| Shuttleworth urges Linux patch and bug collaboration |
Jun. 14, 2007
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- When Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd., spoke at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the Googleplex, he didn't talk about Ubuntu, patents, or hardware vendor partnerships. Instead he devoted his keynote speech to the importance of collaboration in fixing bugs and getting timely patches out to Linux users.
Shuttleworth opened by saying that today we are engaged in a conflict of ideas. "It's not about Red Hat vs. Microsoft or open source fans vs. the evil empire, any more than the Cold War was about the U.S. vs. the Soviet Union. The conflict is really about ideas."
Open source has the power of collaboration, which in turn gives Linux and other open-source programs far greater speed in innovation. On the other hand, our "enemy has far more capital than we do. Our key advantage is that we have the better innovation pipeline."
Now, Shuttleworth continued, "To glue our pipeline together, we need tools. Collaboration is an easy term to say, but it's hard to do. We often don't know who to talk to upstream, so the question is: how can we make collaboration better?"
The problem today is that while projects can work well on mailing lists, bug tracking software, wikis, and the like, "Most of these tools focus on a project. For example, in a bug tracker for a project. We need to talk about collaboration between projects. We need a way that developers working on a tool in GNOME can talk to people in KDE working on a similar tool."
In short, we need a better way to "leverage one another's work." As it is, "this is where things fall down."
For example, Shuttleworth said, "Translations fail to move upstream. It's not because of a lack of will, it's because there are no conveyor belts so translators can send their translations upstream." The result? The same screens, the same documentation, is translated over and over again.
That's a waste of time and expertise, but it's even more critical when it comes to bugs. "Many people work on bugs in many distributions, but they're the same bugs, being seen by different pairs of eyes. It's an open-source saying that 'Many eyes make bugs shallow' but we should get all the eyes together. It's the same thing with patches, Shuttleworth continued. "We need to make it easier for developers, across projects, across distributions, to work together."
Shuttleworth then said, "The distro patches need to go upstream faster and they need to move across distributions. We should set it up so that work in Fedora can move more quickly to openSUSE or Ubuntu."
How to do this? Shuttleworth suggested that "What would be ideal would be if the distros could work together in a common forum on common problems so patches could be cleaned up faster and pushed upstream."
So what are the barriers? "Authentication is a real problem," he suggested. There are too many Bugzillas. Too many systems that one has to log into to report a bug, to file a patch, and each one adds a little friction, which discourages developers."
Another problem is that in the community there's still "Too much of an 'us' and 'them' attitude. It can be hard to know who has commit rights to a project's codebase, and who doesn't. We need to minimize the barriers to work."
"At Ubuntu, we use LaunchPad [story] to try to track bugs in a centralized manager, but it doesn't work as well as we would like. We need a federated, decentralized system to track bugs and patches. When a bug is fixed in a federated system, all of the other systems can pick up on the fix," said Shuttleworth.
So, how do we break down these barriers? How do we make it easier for work to flow between projects?
First, Shuttleworth suggested, in "Bug tracking, the number one problem is to make it easy for people to turn in bugs. If you have to have a personal relationship to get bugs reported, that's a problem. We also need standards for bug descriptions." Again, this will make it easier for anyone to report a bug regardless of what program or Linux distribution they're working on.
We can't expect free software developers to agree on a single bug or patch tracking program, but we can create secure open APIs (application programming interfaces) between Bugzillas. These, Shuttleworth called "Porous federated containers."
You can argue, as one person did at the Summit, that if programmers did this, it would be easy for the enemies of open source to try to introduce bugs. Shuttleworth's reply to this was, "There will be more risk, sure, but we are in a contest of ideas, and all of us believe that the more open, more powerful approach will win out. We can arrange for our APIs and transactions to be digitally signed to help secure the systems and we can respond to threats if they appear."
Shuttleworth again emphasized that a federated, decentralized approach to tracking bugs and fixing them is key to helping improve and speed up open-source innovation. By helping to enable "seamless collaboration with better tools between projects we can make everyone a citizen of the open-community."
That's really the goal, Shuttleworth concluded, adding: "The tools are important, but the people are what's really important."
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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