to use python 
 159 very heavily and to do what I can to encourage the spread of that idea and 
 160 other than that I am a heavy user of Mozilla and Mozilla technologies on all 
 161 the platforms that I work with, I have a Mac so I install Firefox on that and 
 162 if I have to use Windows I'll usually pull Firefox down onto that. I'd love to 
 163 see Thunderbird more widely adopted. We haven't really been able to make it the 
 164 default mail client in Ubuntu because it misses a couple of key feature but for 
 165 the things that I do I think it's a phenomenal mail client and I really love 
 166 the extensions capability.