17:04 <pleia2> #startmeeting Community Council
17:04 <meetingology> 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 <meetingology> 
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17:05 <pleia2> is anyone here from the Developer Memebership Board?
17:05 <tumbleweed> o/
17:05 <tumbleweed> (at the pub, so excuse my half-attention)
17:05 <pleia2> #topic DMB check-in
17:06 <ScottK> \o
17:06 <YokoZar> Forgive tardiness :)
17:06 <ScottK> A few of us are around.
17:06 <pleia2> so this is just a check-in to see how things are going with the DMB
17:06 <pleia2> any issues, concerns, etc?
17:07 <tumbleweed> not enough applicants atm?
17:07 <tumbleweed> otherwise things seem calm
17:08 <ScottK> It does seem that almost every time we turn someone down, someone gets upset and suggests criteria should be more objective.
17:08 <YokoZar> Do you think we've leveled off in terms of growth of developers then?
17:08 <ScottK> It hasn't happened lately, but it's an ongoing issue.
17:08 <ScottK> I don't think it's particularly solvable.
17:08 <tumbleweed> 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 <ScottK> My personal opinion is fewer people outside Canonical see Ubuntu as a worthwhile place to invest their free time.
17:09 <tumbleweed> the developer advocacy people are probably in the best place to answer that
17:10 <czajkowski> ScottK: that sounds rather pesamesitc
17:10 <czajkowski> *pessimistic
17:10 <tumbleweed> I don' tthink it'n entirely untrue though
17:10 <cprofitt> ScottK: that is troubling
17:10 <ScottK> 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 <ScottK> The more Canonical pushes Ubuntu in a unique direction, the less interesting it is in that regard.
17:11 <pleia2> is this a topic that has been brought up with the tech board?
17:11 <YokoZar> At some level, we compete with our own upstreams in terms of attention
17:11 <pleia2> (this is more their area than ours I think)
17:12 <pleia2> or at least a dialog that they should be involved with :)
17:12 <tumbleweed> 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 <Laney> hi
17:13 <ScottK> tumbleweed: There are, but they aren't distro developers.
17:13 <tumbleweed> ScottK: true
17:13 <Laney> there are "app" developers
17:13 <Laney> I don't think the Ubuntu developer community is getting larger
17:13 <Laney> And that does indeed reflect what the company is doing
17:14 * pleia2 nods
17:15 <ScottK> Quite a number of long time Ubuntu developers, including me, are increasingly working on Debian rather than Ubuntu directly.
17:15 <pleia2> yeah, I do keep seeing familiar names pop up in debian
17:16 <ScottK> 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 <ScottK> So given where they've decided to invest, I don't know that it could be a lot better.
17:16 <pleia2> as I understand it, app developers typically wouldn't come to DMB, right?
17:16 <ScottK> No.
17:17 <ScottK> We don't have anything to do with package archives outside the distro.
17:17 <pleia2> thakns
17:18 <Laney> 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 <pleia2> Laney: ouch
17:21 <pleia2> has there been a change in the types of people applying?
17:21 * bdrung appears
17:21 <tumbleweed> recently there was a batch of long time canonical employees, if my memory serves me
17:21 <pleia2> canonical vs volunteers vs other companies
17:21 <pleia2> tumbleweed: that's my memory too
17:22 <ScottK> More Canonical, less anything else.
17:22 <Laney> Don't know how much that's a change over recent history
17:22 <pleia2> Laney: how recent?
17:22 <Laney> It doesn't feel like the mix of people has changed so much in my time anyway
17:22 <YokoZar> I suppose Canonical's rate of growth has outpaced things
17:23 <Laney> 2 years or so
17:23 * pleia2 nods
17:23 <Laney> It's just the numbers
17:24 <ScottK> 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 <ScottK> 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 <tumbleweed> a large chunk certainly went to OSX over the last decade
17:25 <tumbleweed> no idea about any growth in other distros
17:26 <ScottK> 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 <pleia2> 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 <YokoZar> 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 <bdrung> distrowatch says that mint has a big user base, but i don't get the impression that many packagers went there
17:27 <tumbleweed> YokoZar: I'd assume so
17:27 <czajkowski> bdrung: not sure how much I pay to distrowatch :)
17:27 <Laney> Anyway, it's definitely not a bad thing if people move to whatever upstream
17:29 <YokoZar> bdrung I think http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm  a much more reliable popularity contest ;)
17:30 <pleia2> Laney: yeah, it still trickles down to us pretty directly
17:31 <Laney> Still, we were never at a level of having run out of work to do
17:32 <ScottK> 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 <Laney> We've had some meetings at UDS about this but we never found a way to find new people reliably
17:33 <bdrung> YokoZar: assuming distrowatch attracts more technical people, Ubuntu seems to get more widespread by regular users.
17:33 <czajkowski> Laney: do you guys actively go looking ?
17:33 <czajkowski> apprroaching people directly ?
17:33 <Laney> maybe flavours have a role here - they seem to do well for sustaining non-C contributions
17:33 <ScottK> I think that given Canonical's direction, it's not a solvable problem.
17:34 <ScottK> Laney: to the extent they are sustainable in the long run, that's true.
17:35 <Laney> czajkowski: we've done all sorts in the past but not so much at the minute
17:35 <Laney> I'd guess morale about recruitment is quite low
17:36 <czajkowski> Laney: bit of a catch 22 then
17:37 <Laney> Anyway
17:37 <Laney> We're making it easier for not-completely-ubuntu people to contribute
17:38 <Laney> so you don't have to be an out-and-out distribution developer
17:38 * pleia2 nods
17:38 <cprofitt> It concerns me that morale is lower
17:38 <cprofitt> but not sure what we can do to resolve that
17:40 <pleia2> so I'm inclined to say that pause and say that this is now on our radar
17:40 <pleia2> not sure of action items though
17:40 * cprofitt nods
17:40 <ScottK> I don't think there's anything.  I think it's a function of Canonical's direction.
17:40 <ScottK> Fundamentally, there's less room for outside contribution.
17:41 <ScottK> I need to go, so have a good rest of your meeting.
17:42 <bdrung> seeing many articles about Canonical doing stuff, but only few about the Ubuntu community does not attract contributors.
17:42 <sabdfl> hello folks
17:42 <bdrung> hi sabdfl.
17:43 <sabdfl> sorry to be late, glad i could join though
17:45 <bdrung> 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 <YokoZar> Mmm, good to see you
17:45 <YokoZar> Thanks ScottK
17:47 <pleia2> 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 <pleia2> even kids right out college with experience get hired fast
17:47 <pleia2> world needs linux people :)
17:48 <YokoZar> pleia2: I think it good for us that Ubuntu experience is a very marketable job skill ;)
17:48 <pleia2> YokoZar: indeed!
17:50 <sabdfl> just catching up on scrollback (thanks czajkowski)
17:50 <sabdfl> i think its inevitable that the big push for a converged UX, and effectively a new DE, has rattled things
17:51 <sabdfl> am glad we've seen teams step up to drive KDE and GNOME and other DEs in the Ubuntu archve
17:51 <sabdfl> 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 <sabdfl> happy to lose the crazy-edge to Arch, used to be Gentoo, similar gene and meme
17:52 <sabdfl> also, i think looking across the FLOSS landscape, we have fewer participants because bright folks have more layers to play at
17:52 <sabdfl> cloud
17:52 <sabdfl> mobile
17:52 <sabdfl> web
17:53 <sabdfl> none of those were real things in 1995, and mobile + cloud are both post-2004
17:53 <YokoZar> There's also more upstreams
17:53 <sabdfl> i am a bit upset at what i see as pointless undermining of core efforts by parts of the community
17:53 <YokoZar> And, frankly, in some sense the less things are broken at the distro layer the less incentive we have to attract developers ;)
17:53 <sabdfl> i think some of Kubuntu's posturing re Mir has been aimed at currying favour upstream
17:54 <sabdfl> i can appreciate the need for alignment and help and to be popular but it doesn't help to undermine your base :)
17:54 <bdrung> Ubuntu on the desktop lost its newness.
17:54 <sabdfl> right
17:54 <sabdfl> it's hard work too!
17:54 <sabdfl> kids these days :)
17:55 <YokoZar> 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 <YokoZar> we have less huge problems, and thus less fruit to pick these days
17:55 <sabdfl> i would like to know what we can do to get our flavours  to be happy, suggestions welcome
17:55 <sabdfl> saying 'don't move our cheese and can we have more flex on SRUs' isn't it though :)
17:55 <sabdfl> YokoZar, agreed
17:55 <sabdfl> however
17:55 <sabdfl> we ARE seeing exactly that on the mobile front
17:55 <sabdfl> lots of gaps and lots of low hanging fruit
17:56 <sabdfl> and lots of new invention needed
17:56 <bdrung> Scratching my own itch got me involved. Being more stable has the drawback of decreasing incentives to get involved. :)
17:56 <sabdfl> my general expectation is that the whole FLOSS client story really hinges on Ubuntu mobile
17:56 <sabdfl> if we get a reasonable share, then it becomes cool to work on the core (and all flavours benefit)
17:57 <sabdfl> 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 <sabdfl> so, best we crack it open
17:57 <sabdfl> in the interim, good, careful governance is a strength, so my thanks to all of you who shape it
17:59 <pleia2> thanks sabdfl
18:00 <pleia2> any other comments?
18:01 <pleia2> 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 <ogra_> 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 <ogra_> i wonder if it would make sense to make that fact more popular
18:02 <pleia2> 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 <ogra_> im not talking about tablet versions but about what happens if you dock it to a screen and kbd/mouse
18:02 <pleia2> ah, gotcha
18:02 <AlanBell> ogra_: you mean Ubuntu Touch QML Unity on the mobile end and another DE over HDMI?
18:03 <ogra_> there will evry likely be phones shipping with ubuntu
18:03 <ogra_> AlanBell, exactly
18:03 <ogra_> it seems to me that many flavour people are not aware of that fact
18:03 <ogra_> and how much more popularity they would gain
18:04 <ogra_> by being an easily pluggable replacement for the desktop mode
18:06 <czajkowski> any From czajkowski · Hide
18:07 <czajkowski> other comments for the meeting
18:07 <Laney> O_O
18:07 <czajkowski> damn  trackpad!
18:08 <czajkowski> pleia2: is there anything else on the agenda?
18:08 <pleia2> I think that's it
18:08 <czajkowski> does anyone else have any other topics?
18:08 <czajkowski> #AOB
18:08 <AlanBell> o/
18:08 <pleia2> #topic AOB
18:08 <czajkowski> AlanBell: what's up ?
18:09 <AlanBell> we discussed at UDS surprise announcements :)
18:10 <AlanBell> 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 <czajkowski> AlanBell: not sure what you are refering to tbh, but not sure we can go into it now
18:11 <czajkowski> we're very much over time
18:12 <pleia2> 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 <pleia2> don't want another phone announcement situation :)
18:13 <sabdfl> ogra_, good point
18:14 <pleia2> AlanBell: thanks
18:17 <pleia2> ok, anything else?
18:17 <czajkowski> nope all good thanks pleia2
18:18 <pleia2> ok, thanks everyone :)
18:18 <pleia2> #endmeeting