Fedora Goes to the Faire

The statistics alone for the Norfolk Makerfaire are impressive alone. They had 46 tables on display (including Fedora), 1300-1400 attendees, and they issued one Band-Aid over the course of the day. When put in perspective that it was the first faire put on by members of 757 Labs, they are even more impressive.

It didn’t take very long after the doors opened to realize that this was not a “normal Linux event”. People weren’t walking up to the Fedora table to complain about this or ask why this package was pushed. People were walking up with their entire families. Moms were asking about Linux while their kids were amazed at the SELinux and Beefy Miracle stickers. If no other win was recorded from this event, the number of 3rd graders proud of their awesome new SELinux sticker on their backpack would have been worth the effort. Happily there were others.

• We handed out approximately 400 Fedora DVDs. People were consistently amazed that the DVDs were free.
• Users ran the gamut from RHCE’s who worked from NASA to soccer moms and dads with kids in strollers.
• As always, the One Laptop Per Child was extremely popular.  Kids were amazed at the maze program. Parents were amazed and were looking to donate and get more information.

So all in all the Norlfolk Mini-Makerfaire was a much larger success than I anticipated. The only con was that we went through a lot more swag than a Linux convention would have gone through.

Is Ubuntu getting itself ready for the big F word?

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m an active member of the Fedora Project community, and I also happen to work at Red Hat, Inc. (not in a code development engineering role).

No.  Not that F word. In an open source project, especially one with large corporate backing, there’s an even worse utterance out there…

Fork.

Is the Ubuntu project setting itself up for a fork down the road? 

Obviously if I could tell the future I would be doing much more productive things than sorting through Canonical’s messy handling of their Linux distribution. Winning on the ponies at Aqueduct jumps to mind. At any rate, I have no idea if the SABDFL will hold his ship together or not, but there is evidence to suggest that it could easily be heading for a messy fork in the river.

What is Upstream? What is Downstream?

This has always confused me, but where does “derived” fit in the standard model of how an open source project lives. It’s derived from Debian, but what is the actual relationship? Is it upstream from Debian, Downstream? Were they just standing in line together at the DMV one Saturday? It’s a small issue, but it nags at me to no end.

The “Community” Organization

Back in the days of Dapper Drake, it was funny to refer to Mark Shuttleworth as the “Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life”. It was cute. It was quirky. It was sort of orangey-brown. Just like Ubuntu. But Ubuntu was about togetherness and community, and it was the coolest Linux distro out there at the time. Upstream drivers and a 6-month release cycle and holy crap, it supports my video card!

Ubuntu’s dictator also has the large task of staffing Ubuntu’s Community and Technology governing entities.

The Community Council’s charter is to:

The social structures and community processes of Ubuntu are supervised by the Ubuntu Community Council. It is the Community Council that approves the creation of a new team or project, along with team leader appointments. The council is also responsible for the Code of Conductand tasked with ensuring that community members follow its guidelines.

The Technology Board is responsible for:

The Ubuntu Technical Board is responsible for the technical direction that Ubuntu takes. It makes decisions on package selection, packaging policy, installation systems and processes, kernel, X server, library versions and dependencies. The board works with the relevant team to try to establish a consensus on the right direction to take.

Fast forward to 2012 and Canonical is tryin to monetize Ubuntu, squeezing it into anything that someone has the guts to ask them about. Sadly squeezing into places where Linux itself has been for ages is the most common use case I’ve been able to find (Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu in your car).  You also have 8 years of Mark Shuttleworth picking the people on and direction of the two major governing bodies within Ubuntu itself. Fun examples of this attempt to monetize Ubuntu can be found in the latest releases Amazon “integration” (shame on you, Amazon) and also in this bug, talking about searches run from the Unity dash.

Unity

I’ve used Unity for a grand total of 8 minutes. But I know that one of two scenarios about it is true:

1. the minority of unsatisfied Unity users is exponentially more vocal than the satisfied majority

OR

2. there are a LOT of Ubuntu users out there that are NOT HAPPY WITH UNITY.

A search of Mark Shuttleworth’s blog for “unity” shows one early conceit that the original versions “sucked”, but that they are now “well positioned”. Whatever the community wants, it looks like Unity isn’t going anwwhere except into Ubuntu.

Pulling Bits out of the Community’s Hands

I’ve seen spin on this article and the blog post that caused it to be written, but I can only read it one way that makes sense to me.

Canonical (read Mark Shuttleworth) believes that a small group of people in a closed environment can do better work than a large community.

I’ve “done” FLOSS for a while now, and if there is a single immutable truth it is this: Open Source is noisy and often messy. But it’s the noise and mess where you find the genius that changes the world. The off-hand idea in a minor listserv. The idea floated as “impossible” or “impractical”, just like the GCC was back in the day.

I don’t care if he releases all of the code under the GPL after he makes it. When he decided to create skunkworks teams of his hand-selected people, Ubuntu stopped being a community project. And maybe it never was. I’m not saying that Ubuntu is invalidated as a product because it’s not community-driven. I’m just saying stop talking the talk. One thing I do know is that if happens within Fedora (a little response to this), it happens out in the light of day, on a mailing list or in IRC or in the web tools. If I were a contributor to the Ubuntu project I’d be seriously thinking about offering up my time and talents.

Linux in the Hackerspace

I wish I could say I’ve spent the past few months while I wasn’t posting living it up in the Mexican Riviera. Sitting on the beach while cute girls brought me exotic refreshments until the sun sets over the Carribean Sea every day. OK, I did do that for one week. Not months, though. And it was completely awesome.

I’ve been working with some other amazing folks here in Richmond to help transition ownership and (pseudo) management of the hack.rva (http://hackrva.org), the Richmond Hackerspace. The two people who started the space have both moved to other cities for work. So instead of letting it folk, 4 of us stood up and took over the reins.

As someone who isn’t a natural “hacker”, I’ve found it interesting to see what the people who have decided to make their own things use as an operating system to get the job done. Happily, Linux is king, far and away. But it’s not nearly in the way my “Enterprise” mind envisioned when I was going in. A few of my observations.

• Upstream is the norm, even when it isn’t required. I forgot that most of the people who make up Hackerspaces and similar communities are hobbyists. They may or may not work in IT for a career. So they use what is available and right in front of them. Hello Ubuntu and Fedora.
• There is a lot of room for a Linux distribution to come in and help these communities if one ever decided to make it a priority. From helping to build architecture and project-specific spins of a distribution (Raspberry Pi anyone?!), to just showing enthusiastic hobbyists what is out there ready to be consumed. This is a hugely under served market that is no longer underground.

I immediately think to Fedora (my affiliation, but the ideas are the same for any community-based distro), and how its community could help the hackers and makers. The thoughts I came up with were pretty simple.

• Be there in ISO – Hackers and makers are conditioned to use whatever is in front of them to make some pretty awesome contraptions.  If it’s a Fedora install disk or thumbdrive, then they’re going to use Fedora (provided it gets the job done).
• Be there in PERSON – Many hackers and makers don’t use Linux all day, every day. They’re hobbyists. That is where the hacking part of the equation can cause frustration and slow down their creative process. Being represented within these spaces and showing a few best practices would go a long way. Helping to broaden their horizon and show them what technologies are out there that they don’t know about would go even further. In my own hackerspace, I will be building out a pretty comprehensive Cobbler server to help speed up installs for people’s  test bed systems. A small thing, but doing away with DVDs and thumbdrives… priceless.
• Concentrate on “alternative” architectures. Work out a deal with Beagleboard or someone similar to include a Fedora install disk or thumbdrive in the box. ARM, crazily, may well be the way to the future. Again, if it’s in front of them and they know it’s easy, that distribution is going to win. guaranteed.