Image Source : mark hoekstra
With the release of Ubuntu 12.10, Mark Shuttleworth made an important announcement about the development of Ubuntu 13.04. In short, he said Canonical is going to invite trusted community members to work on highly secret projects which were earlier developed by only Canonical employees before the official announcements.
Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.
But unfortunately, most of the people got a different message… People thought that Canonical is going to work on Ubuntu secretively harming the openness of the OS. So, with another post, Mark cleared out the doubts…
Nothing in yesterday’s post about inviting members of the community into some of the projects we work on in confidence implied that the Ubuntu development process is becoming less open.
According to what I understood Ubuntu have developed special features secretively using only Canonical employees before releasing them. After released, anyone can get involved with the development. Many people do this. If you got a stupid idea, it’s better to work on it in secret before telling everybody and ruining the surprise. Only then it will become a great idea. Canonical and many others want to make sure that their idea will work before announcing it. That’s why a company need to develop it before announcing.
People like Apple and Microsoft do everything behind closed doors. But what Ubuntu does is, they develop the idea behind the closed doors and when they think its ready, they’ll release it to the development community so everyone else can jump in. According to Mark, people like Fedora also does this. But Canonical want to become more open. So they decided to invite highly ranked community members to work on these secret projects. The truth is they are not going to become less open.. They are going to become more open!
