Ubuntu Wiki

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Talk at [UbuntuBelowZero/LoveDay Ubuntu Love Day]

Jeff Waugh, Ubuntu Community

On the frontage of the website is the Ubuntu commitment, so you can always look back in the Google cache, and if we do anything wrong you can come and tease us mercilously. Always free of charge, we sometimes forget how important free beer is in getting people interested in freedom of software. Every 6 months we do a release, sometimes we bleed from the ears for this but it's a commitment. All free software... except some hardware drivers because we want to make sure everyone can use free software. The ubuntu spirit, when we were choosing names we were working under no-name-yet.com which wasn't going to have much of a future. Jeff thought about Cockfosters which is a station on the Picadilly line, if anyone has a project we can use that name for please see Jeff. Mark came up with this word and we thought "how many u's are in that" but Mark explained it was an ancient african word meaining "I'm sick of compiling gentoo". We're sharing and standing on the sholders of giants in our development so the word ubuntu says a lot about that. We built the community from the get-go so we had the opportunity to take the combined experience of everyone on the team.

Shows a slide of the whiteboard used to design the ubuntu community. The bof to discuss this as the governing BoF. Shows upstream, lots of different contributions, more fedora than fedora, lots of teams even early on is Kubuntu the whois shows that was registered very fast. Becoming an Ubuntu member is easy, just contribute then come to a meeting and you'll be grilled then confirmed. How did you become a member Jeff? Umm.

Teams, loco (sounds funny in spanish), desktop, kernel etc. Dstro teams kubuntu, edubuntu, new one xubuntu.

Technical board, if people can't decide on an issue it can be passed to the technical board who can decide. Shows embarassing photos of Matt and Scott. Community council for community oriented issues, creating teams, confirming members and resolving community problems like flamewars. We have Colin Watson, shows embarassing photo. James Troup, difficult to get a photo of James but shows an embarassing one, photo of Mako. Then we have Sabdfl, he started the project and gets to call himself whatever he wants because of that, so he chose Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life. Some projects don't have a leadership position so end up having to do consensus. Mark provides us with this strong leadership. Shows an embarassing photo of Mark with Jeff. Mark is also a normal human being, this photo doesn't show that.

There are some things around Ubuntu, one is Canonical who employs lots of the contributors and is a for-profit company based on support. The ubuntu foundation is a trust to ensure ubuntu will continue beyond any problems that could happen. Part of what Ubuntu is doing is building a marketplace of companies from around the world.

Question that the community council and technical board were seeded with canonical employees at the start, will other people get involved? Mako has left canonical, Mark has invited some other people to join the technical board.

How does the marketplace compare to the userlinux idea? Userlinux is not really doing anything, Bruce got a new job and is moving on. We were compared as different projects when we started and Bruce has continued to do that but the intent is actually really similar in both. The main difference is Canonical is a sponsor for Ubuntu.