Comment 23 for bug 882274

@Aaron

I think Mark was clear: you can have access to all these documents and participate in the discussions about priorities, implementation, etc., if you formally join the Unity team. In fact, he welcomed us to do so, and berated those of us who complain from the "outside" for making demands but not willing to do the work required in the long haul as the consequence of the features we demand.

I think that's reasonable for the purpose of getting work done, but -- again -- I think it's detrimental to the community process. It devalues the work the community does on the "outside": alpha testing, beta testing, evaluating, posting, helping each other out, blogging, advocating, reaching out to non-Ubuntu users, and sometimes opening bugs on Launchpad that are curtly closed.

Mark seems to think that such work is all "easy" for us to do, because we don't have to face the consequences of the "real" programming-design-testing cycle, but in fact we're in it for the long haul and do face the consequences of decisions. Including such a decision as not supporting multiple-monitor setups or right-to-left languages in Unity (for three releases of Ubuntu thus far).

As a side-note, I think you've misrepresented the "inside" process a bit: Mark is not a benevolent dictator in any sense. In fact, his leadership is all about empowering and totally trusting the people who are responsible for their domains to make decisions. Mark *never* overrides these decisions, even if he disagrees with them. That means that whoever is in charge of designing the Dash gets total control over all design decisions, even though the team (and the community) as a whole will face the consequences later on. Mark's role is merely as an arbiter: to step in and make a decision one way or another when teams *cannot* agree. Compare this to, say, Linus Torvalds' role in Linux, and it's hard not to be inspired by the Ubuntu way of governing.

I don't think that process is broken. Specifically what is broken is the process involving the "outside" community, on Launchpad and beyond. Mark has been very focused on perfecting the internal team process -- and has done an astoundingly productive job with it -- but the remaining problem is how to properly include us "outsiders."

Unfortunately, I don't see this problem fixed given Mark's current attitude. He just doesn't think what we do is very valuable for Ubuntu at large. Apparently we're a tiny minority of nerdy curmudgeons who hate change and love to whine. Not only does he devalue our work, but he seems to find it distracting and a waste of his and his teams' time. It seems he would be happy if we abandoned Ubuntu and went off to bother a different free operating system. Then the small team of Ubuntu programmers could do their work in peace and quiet.

Except that some of us think that such "quiet" would end up hurting our favorite operating system.

Yeah, it's hard work to include the community. It takes a lot of time. Welcome to free software! Mark, you set the ball rolling, but perhaps the project you created doesn't have what it takes to face the consequences of managing free software in the long haul. Let's fix this.