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Attachment 'uupc_s01e06_low.txt'
Download 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.
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