Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Stepping down considerately

This is the right time to apply the last guide line from Ubuntu's Code of Conduct.

I have started as an Ubuntu user in 2005, I have found it a promising project mostly because it was aimed at "humans" users, while most similar projects had still a greater focus on developers or development oriented aspects.
Getting involved was easy, the developers could be found on IRC some of them more friendly than others but always there, a point of connection with the community.
As soon I had some know-how I have started participating in the forums, each question was an opportunity for teaching, learning or improving, it was a great experience.

During this stage I have found that a lot of answers were related on how to get a specific version of a software, or people failing to do it. The most frequently answer was teaching how to build from source. That did not seem good to me.
We were promoting all this great thing of Free Software, but we were unable to deliver the latest version meeting a particular need without requesting the "human" user to get some application building skills ?

I have tried to engage the packaging (MOTU) team, It just didn't work for me. I was too eager to cover this need -only partially addressed by the back-ports project-. I did not find the process appealing I had no idea how to improve it, I just had minimal packaging skills.
People were not asking for the proper package, they just needed one that worked without disrupting their system (like they frequently did, compiling or installing from other releases). The GetDeb project was setup, it delivers packages to thousands of users.

Lately I have mostly participated on AskUbuntu.com which in my opinion is Ubuntu's mostly valuable free support center.

I will be looking for other Free Software collaboration opportunities, with a strong leadership that practices open governance and uses decision capacities that comes from transparency, straight discussion and communication.

Thanks to Mark Shuttleworth for setting up a great project and paying the salaries to so many brilliant people.
Thanks to all the Ubuntu users and developers for helping and letting me help building a Free Software and Open Source solution.
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3 comments:

  1. What are you stepping down from? and why exactly?

    I'm just curious as your post didn't seem to answer.

    Good luck if you're exiting the ubuntu community, you've been rock'n'roll on ask.

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  2. It's obvious to me he is talking about leaving the community, and it's not all that surprising as Ubuntu is feeling more and more like a socialist/communist state (or any totalitarian regime for that matter).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Martin,
    I am stepping down as a community member.

    There is no point in listing the reasons in public, it would just fuel more fruitless discussion.

    ReplyDelete