Benjamin Kerensa

The Ramblings of a Beautiful Mind

Linux

Joining the Kubuntu Family

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KubuntuI’m happy to announce today that the Kubuntu Council unanimously approved my request for Kubuntu Membership. As I explained in response to a question by Jonathan Riddell, I have felt for a long time that Kubuntu Project distills the Ubuntu values and has a great sense of community that many long time Ubuntu Contributors might remember from the earlier days of Ubuntu.

I’m very happy to join the Kubuntu Team and look forward to supporting the project through contributions in my spare time.

Gosh, I might have to get another tattoo!

Give a little

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Give
Give by Time Green (CC-BY-SA)

The year is coming to an end and I would encourage you all to consider making a tax-deductible donation (If you live in the U.S.) to one of the following great non-profits:

Mozilla

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. We promote the values of an open Internet to the broader world. Mozilla is best known for the Firefox browser, but we advance our mission through other software projects, grants and engagement and education efforts.

EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.

ACLU

The ACLU is our nation’s guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, a top-ten internet property.

Feeding America

Feeding America is committed to helping people in need, but we can’t do it without you. If you believe that no one should go hungry in America, take the pledge to help solve hunger.

Action Against Hunger

ACF International, a global humanitarian organization committed to ending world hunger, works to save the lives of malnourished children while providing communities with access to safe water and sustainable solutions to hunger.
These six non-profits are just one of many causes to support but these ones specifically are playing a pivotal role in protecting the internet, protecting liberties, educating people around the globe or helping reduce hunger.

Even if you cannot support one of these causes, consider giving this post a share to add visibility to your friends and family and help support these causes in the new year!

 

Mozilla All Hands: They can’t hold us!

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Macklemore & Ryan Lewis perform for Mozilla
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis perform for Mozilla

What a wonderful all hands we had this past week. The entire week was full of meetings and planning and I must say I was exhausted by Thursday having been up each day working by 6:00am and going to bed by midnight.

I’m very happy to report that I made a lot of progress on meeting with more people to discuss the future of Firefox Extended Support Release and how to make it a much better offering to organizations.

I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.

It was great to hear that we will be doing some work to bring Firefox to iOS which I think will fill a gap that has existed for our users of OSX who have an iPhone.  Anyways, what I can say about this all hands is that there were lots of opportunities for discussions on quality and the future is looking very bright.

Also a big thanks to Lukas Blakk who put together an early morning excursion to Sherwood Ice Arena where Mozillians played some matches of hockey which I took photos of here.

In closing, I have to say it was a great treat for Macklemore & Ryan Lewis to come and perform for us in a private show and help us celebrate Mozilla.

 

Chasing the wrong problems

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Ubuntu - We Can Do It!As the discussion on Ubuntu Governance has progressed, it seems the Community Council decided to host a meeting the other day to discuss the topic while the conversation pivoted around a few topics.

I want to add my two cents and say I really do not think that the Ubuntu Community has suffered from a lack of leadership and good governance, both separate things.  I think Jonathan Carter (Highvoltage) really nailed it when he said this in the Community Council meeting “if you visit a canonical page on community and how to get involved, it’s *full* of whatever’s important to canonical right now” and he went on to add some examples on where Canonical has in the past just made important decisions without input from Community and pointed out there are even more recent examples he could offer.

So the real issue is if the Ubuntu Community wants to tackle it is not leadership or governance because we have brilliant leaders and members of governance but instead it is making contributors feel like they are stakeholders again and kept in the loop. Mind you, the Canonical Community Team has repeatedly promised to help Canonical employees get better at keeping the community in the loop even promising such at UDS-P but my experience has been they never really got better.

Finally, I think an Ubuntu Foundation is still a great idea and could create some harmony between Canonical’s commercial interests and the community interests of the project. Projects that have had companies controlling the project have never had great success at sustaining a community because the commercial interests always win at the end of the day.

Something needs to be done otherwise there will be a continued decline in participation in Ubuntu. Let me say the only reason Ubuntu Membership has not had the same downtrend as UDS participation and governance participation is because you do not need to be re-vetted to be an Ubuntu Member. We have folks who are Ubuntu members who have not been on IRC, Mailing List or anywhere in the project in years but are still members. The reality is that if we just looked at contributions, the actual amount of contributors today is far less than the member rolls represent.

Community Appreciation Day: You All Rock!

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Ubuntu Community Appreciation DayToday is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day and I wanted to quickly recognize the following people, but before doing so, I want to thank all the contributors that make the Ubuntu Community what it is.

Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph

Elizabeth is a stellar community contributor who has provided solid leadership and mentorship to thousands of Ubuntu Contributors over the years. She is always available to lend an ear to a Community Contributor and provide advice. Her leadership through the Community Council has been amazing and she has always done what is in the best interest of the Community.

Charles Profitt

Charles is a friend of the Community and long time contributor who is always providing excellent and sensical feedback as we have discussions in the community. He is among a few who will always call it how he sees it and always has the community’s best interest in mind. For me he was very helpful when I first started building communities in Ubuntu and shared his own experiences and how to get through bureaucracy and do awesome.

Michael Hall

Michael is a Canonical Employee who started as a Community Contributor and I think of all the employees I have met that work for Canonical it is Michael who has always seemed to be able to balance his role at Canonical and contributing best. He is always fair when dealing with contributors and has an uncanny ability to see things through the Community lenses which I think many at Canonical cannot. I appreciate his leadership on the Community Council.

Thanks again to all those who make Ubuntu one of the best linux distros available for Desktop, Server and Cloud! You all rock!