== Meeting information == * #ubuntu-meeting: Community Council, 18 Jul at 17:04 — 18:18 UTC * Full logs at [[http://ubottu.com/meetingology/logs/ubuntu-meeting/2013/ubuntu-meeting.2013-07-18-17.04.log.html]] == Meeting summary == === DMB check-in === The discussion about "DMB check-in" started at 17:05. === AOB === The discussion about "AOB" started at 18:08. == Vote results == == Action items == * (none) == People present (lines said) == * pleia2 (40) * sabdfl (31) * ScottK (24) * Laney (19) * czajkowski (16) * YokoZar (13) * tumbleweed (13) * bdrung (8) * ogra_ (8) * cprofitt (4) * AlanBell (4) * meetingology (3) == Full Log == 17:04 #startmeeting Community Council 17:04 Meeting started Thu Jul 18 17:04:43 2013 UTC. The chair is pleia2. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/meetingology. 17:04 17:04 Available commands: #accept #accepted #action #agree #agreed #chair #commands #endmeeting #endvote #halp #help #idea #info #link #lurk #meetingname #meetingtopic #nick #progress #rejected #replay #restrictlogs #save #startmeeting #subtopic #topic #unchair #undo #unlurk #vote #voters #votesrequired 17:05 is anyone here from the Developer Memebership Board? 17:05 o/ 17:05 (at the pub, so excuse my half-attention) 17:05 #topic DMB check-in 17:06 \o 17:06 Forgive tardiness :) 17:06 A few of us are around. 17:06 so this is just a check-in to see how things are going with the DMB 17:06 any issues, concerns, etc? 17:07 not enough applicants atm? 17:07 otherwise things seem calm 17:08 It does seem that almost every time we turn someone down, someone gets upset and suggests criteria should be more objective. 17:08 Do you think we've leveled off in terms of growth of developers then? 17:08 It hasn't happened lately, but it's an ongoing issue. 17:08 I don't think it's particularly solvable. 17:08 YokoZar: I haven't seen any new blood in a while, but I've also been getting less involved myself, so hard to know... 17:09 My personal opinion is fewer people outside Canonical see Ubuntu as a worthwhile place to invest their free time. 17:09 the developer advocacy people are probably in the best place to answer that 17:10 ScottK: that sounds rather pesamesitc 17:10 *pessimistic 17:10 I don' tthink it'n entirely untrue though 17:10 ScottK: that is troubling 17:10 I think many people who are technically ept enough to get involved in development are also people interested in advancing the broader FOSS community. 17:11 The more Canonical pushes Ubuntu in a unique direction, the less interesting it is in that regard. 17:11 is this a topic that has been brought up with the tech board? 17:11 At some level, we compete with our own upstreams in terms of attention 17:11 (this is more their area than ours I think) 17:12 or at least a dialog that they should be involved with :) 17:12 possibly given the new directions of ubuntu's public image (towards the phone) there are new developers that we simply aren't seeing 17:13 hi 17:13 tumbleweed: There are, but they aren't distro developers. 17:13 ScottK: true 17:13 there are "app" developers 17:13 I don't think the Ubuntu developer community is getting larger 17:13 And that does indeed reflect what the company is doing 17:14 * pleia2 nods 17:15 Quite a number of long time Ubuntu developers, including me, are increasingly working on Debian rather than Ubuntu directly. 17:15 yeah, I do keep seeing familiar names pop up in debian 17:16 All that said, I think the current situation is better than if Canonical had decided to do all the phone work outside the Ubuntu archive. 17:16 So given where they've decided to invest, I don't know that it could be a lot better. 17:16 as I understand it, app developers typically wouldn't come to DMB, right? 17:16 No. 17:17 We don't have anything to do with package archives outside the distro. 17:17 thakns 17:18 Our last new core-dev appears to have been on 2012-11-01 - MOTU has had 5 or so this year and PPU 6 including two new flavours 17:18 Laney: ouch 17:21 has there been a change in the types of people applying? 17:21 * bdrung appears 17:21 recently there was a batch of long time canonical employees, if my memory serves me 17:21 canonical vs volunteers vs other companies 17:21 tumbleweed: that's my memory too 17:22 More Canonical, less anything else. 17:22 Don't know how much that's a change over recent history 17:22 Laney: how recent? 17:22 It doesn't feel like the mix of people has changed so much in my time anyway 17:22 I suppose Canonical's rate of growth has outpaced things 17:23 2 years or so 17:23 * pleia2 nods 17:23 It's just the numbers 17:24 Also, over the last 4 years or so, Ubuntu is less and less where the cool kids that want the crazy bleeding edge stuff hang out. 17:24 I'm not sure where they went, but I've seen a big change in the feature freeze exceptions the release team gets in that time. 17:25 a large chunk certainly went to OSX over the last decade 17:25 no idea about any growth in other distros 17:26 Arch seems a good candidate for a locus of insanity, but I may just be biased because they thought pointing /usr/bin/python at ./python3 was a good idea. 17:26 I'm sure a lot of factors are in play here, one of which is I'm seeing more talented devel-type people being hired faster, less time for hobbiest work 17:27 tumbleweed: I'm pretty sure we've still been growing in terms of users at least. Which I suppose implies a smaller percentage of our users are developers. 17:27 distrowatch says that mint has a big user base, but i don't get the impression that many packagers went there 17:27 YokoZar: I'd assume so 17:27 bdrung: not sure how much I pay to distrowatch :) 17:27 Anyway, it's definitely not a bad thing if people move to whatever upstream 17:29 bdrung I think http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm a much more reliable popularity contest ;) 17:30 Laney: yeah, it still trickles down to us pretty directly 17:31 Still, we were never at a level of having run out of work to do 17:32 Ubuntu developers moving "up" to Debian has been a significant source of DDs in recent years, but if the Ubuntu pipe is drying up, it's not good in the long run. 17:33 We've had some meetings at UDS about this but we never found a way to find new people reliably 17:33 YokoZar: assuming distrowatch attracts more technical people, Ubuntu seems to get more widespread by regular users. 17:33 Laney: do you guys actively go looking ? 17:33 apprroaching people directly ? 17:33 maybe flavours have a role here - they seem to do well for sustaining non-C contributions 17:33 I think that given Canonical's direction, it's not a solvable problem. 17:34 Laney: to the extent they are sustainable in the long run, that's true. 17:35 czajkowski: we've done all sorts in the past but not so much at the minute 17:35 I'd guess morale about recruitment is quite low 17:36 Laney: bit of a catch 22 then 17:37 Anyway 17:37 We're making it easier for not-completely-ubuntu people to contribute 17:38 so you don't have to be an out-and-out distribution developer 17:38 * pleia2 nods 17:38 It concerns me that morale is lower 17:38 but not sure what we can do to resolve that 17:40 so I'm inclined to say that pause and say that this is now on our radar 17:40 not sure of action items though 17:40 * cprofitt nods 17:40 I don't think there's anything. I think it's a function of Canonical's direction. 17:40 Fundamentally, there's less room for outside contribution. 17:41 I need to go, so have a good rest of your meeting. 17:42 seeing many articles about Canonical doing stuff, but only few about the Ubuntu community does not attract contributors. 17:42 hello folks 17:42 hi sabdfl. 17:43 sorry to be late, glad i could join though 17:45 I saw bug report with a mindset of users versus Canonical. I don't know whether this is caused by the growth of Ubuntu or the increased impression of Ubuntu being controlled by Canonical. 17:45 Mmm, good to see you 17:45 Thanks ScottK 17:47 I think it's fair to say that the market has changed for linux-focused developers too, most people I know who used to hack on this stuff have "real jobs" and increasingly that takes them away from hobbiest stuff (and isn't always directly on the core os) 17:47 even kids right out college with experience get hired fast 17:47 world needs linux people :) 17:48 pleia2: I think it good for us that Ubuntu experience is a very marketable job skill ;) 17:48 YokoZar: indeed! 17:50 just catching up on scrollback (thanks czajkowski) 17:50 i think its inevitable that the big push for a converged UX, and effectively a new DE, has rattled things 17:51 am glad we've seen teams step up to drive KDE and GNOME and other DEs in the Ubuntu archve 17:51 not sure I put much stock in the suggestion that the whole platform is less relevant to FLOSS though - still feels like the best place to get your fix 17:52 happy to lose the crazy-edge to Arch, used to be Gentoo, similar gene and meme 17:52 also, i think looking across the FLOSS landscape, we have fewer participants because bright folks have more layers to play at 17:52 cloud 17:52 mobile 17:52 web 17:53 none of those were real things in 1995, and mobile + cloud are both post-2004 17:53 There's also more upstreams 17:53 i am a bit upset at what i see as pointless undermining of core efforts by parts of the community 17:53 And, frankly, in some sense the less things are broken at the distro layer the less incentive we have to attract developers ;) 17:53 i think some of Kubuntu's posturing re Mir has been aimed at currying favour upstream 17:54 i can appreciate the need for alignment and help and to be popular but it doesn't help to undermine your base :) 17:54 Ubuntu on the desktop lost its newness. 17:54 right 17:54 it's hard work too! 17:54 kids these days :) 17:55 Speaking personally, what made me a developer was seeing a piece of low hanging fruit in Ubuntu that was a huge problem I knew how to solve 17:55 we have less huge problems, and thus less fruit to pick these days 17:55 i would like to know what we can do to get our flavours to be happy, suggestions welcome 17:55 saying 'don't move our cheese and can we have more flex on SRUs' isn't it though :) 17:55 YokoZar, agreed 17:55 however 17:55 we ARE seeing exactly that on the mobile front 17:55 lots of gaps and lots of low hanging fruit 17:56 and lots of new invention needed 17:56 Scratching my own itch got me involved. Being more stable has the drawback of decreasing incentives to get involved. :) 17:56 my general expectation is that the whole FLOSS client story really hinges on Ubuntu mobile 17:56 if we get a reasonable share, then it becomes cool to work on the core (and all flavours benefit) 17:57 if not, then after a decade or so I think I'd be ready to say Linux will always be a developer desktop :) 17:57 so, best we crack it open 17:57 in the interim, good, careful governance is a strength, so my thanks to all of you who shape it 17:59 thanks sabdfl 18:00 any other comments? 18:01 thanks for joining us tumbleweed, bdrung, ScottK and Laney, even though I don't see action items right now I think awareness itself helps 18:01 something that struck me a while ago already was if the flavours are actually aware that *they* can be the desktop version on a converged device too .... 18:01 i wonder if it would make sense to make that fact more popular 18:02 kde has a tablet version that they've been putting a lot of work in to, but I think other flavors tend to just lack interest (xubuntu isn't interested) 18:02 im not talking about tablet versions but about what happens if you dock it to a screen and kbd/mouse 18:02 ah, gotcha 18:02 ogra_: you mean Ubuntu Touch QML Unity on the mobile end and another DE over HDMI? 18:03 there will evry likely be phones shipping with ubuntu 18:03 AlanBell, exactly 18:03 it seems to me that many flavour people are not aware of that fact 18:03 and how much more popularity they would gain 18:04 by being an easily pluggable replacement for the desktop mode 18:06 any From czajkowski ยท Hide 18:07 other comments for the meeting 18:07 O_O 18:07 damn trackpad! 18:08 pleia2: is there anything else on the agenda? 18:08 I think that's it 18:08 does anyone else have any other topics? 18:08 #AOB 18:08 o/ 18:08 #topic AOB 18:08 AlanBell: what's up ? 18:09 we discussed at UDS surprise announcements :) 18:10 and there appears to be one in progress, is there anything we should know about it, or could say the IRC operator team get some kind of briefing on where the relevant resources are 18:11 AlanBell: not sure what you are refering to tbh, but not sure we can go into it now 18:11 we're very much over time 18:12 I'll make a note to remind myself that in the case of such announcements we should make sure we keep the IRC folks in the loop 18:12 don't want another phone announcement situation :) 18:13 ogra_, good point 18:14 AlanBell: thanks 18:17 ok, anything else? 18:17 nope all good thanks pleia2 18:18 ok, thanks everyone :) 18:18 #endmeeting Generated by MeetBot 0.1.5 (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/meetingology)