http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder hourly 1 1901-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://gmane.org/img/gmane-25t.png http://gmane.org http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15524 <pre>We have regularly been made aware of recurring problems on this list. The tone and atmosphere are unmatched in other Ubuntu mailing lists. At one point, Mark reached out [1] to remind everyone how we want to communicate with each other. Still debates kept getting out of hand and were mostly wildly unrelated to Ubuntu. Alan reached out again [2] and made clear that the list had long moved away from its initial focus and welcoming atmosphere. No solutions for the problem were brought up in the list discussion or in the Community Council meeting. In the meeting on April 19th the CC decided to shut down the Sounder mailing list. In essence, this is a decision to prune areas of the project which are offtopic or ungoverned, on the basis that they distract from our shared community focus on the goal of delivering free software in the best possible state, on particular terms (free of charge, cadence). While we appreciate that the Sounder list (and possibly other, similar forums) provide a particular social release for those who use them, we think there are better forums for each of the varied topics discussed there. Some of those are inside the project, most are elsewhere. [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2009-December/013663.html [2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2011-April/016351.html Thanks for all the fun moments on the list, see you elsewhere, your Community Council </pre> Daniel Holbach 2011-04-20T09:25:09 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15523 <pre>Given that sounder is closing, those of us who still think this sub-community is worth preserving could move to http://groups.google.com/group/bikeshed Any objections? I have put up a draft description: "This group is for informal discussion between people who identify as members of the Ubuntu community. This group is not affiliated with the Ubuntu project, does not represent the official view of anyone, and probably isn't representative either of users or developers. Try not to feed flame-wars." I don't claim that is the best possible description of the group. Nor do I claim to know whether the group needs moderation, or needs to be more inclusive etc. Such issues could perhaps be decided by discussion between people who care enough to show up at the new mailing list. </pre> John McCabe-Dansted 2011-04-20T08:54:58 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15520 <pre>Dear Community Council Dissent, disagreement and debate are not bad. Inclusion does mean inclusion. Monocultures are inherently flawed. Consider some introspection. You are the Community Council. Good for you. Sounder members are part of the Ubuntu community. That is, or should be, far more important. As a result what your decision to close the list says, louder and more clearly than anything else is this: "we, The Community Council, get to decide who should and should not be members of the community. We, The Community Council, don't like the Sounder list, nor do we approve of the attitudes of many of the members who frequent it. We, The Community Council, think inclusion means to include those we approve of and exclude everyone else. We, the Community Council, want everyone who is not like us or does not hold our narrow political views to be eliminated from the community forthwith" But inclusion is about tolerance; not your weird narrow view of tolerance, but actual tolerance. Inclusion is not about including some identified groups while excluding others, grouped or otherwise. In fact identifying groups is inherently anti-inclusion: those people (who are not like us, this group) need to be specifically included (now we have identified them as a specific group who are different and need special treatment). "It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one" Ubuntu CoC Absolutely, well said. It's equally important to remember that eliminating dissent and difference is the beginning of the end, the descent towards monoculture; communities rarely survive becoming monocultural because evolution tends to difference, and because monocultures are prone to succumbing to fatal diseases; i.e. the Ubuntu community is going in the wrong direction. Sounder members, especially the most opinionated ones, are needed in the Ubuntu community for that community to be healthy and strong. They also should be entitled to be covered by the CoC i.e. need to not be made to "feel uncomfortable or threatened" by the rest of the community's actions. I sincerely hope that the Community Council reconsiders its decision. Sounder might be a a bit strange at times, and we who are on the list might be representative of some of the stranger parts of the Ubuntu community; but nonetheless Sounder serves a valuable purpose in the Ubuntu community. Sounder is a celebration of diversity, a place where all, utterly regardless of their age, religion, gender, race, height, physical state or political views, are welcomed; a place of true inclusion. To close it has no positive outcomes for the Ubuntu community, only negative ones. Chris CC'd to my blog. --- &lt; at &gt;putt1ck putt1ck.blogspot.com skype:putt1ck Opinions in this email are my own and may not reflect that of my clients, past employers, associates, friends, family, pets etc.. Documents attached to this email may be in ISO 26300 format: http://iso26300.info </pre> Chris Puttick 2011-04-20T07:24:13 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15476 <pre>Seagate lands Samsung's hard drive unit for $1.37 billion: It's duopoly time &lt;http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=781960099-f09aff1f3240c763b781087d83996fa3-bf&amp;brand=ZDNET&amp;s=5&gt; Seagate has acquired Samsung Electronics' hard disk drive (HDD) operations for $1.37 billion in a move that boils the market down to two players. Seagate and Western Digital now control the HDD market. READ FULL STORY &lt;http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=781960100-f09aff1f3240c763b781087d83996fa3-bf&amp;brand=ZDNET&amp;s=5&gt; </pre> Fred A. Miller 2011-04-20T01:43:46 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15475 <pre>Dear Mr Pope and the rest of the Ubuntu Community Council, Alan, you have displayed your true colors today. After assuring me that this item would be brought up at the next community meeting rather than today's, I decided to disregard the inflammatory rhetoric about your character, and put my trust in you as a representative of the community. That trust was obviously misplaced. I say this because I feel that on top of you misleading me (and others) about the time of the meeting, you also chose to deliberately mischarachterize a number of my statements and selectively present the evidence I so exhaustively prepared, so as to bolster your own opinion that the list should be closed. I call foul. I call foul on the entire CC. Because if you voted to close the list you did so because it was your opinion that it should be shut regardless of community input and evidence to the contrary OR because you neglected to do your duty and investigate the information put forth by Mr. Pope (he was kind enough to link to original messages while quoting out of context, isn't that nice?) Whether it be negligence or malfeasance, I stand disappointed in your service. Due to this misconduct, and other recent flagrant missteps by the Ubuntu community, I will be looking elsewhere for my Linux needs. I have no need for a community in which someone so dishonest and underhanded gains a respected and representative status. Thank you and good day, Samuel </pre> Samuel Thurston 2011-04-20T01:43:23 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15444 <pre>Heh, my first, and last post to this list. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil/TeamReports/11/April Meeting 2011-04-19 CC decided to close the Sounders mailing list. In essence, this is a decision to prune areas of the project which are offtopic or ungoverned, on the basis that they distract from our shared community focus on the goal of delivering free software in the best possible state, on particular terms (free of charge, cadence). While we appreciate that the Sounders list (and possibly other, similar forums) provide a particular social release for those who use them, we think there are better forums for each of the varied topics discussed there. Some of those are inside the project, most are elsewhere. Transcript of IRC meeting log here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/04/19/%23ubuntu-meeting.html </pre> sktsee 2011-04-19T21:45:19 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15440 <pre>http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project.ars Oracle is throwing in the towel on OpenOffice after the majority of the community jumped ship and sided with The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. This move by the community to fork OOo due to Oracle's heavy handed handling of the project should be a warning to not just Canonical, but any other major Open Source project that runs things like a totalitarian regime and fails to listen to the cries of its community. Anger the community enough and they will fork the project, and the community will leave the original to molder and die. That's the beauty of Open Source, if the project you love is being run by a tyrant who isn't listening to your suggestion or complaint you can fork the project and build a new community based on higher ideals. There is a growing sense that Canonical isn't listening to its community. There's been several issues which haven't been addressed for some time, and when they're brought up they're usually blown off. One of the big issues is the removal of the monitor model selection feature from the screen resolution system preferences window. This has left a greatly underestimated number of users in a quandary, and since the majority of them are newbies to Linux most give up and never give Ubuntu a second glance. This in turn is hurting Ubuntu's image as a "user friendly" Linux distribution in the eyes of those whom the project depends the most more so than developers ... the user community. Without the users Ubuntu would be Linux distro that simply exists but isn't being used. Unity is another issue. Given time Unity may turn out to be a great desktop for Ubuntu, but it still needs work. Canonical is really gambling with their future releasing Unity in 11.04 and making it compulsory in 11.10. I understand the releases in between the LTS distributions are meant to perfect new features and technology for the next LTS release, but Canonical should have made Unity voluntary only and gave users incentives to use it to help the dev community make the necessary improvements. Thus, once the next TLS release came around Canonical could release Ubuntu with a version of Unity that was rock solid. The moral of the story is, if you fail to listen to your community they'll fork the project, and abandon the original to die in obscurity. If it can happened to Open Office it can happen to Ubuntu, and Gnome too. </pre> Michael Haney 2011-04-19T18:02:54 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15422 <pre>IE9, which became available on March 14, has previously been available through manual downloads. The company said it has seen strong customer and business demand for the new browser, which supports HTML5 and Windows 7 integration. On April 18, existing IE9 beta and release candidate users will be upgraded through Windows Update. *Goodbye, XP * http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20110415/tc_nf/78171 </pre> Fred A. Miller 2011-04-18T00:19:34 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15389 <pre>http://digitizor.com/2011/04/15/crashed-unity-canonical-study/ </pre> Liam Proven 2011-04-16T14:36:56 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15387 <pre>Nothing can go wrong! Nothing can go wr!"&amp;%!£%"^!%£!"""&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt;&lt; at &gt; 5 out of 11 testers managed to crash Unity: http://digitizor.com/2011/04/15/crashed-unity-canonical-study/ How far are we from release day? - d. </pre> David Gerard 2011-04-16T08:46:58 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15386 <pre>I have been working on software for monkey testing. The way monkey testing works is to randomly generate keypresses until a bug is detected. My vision is that this would allow end users to donate CPU cycles to improve the quality of upstream software. This was inspired by the fact that Ubuntu has a very high user to developer ratio, and appears to need more ways to allow enthusiastic users to contribute. This software has found over 80 bugs in the LyX project and more recently I have also used it to find bugs in Abiword and Gnumeric. I suspect that it could be used to find bugs in pretty bug any rich GUI application. The LyX developers found this bug reports quite useful as: Keytest often finds the bug within one week of it being checked in, while it is still fresh on their minds; Keytest does a bisect and reports the change that caused the regression where possible; and Keytest finds the smallest subset of the key presses needed to reproduce the bug to provide a convenient recipe to reproduce. It is available at: http://dansted.co.cc/Mon-Keytest.html Would anyone like to have a play with this? Feel free to drop me a mail, as it is still quite experimental. Note that although the intention is that one day end users could use keytest, in its current state you'd really have to be completely comfortable with compiling software, version control, and tracking down resource hogs with top to be able to use it. Incidentally this is an example of a mail that sounder seems suited for, as sounder is place that we can discuss such things without worrying whether it e.g. technically relates to the development of Ubuntu. </pre> John McCabe-Dansted 2011-04-16T07:59:50 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15383 <pre>Ubuntu-coloured sheep! "Orange sheep: Farmer dyes sheep to stop theft" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13077375 -Paul </pre> Paul Sladen 2011-04-14T16:42:58 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15369 <pre>The OSGUI Tech Show from Down Under does a first look overview of the 64-bit edition of the Xubuntu 11.04 Beta 1 release. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MUUsHOaneQ </pre> Michael Haney 2011-04-11T23:46:20 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15351 <pre>with the recent spate of religious discussion here on sounder, I am left to wonder about the future of Ubuntu. I for one will probably not use a distro based around unity because it doesn't meet my workflow needs. (at least not unless it matures quickly) I'm not sold on gnome shell yet which seems to be the preferred alternative. But this makes me wonder, will the community split into two factions? perhaps Unity-arians and GNOstics? :P </pre> Samuel Thurston 2011-04-11T01:51:38 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15350 <pre>Just to beat the dead horse a little, I found the message heralding the switch from the old mailing list description (which was "Ubuntu community news and chit-chat .. anything goes ") to the current one: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2010-August/015091.html How I came across this is moderately interesting: I was thinking about doing another epic data post, along the lines of my previous one, detailing the history of the list. Since the archives start in August of 2004, I decided to only look at each august as "annual milestones." Here are the interesting points of my finds: Initially the list was a lot of install reports of warty and technical information probably better suited to the ubuntu-users list. august 2005 sees the shift into how Alan characterizes the list, as mostly a "ubuntu sightings and ubuntu in the news" type list. However even at this time there were discussions about more "political" type issues. Darl McBride Sco/novell lawsuit drivel: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2005-August/002329.html' Stuff about space (because sabdfl is an astronaut, get it?) https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2005-August/002376.html Open source -&gt; guerrilla warfare -&gt; US justifies Iraq War (seriously) https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2005-August/002363.html === August of 2006 shows really what I think is the beginning of the way the list is today: An ubuntu distro with religious overtones: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2006-August/008327.html An argument about a similar change in the description of ubuntu-users list https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2006-August/008558.html Merits of various email providers: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2006-August/008510.html === August of 2007 was much more of the same. August of 2008 is the big story. Aug 2007 had 97 messages. low, but only about half of the previous couple years volume, something you could write off as a statistical anomaly. Aug 2008 has 11. 11 messages posted to sounder for the whole month. in one year's time, the list volume went from 3 messages per day to 1 every 3 days. ==== August 2009 sees a comeback, 67 messages, or back to two a day: but the content of the list is DECIDEDLY non-ubuntu and mostly even non-linux related. August 2010 sees an almost complete return to the prior model: mostly topical, reasonably high traffic still (90ish messages) Since Aug 2011 is still to come, I want to compare the most-recent whole month data we have: March 2011 167 messages, overwhelmingly ubuntu related.(actually overwhelmingly Unity related, but that's a horse of a different color.) ==== In short the list is almost as healthy as it's ever been. If Ubuntu doesn't "need this list" anymore, perhaps that's because Ubuntu's grown to the point where it's no longer exciting when it's mentioned in the news. That's kind of sad. If people are interested I may do an analysis on what the big dip in 2008 was all about. Not sure I want to invest the time if nobody cares though. </pre> Samuel Thurston 2011-04-10T19:04:48 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15329 <pre>Alan Pope feels that "the Ubuntu community doesn't need this list anymore." I feel that sounder provides a very valuable function in the Ubuntu community. I have only my own perspective to offer, limited as it is. As Alan seems predisposed to press the case for the closure of the list in the face of vocal and vehement public disapproval, I'd like to enlist your help. What do you value about the sounder list? </pre> Samuel Thurston 2011-04-09T03:01:52 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15294 <pre>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/20-years-of-linux-down-and-the-best-is-yet-to-come/8613?tag=nl.e589 </pre> Fred A. Miller 2011-04-08T14:14:56 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15283 <pre>I've added an proposal to the Ubuntu Community Council agenda to shut the sounder list down. When the Ubuntu project was started, the sounder list was a place where new ideas and fun things like 'Ubuntu sightings' were discussed - it was the first mailing list you would read in the mornings. However nowadays I don't believe this list is serving its purpose &amp; isn't helpful to the project. It only serves to allow a small set of people to argue about subjects very tenuously related to Ubuntu, or unrelated at all. The Ubuntu project doesn't need this list anymore. If anyone has an opinion / counter proposal I would recommend they turn up to the next CC meeting where it can be discussed. The next CC meeting is due to be on the 17th April 2011 at 11:00 UTC and will be held in #ubuntu-meeting on freenode IRC. I'll send a reminder nearer the time. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncilAgenda It can of course also be discussed on this list, and at the meeting I'll do my best to objectively pull together opinions and proposals from those not present. Thanks, Al. </pre> Alan Pope 2011-04-08T09:17:59 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15262 <pre>16 March 2011 Microsoft, the do-gooder, makes the ethics grade Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20044027-75.html#ixzz1IsK9MpGy </pre> Nathan Bahn 2011-04-07T21:29:35 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15261 <pre>The guy who does the This Week in Linux podcast on Youtube has done a new piece on Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryDE2klMGU8&amp;feature=uploademail </pre> Michael Haney 2011-04-07T21:14:05 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder/15238 <pre>It's out. http://www.gnome3.org/ As seen here: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/382495/gnome_3_will_ubuntu_reconsider_/ And if you read the comments: https://launchpad.net/ubuntugnome/ </pre> Liam Proven 2011-04-07T13:15:41 Search the mailing list at Gmane query http://search.gmane.org/?group=$group=gmane.linux.ubuntu.sounder