As we build towards to the next Ubuntu Developer Summit in a few weeks, we have been getting our blueprints and plans in place to have a comprehensive set of discussions at the event. Unfortunately I won’t be there, fortunately due to an impending bundle of baby joy that will be entering my life, but I will be remotely participating. Be sure to join us there, there is no excuse, people.

As part of these plans I have been having some wonderful discussions with Ivo Weevers who is the head of the Canonical design team and who reports directly to Mark Shuttleworth. Ivo is passionate about helping the design team at Canonical and the community to work closely together, and we have been discussing what problems we need to solve, and how to resolve them. In the past there have been concerns in the community that it is difficult for our community to actively participate in design and Ivo and I are keen to solve these challenges.

There are many topics to be discussed and we are currently fleshing out the schedule for UDS, but I am keen to solicit feedback about one particular piece of this puzzle.

Thankfully we are not trying to figure out the puzzle of opening one of these instruments of frustration.

As many of you will know, Ubuntu is a meritocracy; when people do great work, they have more influence over the project. As an example, our developers who work hard and become approved core-dev or MOTU contributors have more influence over our development operations than those who have not put in this level of development work. Now, before the haters start hatin’, I agree that Ubuntu is not a perfect meritocracy in that some Canonical staff members have direct influence over Ubuntu in a way that the community are unable to contribute. Examples of this include our infrastructure and systems teams, and to a degree this also includes the design team.

In a world in which everyone has a strong opinion about design, I believe that part of solving this challenge is that we need a means in which we can highlight the great designers from not-so-good designers. To be clear, this does not necessarily mean designers who agree with the Canonical design team, but instead designers who are collaborative, talented, contribute significant and sustained work, and bring their expertise forward to improve Ubuntu…the very same criteria we use to judge other areas of expertise in the project.

In the development world we have a pretty well defined way of assessing the cream of the development crop while still providing an opportunity for everyone to be able to ascend and aspire to that level of quality. We have methods of contributing that can build up a body of work that can then be reviewed and direct upload rights can be granted when the quality requirements are met. To do this we have the following:

1. A clear definition of things that prospective developers can do.
2. A simple means in which non-uploaders can contribute their work.
3. Criteria that we can use to assess the quality of this body of work (e.g. technical quality, effectively following our guidelines and principles, providing a significant and sustained body of work etc).

I was chatting to Ivo about this and we would like to define the same three equivalent attributes for the design part of Ubuntu. Namely, we need to be able to point to things that people can do, have a means of reviewing this work effectively, and importantly, define criteria of what makes a great designer. I would propose that we apply these assessments to create an equivalent to core-dev in the development team but for designers. This way everyone can contribute more widely, but we can have a team of reliable, effective, community contributors that works closely with the Canonical design team and a clear means in which anyone can learn how to gain the skills to join this team.

I wanted to open up this discussion to the community to get your feedback and then we can review the feedback and discuss it at UDS and then start formulating a plan for the 13.04 cycle. In putting forward your suggestions, please bear in mind that we need to make the solution light-weight for everyone involved, both new contributors and those who will be reviewing the work of others.

A few days ago Stuart Langridge and I upgraded a machine from 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS and then from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS, all over SSH. Both upgrades ran without a hitch. We simply ran do-release-upgrade and everything worked great.

Upgrading from a four-year old installation to a current installation with no problem was impressive. For everyone who contributed to making the magic happen, thank-you!

Recently there has been some concerns in our community about the online dash search feature, and these concerns have been orientated around the privacy of your data, the legal requirements for how this data is handled, and the effectiveness of the search.

These concerns have been taken very seriously inside Canonical and there has been extensive work going on to ensure we can tend to any outstanding issues ready for the 12.10 release. It is important to remember that this is the nature of how we develop Ubuntu; we often add features that later require additional focus and work based upon feedback in the community. This is just the nature of collaborative community; our community helps us to refine and improve Ubuntu in many ways based on feedback. I want to offer a sincere thank-you to everyone who has provided constructive, frank feedback about what we need to do to improve this feature and bring it in-line with the needs and expectations of our users.

So far in this story there has been a series of concerns and actions in response to this feedback. This is summarized as:

• Concern about the usefulness of the feature – to resolve this a toggle switch has been added to the Privacy settings dialog to disable/enable the feature.
• Concern about the encryption of traffic – traffic is now encrypted.
• Concern about adult content being displayed via the lens – significant changes have been made to blacklist certain results based on keywords.
• Concern about the legal requirements of this feature under European law – a Legal Notice link has now been added to the dash to make the terms of use clear for using the dash.

In addition to this, Cristian Parrino, our VP of Online Services at Canonical, who is basically in charge of Ubuntu One, our affiliate schemes, and who is responsible for the affiliate portions of the dash (e.g. Amazon/Ubuntu One Music Store results) has provide some further responses to these concerns.

Cristian published a blog entry – be sure to take a look.

Please feel free to ask any further questions in the comments. Thanks!

When the Unity developers introduced Dash Previews in Unity 6, I knew it was something I wanted to add to Singlet.  I didn’t have time to get the feature added in time to get it into Quantal’s Universe archive, but thanks to Didier Roche and Iain Lane, I was able to get it into Quantal’s Backports archive before the actual release date, so it will be available to all Ubuntu users right away.

Previews for all!

One of the main goals of Singlet, second only to making it easy to write Unity lenses and scopes, was to automatically add new features to any lenses and scopes written with it.  Previews are my first opportunity to put this into practice.  Singlet 0.3 will add Preview information for any Scope or SingleScopeLens written for Singlet 0.2!  To do this, Singlet 0.3 will use the same image, title and description used in the search results to populate the preview.  This is a big improvement over having no preview at all, and there is absolutely nothing the developer needs to do. Even better, if you have a custom handle_uri method, it will also add an “Open” button to your preview which will call it.

Better, faster, simpler Previews

Getting previews for free is nice, but it does limit the preview to only the information you are giving to the result item.  But the Previews API allows you to do so much more, and Singlet lenses and scopes can take full advantage of them.

The simplest way to add more data to your preview is to add a method to your Scope or SingleScopeLens class called add_preview_data.  This method will be called whenever Unity needs to show a preview for one of your result items, and will be given the specific result item being previewed, as well as a reference to the Unity.Preview object itself.

def add_preview_data(self, result_item, preview):
    if result_item['category'] == self.lens.events:
        url_parts = result_item['uri'].split('/')
        event = self._ltp.getTeamEvent(url_parts[5])
        venue = self._ltp.getVenue(event['venue'])
        if 'latitude' in venue and 'longitude' in venue:
            preview.props.image_source_uri = 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=%s,%s&zoom=11&size=600x600&markers=%s,%s&sensor=false' % (venue['latitude'], venue['longitude'], venue['latitude'], venue['longitude'])

The result_item is a Python dict containing the keys ‘uri’, ‘image’, ‘category’, ‘mime-type’, ‘title’, ‘description’, and ‘dnd-uri’, the same fields you added to the results model in your search field. The code above, added to the LoCo Teams scope, sets the Preview image to a Google Maps view of the venue’s location. You can also add additional Preview Actions from within this method.

If you want even more control, you can instead add a method called simply preview to your class, which takes the result_item and the full result_model from your scope, letting you create a Unity.Preview object yourself, and doing whatever you want with it.

def preview(self, result_item, result_model):
    preview = Unity.GenericPreview.new(result_item['title'], result_item['description'], None)
    preview.props.image_source_uri = result_item['image']

    some_action = Unity.PreviewAction.new("do_something", "Do Something", None)
    some_action.connect('activated', self.do_something)
    preview.add_action(some_action)

    return preview

Just a quick note for our wonderful worldwide collection of LoCo Teams…you can find out how to order your Ubuntu 12.10 DVDs right here. We look forward to hearing about the wonderful work you are doing to share the DVDs with people. Rock on.

I just want to let you folks know about a new addition to ubuntu.com.

For a long time now, many of our users have wanted to financially contribute to the Ubuntu project. For some of our users who don’t have the time to contribute in other areas (such as development, documentation, translations etc), this provides a nice means of supporting the project.

Although these contributions to Ubuntu were possible, the details of how to do so was pretty much buried in a growing ubuntu.com and many folks missed the link. In addition to this, the granularity of how you could contribute was limited; you could contribute an amount of money to the project, but there wasn’t really a way to indicate how you wished that money to be used (such as using it for growing Debian/upstream relations, for desktop improvements, or other areas).

Inspired by the wonderful folks at the Humble Indie Bundle, we now have a contributions page that provides a clearer means in which you can not only contribute but also where you want the money to be used. It looks like this:

Now helping to financially support Ubuntu is easier than ever.

The way the page works is that you can use the sliders to select how much you contribute to the following areas:

• Make the desktop more amazing
• Performance optimisation for games and apps
• Improve hardware support on more PCs
• Phone and tablet versions of Ubuntu
• Community participation in Ubuntu development
• Better coordination with Debian and upstreams
• Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu
• Tip to Canonical – they help make it happen

Currently the page only accepts PayPal, but other payment mechanisms are currently being explored as we speak. The page appears on the site before you download an ISO (thus making it easier to find) and it provides the opportunity to contribute. For those who don’t wish to contribute in this way you can simply click the Not now, take me to the download › to bypass the page. Obviously our users are not required contribute. You can download Ubuntu here and see the page in action.

When a contribution occurs, Canonical will act as a steward for the money and ensure it is managed fairly and in accordance of the user’s wishes…ensuring it goes to the part of the project outlined in the form. Importantly, Canonical will not be using the money for any Canonical business-orientated functions; all of the contributions will be used to fund the Ubuntu project and continue it’s growth and development.

Some of you may have preferred there to be a finer-grained set of places to contribute, but in the interests of efficiency, the above areas were chosen to ensure that it covers the major areas that our users will be interested in financially supporting.

Naturally I would like to encourage you all to contribute. Over the years Ubuntu has grown to serve more people around the world than ever before with a powerful Free Software Operating System. For us to continue to grow, improve, and evolve Ubuntu we need to ensure we have the resources available to do this work. On one hand Canonical contributes extensively to this work, and this contributions page provides an opportunity in which you can contribute too. Your money will help go towards improving the areas of Ubuntu that you are passionate about, and help us to continue to bring a simple, efficient, safe, and elegant Free Software platform to the world. Thanks!

If you folks have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments.

Well, we did it.  The six members of the Canonical Community Team stayed awake and (mostly) online for 24 straight hours, all for your entertainment and generous donations.  A lot of people gave a lot over the last week, both in terms of money and time, and every one of you deserves a big round of applause.

Team Insanity

First off, I wanted to thank (blame) our fearless leader, Jono Bacon, for bringing up this crazy idea in the first place.  He is the one who thought we should do something to give back to other organizations, outside of our FLOSS eco-system.  It’s good to remind us all that, as important as our work is, there are still things so much more important.  So thanks, Jono, for giving us a chance to focus some of our energy on the things that really matter.

I also need to thank the rest of my team, David Planella, Jorge Castro, Nick Skaggs and Daniel Holbach, for keeping me entertained and awake during that long, long 24 hours.  There aren’t many people I could put up with for that long, I’m glad I work in a team full of people like you.  And most importantly, thanks to all of our families for putting up with this stunt without killing us on-air.

Upstream Awesomeness

Before we started this 24-hour marathon, I sent a challenge to the Debian community.  I said that if I got 5 donations from their community, I would wear my Debian t-shirt during the entire broadcast.  Well, I should have asked for more, because it didn’t take long before I had more than that, so I was happily sporting the Debian logo for 24 hours (that poor shirt won’t ever be the same).

I wasn’t the only one who put a challenge to the Debian community.  Nick made a similar offer, in exchange for donations he would write missing man pages, and Daniel did the same by sending patches upstream.  As a result, the Debian community made an awesome showing in support of our charities.

All of our donors

The biggest thanks, of course, go out to all of those who donated to our charities.  Because of your generosity we raised well over £5000, with the contributions continuing to come in even after we had all finally gone to bed.  As of right now, our total stands at £ 5295.70 ($8486).  In particular, I would like to thank those who helped me raise £739.13 ($1184) for the Autism Research Trust:

• Christopher Crisafulli
• Michael Nachtigal
• Jane Silber
• John Pugh
• Laura Czajkowski
• Stephen Smoogen
• evilnick
• Sam Hewitt (twice!)
• John Vrbanac (thrice!)
• Stefano Zacchiroli
• Paul Tagliamonte
• Jonathan Carter
• Thijs K
• Cary Haynie
• Chris Johnston
• Angel Abad
• Mark Shuttleworth
• Gregor Herrmann
• Benjamin Kerensa
• SamVH
• sebsebseb
• Anonymous (x6, you know who you are)
• Corey Goldberg
• William Anderson
• Philip Ballew
• Dmitry
• Arthur Talpaert
• Kelly Reid
• Michal Predotka
• Peter Mahnke
• Dave and Elizabeth
• Thomas Richards
• Kev Quirk
• Peter Jensen

And a very big thank you to my brother, Brian Hall, who’s donation put us over £5000 when we only had about an hour left in the marathon.  And, in a particularly touching gesture of brotherly-love, his donation came with this personal challenge to me:

So here it is.  The things I do for charity.

Over the last 24 hours the Canonical Community Team spent an entire 24-hour period together working, interviewing community members, planning further work, and fund-raising for our six charities; Oxfam (Daniel Holbach), Greenpeace (David Planella), Little Kids Rock! (Jorge Castro), Autism Research Trust (Michael Hall), WaterAid (Nicholas Skaggs), and Homeless International (Myself).

I am delighted to announce that at the end of this period we each raised the following for our charities:

• £1055 – Daniel Holbach
• £610.50 – David Planella
• £898 – Jorge Castro
• £709.13 – Michael Hall
• £588.68 – Nicholas Skaggs
• £1272.39 – Myself

…this totaling £5133.70 for charity!

Thank-you to everyone who donated, many of whom donated to multiple horsemen; your generosity is hugely appreciated, not just by us, but also by the many people, families, and neighborhoods that will benefit from your contributions.

Throughout our 24 hours online we were joined by many people for interviews and discussions. Thanks to Stuart Langridge, Gema Gomez, Daviey Walker, Carlos de-Avillez, Chuck Short, Joey-Elijah Sneddon, Laura Czajkowski, Alan Pope, Rick Spencer, Marco Ceppi, Clint Byrum, Ted Gould, Martin Pitt, Mark Shuttleworth, and Didier Roché. Thanks also to everyone in the IRC channel and on Twitter who stayed up to support the marathon and watch the discussions, interviews, see us coordinate projects and UDS work, joke around with each other, and even cook and barbecue together. It was a blast!

Finally, of course, I want to thank Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, David Planella, Nicholas Skaggs and Michael Hall for agreeing to take a full 24 hours out of their life, away from their families, and outside of their comfortable beds to take part in this madness. Spending 24 hours with the same five other somewhat-sleep-deprived people could be a recipe for frustration, but I think I speak for everyone in that it was simply a pleasure to spend time together as a team and as friends. I feel blessed to work with such a talented, hard-working, and friendly team, and the last 24 hours was another reminder of why I feel so fortunate to have such a wonderful job and with such a rocking team.

And with that written up…I am going to bed. Night all!

So the Ubuntu Community Charity Marathon is in full swing and we are just getting into the 14th hour. We had a number of challenges posted already:

• Nick is going to write a manpage for Debian for every 5 donations he gets which have ‘Debian’ in the comment.
• Daniel is going to send patches to Debian for every donation with the word ‘Debian’.
• Jono is going to shave his beard off if he hits £3000.

This is all very nice and everything, but now we reached a new point in this craziness: Alan Pope, Elvis imitator deluxe pledged to shave off his hair. Shave off his hair. If all of us get more donations in than Jono.

Popey, Elvis imitator deluxe

An easy fix for the situation above would be for example: if Jono gets 3000 pounds and each of us gets 3001. Tell you friends, help us out. This is going to be awesome and it’s all for a good cause.

Here to help you out:

• Daniel’s donation page
• David’s donation page
• Jono’s donation page
• Jorge’s donation page
• Michael’s donation page
• Nick’s donation page

As part of the 24-hour marathon we are doing lots of interviews, as well as some fun sessions, Q+A sessions on more. Here is the first part of the schedule:

• 2.00pm UTC – Gema Gomez – Assuring Quality in Ubuntu – we interview Gema Gomez who is part of the Ubuntu QA Team about how we are growing quality in Ubuntu.
• 3.00pm UTC – Daviey Walker – Ubuntu Cloud in 12.10 and Beyond!
• 4.00pm UTC – App Developer Showdown – we will explain the plans set in store to provide the best App Developer experience to submit your apps to Ubuntu
• 5.00pm UTC – Carlos – community council and bugsquad
• 6.00pm UTC – [tentative] Chris Johnston – Getting involved with Summit development, learn how to get the code running locally, how to make contributions, and what the future plans are for the project.
• 7.00pm UTC – Chuck Short – Ubuntu and OpenStack – Chuck will be talking about some of the awesome work the Server team is doing to bring the latest from OpenStack into Ubuntu.
• 8.00pm UTC – Team Q+A – Ask us about Ubuntu! Bring your questions and ask anything you like to any of the horsemen!
• 9.00pm UTC – The Bacon BBQ Extravaganza – as part of some sessions about what the horsemen do for fun, join Jono Bacon as he starts his six hour smoking session of three racks of Baby Back Ribs. Come and find out how smoking works, check out the pit and the gadgets, and have a little fun!

We will have the schedule for the next part of the 24-hour marathon soon!

Come and join the fun at marathon.ubuntuonair.com/ – thanks!

Gangnam Style.

At 10am UTC / 11am UK / 12pm Europe / 3am Pacific / 6am Eastern on Thurs 4th Oct 2012 the Canonical Community Team will be working for a solid uninterrupted 24-hour session. The marathon will involve Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, David Planella, Nicholas Skaggs, Michael Hall and myself; six horsemen spread across three different countries hitting the Ubuntu pump hard for 24-hours…all in the interests of raising money for charity while improving and growing Ubuntu and Free Software.

The entire session will be streamed live on marathon.ubuntuonair.com where you can watch the action and chat to the team as we work and do the marathon.

Importantly, we want to use this as an opportunity for the community to get involved in the marathon too! Let’s use this 24-hour period as a great opportunity to add the finishing touches to Ubuntu 12.10, work on different projects, improve our documentation and translations, and help share knowledge and experience.

Of course, at the core of why we are doing this work is to raise money for charity…let’s see how much money we can generate for the six good causes that we have picked! Please go and DONATE!

So…at 10am UTC / 11am UK / 12pm Europe / 3am Pacific / 6am Eastern on Thurs 4th Oct 2012 be sure to head to marathon.ubuntuonair.com and join the fun – also please tweet about the marathon with the #ubuntumarathon hashtag. Thanks!

Apologies for such a long post, but I want to ensure you all have the necessary information about our focus in 13.04. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments!

As we edge towards our next release, I have been preparing my team, the Canonical Community Team, for the forthcoming 13.04 cycle and I want to share the process to give you folks an idea of how we decide what to work on. Please note that we are a community management team, so if your favorite feature, bug-fix, or pet peeve is not listed here, don’t be surprised, we are not a normal engineering team who builds features or fixes bugs inside Ubuntu.

The goal of this preparatory work is for me to gather input from our stakeholders, the community, and our team members to get a firm idea of the problems and opportunities that are in front of us. I then take this input into account as I assess what would be the best use of the team’s expertise and resources.

Our team’s mandate is pretty wide…the community is a big place…so it is always difficult to settle on the most critical areas of focus from a wealth of worthy candidates. My apologies that we simply don’t have the bandwidth to focus on more areas, but everyone on the team is always available to help our community leaders and contributors to be successful – if you don’t see your community problems and opportunities listed here, that doesn’t mean we are not here to provide help, guidance, and support – feel free to reach out to us!

You can catch us in #ubuntu-community-team on freenode IRC, and feel free to email us or simply leave your comments on this blog entry.

Please don’t reach out this way.

When I have finished gathering this input I then work with the team to map out in a spreadsheet each of their objectives, goals, success criteria, and an overview of the work required for these items. This spreadsheet provides a good overview of the body of work for each horseman, and then when I approve these objectives and goals I ask each team member to register blueprints for each goal.

These blueprints are public pages on Launchpad that serve a number of important purposes:

1. They form the backbone of the sessions we have to discuss these objectives and goals at UDS.
2. They provide a place in which we can track decisions and further work, right down to the work item.
3. They provide wonderful transparency and an easy way for anyone to see changes and updates to each one of our goals – you can subscribe to a blueprint and you get emails when they change (including changes to the status of work items).
4. They provide the input to status.ubuntu.com where we can get visibility on this work so I can help ensure everyone stays on top of things.

Today I finalized with my team these core objectives and goals and I want to now provide an overview of them. You should expect to see the team follow up on their own blogs with further details and topics for discussion as well as the specific blueprints for these goals that you can subscribe to.

I will also follow up after UDS with a full listing of all blueprints we are working on so you can see everything in one place. This blog entry is designed more to provide some background to this work.

Please note: even though we have an idea of the objectives and goals, the final solutions, outstanding questions, implementation details, and other content is not finalized; that is the purpose of the Ubuntu Developer Summit…to delve into the details and plan how we achieve those goals together as a community.

Let’s now take a look at these plans, divided up into topic areas.

Quality Assurance

Over the years we have developed standards of practice of not only how we build Ubuntu but also how we strive to encourage the same philosophy in other projects. This has included our focus on cadence and design; both of these underpinnings in how we build Ubuntu have helped improve the final product, and it has been great to see other projects taking similar approaches.

In the last few years we have made quality a core part of these standards of practice, and matched them with neccessary investment from Canonical. This includes the growth of our QA team and I hired Nicholas Skaggs on my team who has been doing a fantastic job growing and building our community of testers and quality engineers.

These additional resources have been focusing on growing our automated testing infrastructure, increasing our manual test coverage, and improving our visibility on defects which will ultimately result in resolving those issues and preventing regression. Many of you will have felt the results of this quality investment in 12.04, and the train is rolling on with 12.10 and through to 13.04.

Quality is a difficult thing to show as a picture, so heck, here’s a duck.

Over the last few weeks Nick and I have been talking a lot about two core goals in 13.04:

1. Growing our community of testers.
2. Improving our visibility and predictability so we apply our QA resources and community smarter.

There is important yet subtle distinction in this work. Our goals are to assure quality, not just to ensure things get tested. We want to ensure that the right things get the appropriate level of testing so as to assure they work correctly in Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu we typically have two core types of testing going on…automatic and manual testing. The QA team led by Pete Graner have been building out our automated testing facilities and the goal here is to ensure that everything that can be tested is tested in an automated fashion. For those areas that cannot be tested with an automated test, we lean on Nick to rally our community to help with manual testing of those areas.

Automated Testing

The QA team have been working extensively on our automated testing facilities. The goal here is simple: for us to provide a comprehensive set of automated tests that are regularly run and provide visibility on regressions and other issues. These automated tests provide an effective means of raising red flags that our developers need to focus on fixing.

Having an automated testing infrastructure is one thing, but it is nothing without the tests. With the QA team getting the infrastructure up and running, I have asked Daniel Holbach and Nicholas Skaggs to work with our community to encourage and grow our test coverage. The contribution of automated tests is a wonderful way of assuring the quality of Ubuntu and providing more visibility on where problems may exist so we can fix them, thus producing a better quality Ubuntu.

This work will first involve ensuring that the neccessary documentation is in place, that our community knows which tests are required, and that there is a simple means of contributing tests. We will then have an extensive outreach campaign to encourage our community to participate and write tests; expect outreach about this at UDS and in future community events.

Manual Testing

When something can’t be tested automatically we rely on human-run manual testing. Currently we have two types of testing:

1. In 12.10 we moved to a twice monthly regular cadence testing (primarily testing the installation experience) – this happens without fault every two weeks with the goal that all tests are run.
2. We often have a series of reactive test plans to test things such as a new Unity release or problem spots in the distribution.

The challenge with the latter reactive tests is that they sometimes resulted in a bit of a scramble to get things in place. What can sometimes occur is that a new component lands in Ubuntu that either (a) includes significant changes or (b) has problems and Nick works quickly to get out a test plan.

As such in 13.04 I have asked Nick to provide a more predictable manual testing methodology and to provide greater visibility on the state of QA in the distribution. Nick is going to work on a weather report visualization of where quality issues exist in different parts of the platform. On one hand this will be a data-driven view and on the other this will involve some human input.

The goal here is to provide a simple means in which our community can identify problem spots and then we can tie together greater automated and manual testing based on these needs. This quality report will be augmented with community growth campaigns to get more people interested and participating in QA. Nick will also continue to run the cadence testing every two weeks.

It is rumored that the reason for the two week cadence is that it lines up with the next Seinfeld marathon. This cannot be confirmed nor denied.

The culmination of this QA work will result in a growth of automated tests and a community who produces these tests as well as better visibility on where there are quality issues in Ubuntu so we can apply appropriate automated and manual testing and community growth to relieve those issues.

Juju

Juju has seen some wonderful growth in the last year. With Ubuntu’s popularity in the cloud, the Devop crowd have been getting increasingly interested in Juju and the team has been continuing to grow and extend Juju to support the needs of our users.

On my team Jorge Castro is there to grow the Juju community. When we started this work the goal was simply to grow the number of charms and active charm contributors. This work involved Jorge flying out and running charm schools, organizing charming competitions, and we spent a lot of time getting the documentation, community governance, review processes and other necessary pieces in place.

Earlier in this cycle we changed gears to really focus on quality applied to a target set of charms. A big chunk of this work involved the creation of the Charm Quality Rating scale that provides a means in which we can determine what an awesome high quality charm looks like. We then applied it to the set of charm targets. Jorge and members of Antonio’s team have been reaching out to upstreams to work together in improving the quality of their software when deployed with Juju.

In 13.04 Jorge will continue to focus his efforts on this quality initiative and working with upstreams around this work. Jorge will also re-focus back on the wider net of charm and community growth to keep our community growth consistent while we focus on quality.

With every new community I always mentally segment the new community member interface into what I call the on-ramp. It looks like this:

Not meant for skateboarding.

This effectively covers the challenges that new community members face when they join a community. First they need to know that they can participate in the first place, second they need to know the skills to participate, thirdly they need to know what to work on, and then finally they need to feel great about their contributions and get the recognition they deserve. This is all part and parcel of how we build a strong sense of belonging in communities which increases the stickyness of contributors who want to stick around and participate in the project.

Over the last year Jorge and others have put together these various pieces of the on-ramp as required, but I have asked Jorge to do a full on-ramp review to ensure we have each of these parts nailed. This is going to involve a blueprint for each part of the on-ramp, a full review of each area, user-testing our resources and community-faces interfaces, and identifying and resolving any deficiencies reported. This will result in a more efficient, more pleasant, and more productive community experience.

App Developers

In recent months my team have been focusing on improving the app developer experience on Ubuntu, and ensuring that we present a simple, powerful, and flexible platform in which developers can build rich, feature-full apps that integrate neatly into the platform and benefit from the flexibility of Ubuntu. David Planella and Michael Hall have been doing wonderful work in this area.

To fulfill the needs of app developers we have a few challenges to overcome. I see the app developer experience involving the following pieces in the pipeline:

1. Providing the tools, resources, and skills-acquisition to write apps.
2. Promoting the benefits and opportunities of Ubuntu as a platform for app developers.
3. Providing a simple and effective means of delivering applications to Ubuntu users.

For the first bullet, we are going to continue to make developer.ubuntu.com improvements to ensure that new developers have all the information they need. We have already scoped out some improvements to developer.ubuntu.com that will provide these important resources for our app developer community. This will include:

• Integrated API documentation for our various APIs.
• A code snippets library that will make it easier to find what you need and get started.
• A video tutorial section.
• Ask Ubuntu integration.
• An outreach campaign to increase the number of recipes we have on the site.

Our goal is that developer.ubuntu.com continues to be a hub of information and support for Ubuntu app developers.

For the second area we are going to continue our app developer community growth. Here I have asked David Planella and Michael Hall to continue to grow the number of app developers who are interested in building apps for Ubuntu and ensure they have the skills and opportunity to deliver fantastic apps to our users. In the last cycle we ran the Ubuntu App Developer Showdown and we want to run similar kinds of initiatives. This will include regular Google+ hangouts, an app developer education week, weekly guest hangouts and more.

For the final area, as I blogged about before, we need to improve the ease and pipeline of how developers can get their applications into Ubuntu. Over the last few months we have been working on a spec to solve this challenge. This is a foundational piece of work that will help to significantly ease publishing apps to the Ubuntu Software Center. The spec involves many different pieces of work from many teams. The Security and Foundations teams have already committed to much of this work in the 13.04 cycle, but there will be lots of general coordination of these pieces that we will need to work on. This spec will certainly not be completed in 13.04, but much of the foundational pieces will be worked on.

The new app upload process.

Developers

Our developer community has always been important to us, and in 13.04 we will continue to focus on and grow interest and participation in Ubuntu development. As usual, Daniel Holbach will be coordinating this work, and we have identified some important areas of focus.

First and foremost, 13.04 is going to be all about growth. In 12.10 the Developer Advisory Team was put into place and there were significant improvements to our packaging guide, and in 13.04 the focus is going to be on supporting our active contributors in getting through the developer process and becoming active developers.

This work will not just focus on Core Developers but also MOTU. Our MOTU community is incredibly important to Ubuntu and the work they do in maintaining the comprehensive set of packages in Universe is hugely valuable to our users. Daniel will be be priming the pump for every Developer Membership Board meeting and helping to ensure potential candidates have their necessary documentation in place and the DMB are notified of their application.

If you are actively participating in Ubuntu development today and submitting your contributions to the sponsorship queue, get to know this guy, he can help you with anything you need:

if you whisper daniel.holbach@ubuntu.com three times magic happens

As part of this developer growth work Daniel is also going to run a bug fixing initiative in 13.04 to increase the visibility on bugs for our community contributors so our new developers can feel like their work is fixing the right parts of Ubuntu and feel great about those contributions (also fitting in with our quality goals). Daniel will also be working on a series of educational videos for how to participate as a developer and be performing a lot of active developer growth outreach via Google+ hangouts, Ubuntu Developer Week and more.

Ubuntu Accomplishments

As some of you will have seen, a number of us have been hacking on the Ubuntu Accomplishments project in our spare time. The project has made significant progress and is pretty much at a point that is ready for community-wide deployment. This involves moving the validation server over to a Canonical hosted machine, deploying the web interface (which will eventually be trophies.ubuntu.com), and getting it packaged and into the Ubuntu Software Center.

This work will result in a system that provides context sensitive documentation for how to participate, improves social community connection points (via the web interface), and provides a great method of acknowledging contributions. In a nutshell, Ubuntu Accomplishments makes participation discoverable and acknowledged. I am excited to see the community utilizing the system and continuing to grow support for different types of accomplishment.

I have asked Michael Hall to work with the Canonical IS team to get Ubuntu Accomplishments deployed and to ensure the system is packaged and available in the Ubuntu Software Center ready for the 13.04 release.

Other Topics

The topics covered above are really just the core areas of focus in the cycle, and a typical cycle for our team involves hundreds of other responsibilities and different pieces of work from LoCo Teams to Documentation to Translations to UDS, improving communications and more. When UDS is completed and I provide the update with the full list of blueprints I will expand on these additional topics too.

If you got to this point, thanks for reading…I know this was a long post. Please do let me know if you have any other questions or queries. Thanks!

…I am willing to do stupid things in exchange for money while fund-raising for my charity at our 24 hour Ubuntu marathon on Thursday. We have raised £1515.95 but we need more!

DONATE HERE and suggestions welcome in the comments!

It has been a little while since I last talked about Ubuntu Accomplishments, but there has been ferocious work going on in the project. The new release includes a number of important features and refinements.

The goal of the 0.3 has been to focus on quality. Our intention here was to raise the reliability and quality of the core system and provide another good solid iteration towards a 1.0 release. As such many of the features in this release are not particularly visible, but you can really feel the improvement in quality.

Let’s first take a look at the end-user improvements. Firstly, we improved the My Trophies view to include filtering to show you the different collections as well as which trophies you got most recently:

A core philosophy with the project is to keep our interface clean and uncluttered.

These new filters make it much easier to navigate your trophies when you have a large collection. It also makes the client feel more dynamic when displaying trophies in chronological order (this is grouped by ‘Today’, ‘This Week’, ‘This Month’, ‘Last Six Months’ etc).

Thanks to s-fox we now have Social Media integration build into the client. When browsing your trophies you can click one then click the Share button to easily share it across your social networks. This integrates neatly with Gwibber so it uses your online accounts settings.

A large chunk of the 0.3 cycle was spent by the awesome web team building a web front-end for displaying and browsing accomplishments. Thanks to Janos Gyerik and Gabriel E. Patiño for their extensive work on this code-base.

An in-development shot of the web gallery.

This web gallery will eventually be visible at trophies.ubuntu.com. The code lets you browse different opportunities, view the documentation, and then also show your trophies to others. We integrated support for the web gallery into the desktop app to switch on support for this with a single click (you have to opt-in to share your trophies online).

We have all kinds of interesting plans for building in social functions into the web interface to help make our community feel better connected in terms of what people work on and how people can find help in participating. I am really looking forward to seeing this deployed in a production environment in the next few months.

In addition to this work we also added a number of new accomplishments to continue extending the system to cover as much of the community as possible.

Quality

A big chunk of the work in this release however was much less visible with the goal of assuring quality.

Thanks to Matt Fischer we now have a comprehensive suite of unit tests. We are now regularly running these tests and running them against new contributions to assure the quality of our code-base and not regress.

We also did a full review of our API, and we tidied up our code-base significantly. Creating effective APIs is hard and intensive work, and thanks to Rafal Cieslak for his excellent efforts in driving much of our API clean-up. We have a far more mature API now.

As part of this work in assuring quality I spent some more time hacking on a tool I wrote to check the quality of our accomplishments (the tool is accomplishments-battery). I pretty much re-wrote it for 0.3, added different output formats, included checking for accomplishment schema completeness, and made it more modular. We use this tool to run a full daily check of all accomplishments to ensure they work correctly.

A test run on the Ubuntu Member accomplishments.

We as a team also spent a lot of time generating API documentation both for contributors and for accomplishments writers. We want to provide two types of documentation: docs for people consuming the technology to write clients and accomplishments as well as docs for people who want to hack on the core accomplishments system. This is still on-going work, but we are in much better shape than we were.

Part of our documentation designed for client authors.

We also vastly improved our documentation for how people contribute to the project.

Trying The Release

To get started using the release, please see our installation instructions. You will need to be using Ubuntu 12.04 or later to use the 0.3 release. Fortunately, the most recent versions of our flavors (e.g. Xubuntu) can now also run Ubuntu Accomplishments too!

If you have any questions, feel free to post them using our Ask Ubuntu tag, or ask in our support channels (more on this below).

Next Steps

Our next step is to get the system production ready. I have tasked Michael Hall on my team to take this pretty mature code-base and deploy it in a production environment and work with the Canonical IS around these logistics (the IS team has already approved this work). Michael will be working on getting the system up and running over the coming weeks. This will include both the validation server and the web gallery.

While this work is going on we hope to have a preview version of trophies.ubuntu.com ready to go. We already have the integration with the desktop application in the code-base (just not exposed in the user interface). We will then continue to refine our core system, grow our library of accomplishments and start rolling the system out to our wider community. Exciting times!

We need your help though! If you are a programmer, tester, writer, translator, or just want to help in another way, please our getting involved page, join our mailing list, and be sure to join our IRC channel in #ubuntu-accomplishments on Freenode. We hope to see you soon!

Thanks to Rafal, Matt, s-fox, and the many other folks who helped make this release such a success!

The other day I announced our 24-hour horsemen marathon. In a nutshell, we in the Canonical Community Team are going to work for a continuous 24-hour session on Thursday next week. Each of us has picked a charity that we are going to support and I wanted to share some words on why I picked mine…Homeless International.

A few years ago Erica and I were driving through a city and we saw an old guy, bleeding, with no coat, walking along the street in the rain, clearly exhibiting schizophrenia. We both immediately stopped the car and I got out to go and help the guy. I got chatting to him. He was a veteran, he had a son that he had lost touch with, and that day he had given his coat to a lady so she wouldn’t get wet in the rain.

Shortly after I got chatting to a family friend who works with the homeless and he started telling me the true extent of the problems with homelessness and poverty all over the world (he organizes charity events to help the homeless here in the Bay Area). I started looking online more and more into the issue and became more and more passionate about the issue.

Most importantly, homelessness and poverty doesn’t just affect other people. Mental illness, health problems, disability, family issues, escalating drug/alcohol problems and other issues are often the causes of why someone ends up on the streets. It could affect you, your family, or your friends.

Homeless International work to provide support and help to the homeless and poverty stricken all over the world. They do wonderful work in many countries, and they work to provide housing, resources, aid, and other support. They are a truly valuable cause and I am proud to be supporting them.

For more information on the marathon and why you should donate your money to my charity, see the video:

Can’t see the video? Watch it here!

CLICK HERE TO DONATE*.

If you donate you will have love, success, and and unlimited supply of bacon (despite the global shortage) in your life. Who could argue with that?

A quick update on the online dash search feature.

The shopping lens feature is currently in the 12.10 development branch and undergoing extensive testing; thanks to Nick Skaggs for rallying folks around this additional testing to assure quality.

You will be able to disable the feature if you wish. There is work going on to have a toggle switch in the settings to disable it. Note that this will affect all online searches (e.g. Gwibber). The user interface looks like this (shown in French due to Didier’s campaign for French as a global first language):

As I mentioned the other day, the search traffic will be encrypted ready for release, and you can read more details on how the searches work here.

This photo taken when we toured with Justin Bieber.

See that motley crew above? That is my team, the Community Team at Canonical. I am blessed to have such a wonderful team; not only are they all fantastic community leaders, but they are just a fun bunch of guys in general to be around.

A while ago I suggested to the team that we do something for charity. We spent some time brainstorming, and exploring ideas from the sublime to the ridiculous. We then hit on something we were all fans of…an idea in which lots of Ubuntu work will be done, charities will benefit from, and should be fun and entertaining…

…we are going to have a 24-hour work marathon, streamed live online for your morbid pleasure and amusement.

How It Will Work

In a nutshell, each of us is going to work for a solid 24-hour block, taking breaks where needed (no, a break can’t include an 8-hour nap). Each of us will log on and our entire day will be streamed live on Ubuntu On Air.

In this 24-hour period we will work collaboratively on projects, discuss our work on the stream, answer questions from the community, give tutorials, and more. We are open to ideas of things we can do throughout the day that might be interesting to the community (such as topics for tutorials, discussion topics, work we should do etc). Feel free to share your ideas on this wiki page.

Anyone who knows us knows that we like to have fun. As such we will all try to bring a little something from our personal lives to the marathon too, after all, you are stuck with us for a full day. As an example, I fully plan on smoking a few racks of ribs while I am working, so you can join me for the cook. I am sure that Daniel will make a Tofu sandwich or something.

The reason why we are putting ourselves through this is to raise money for charity. We couldn’t pick a single charity, so each of us have picked a charity that we care about, and we are frankly going to turn this into a flat-out competition for who can make the most money. As we progress though the marathon we plan on having some bets and forfeits if we can outdo each other with our charities. It should be a lot of fun.

The Charities

So which charities are we going to be raising money for? Take a look below…

Nick Skaggs is supporting WaterAid and he says “Water has always played a role in my life. I grew up on the Great Lakes, which are huge reservoirs of fresh water. The lakes, rivers and streams I grew up near at one time were quite polluted — the town I was born in had several dysentery outbreaks in it’s early history. It’s sad to see such waste of fresh water. Water to me is beautiful, and my favorite beverage There’s nothing like a glass of water to quench your thirst. Provided of course, that water is clean. WaterAid has a mission to deliver long-term sustainable drinking water to the world, via wells and better sanitation efforts to keep local water sources pure. Water is crucial to life, ourselves and nature is highly dependent upon it. Access to clean drinking water is the most basic of all human survival needs. We can go for days with food, get by without shelter, but we cannot survive long without water“.	I am supporting Homeless International and because “I have always been aware of homelessness and poverty but it never really touched me until I saw an old man, bleeding, clearly exhibiting schizophrenia, walking through a city street in the rain. Many homeless and those in poverty are our elderly, our veterans, and our sick and vulnerable. No-one is immune to homelessness and poverty…many become homeless or fall into poverty due to health and trauma problems. Homeless International is a wonderful organization who helps provide shelter, aid, and support homeless people across the world. Your donation will provide help the elderly, sick and vulnerable to have shelter. Thanks for your donations!“.	David Planella is supporting Greenpeace and he says “Having grown in an environment very close to nature has made me appreciate how big a gift and how fragile this planet we live in is. I’ve chosen to support Greenpeace as an organization whose core values are to “change attitudes and behaviour, to protect and conserve the environment and to promote peace”, with which I very much identify. Help me support an NGO that gives voice and acts to protect the place we all share and spend our lives in“.
Daniel Holbach is supporting Oxfam and he says “Oxfam puts lots of hard work into ending poverty and injustice as part of a global movement for change. Oxfam deeply understand that we all live in this world together and that problems need to be solved holistically. I’ve been supporting them for years and some of my friends have volunteered for them as well“.	Jorge Castro is supporting Little Kids Rock! and he says “In Junior and High Schools I played trumpet, tuba, Sousaphone, electric bass, and a double bass. I made lots of friends, got to do great things like play festivals, and expanded my mind by learning to appreciate everything from jazz to classical to rock and roll. I can’t imagine growing up without playing music, and every kid should have the opportunity to do so. Little Kids Rock helps not only by providing disadvantaged schools with instruments, but with a curriculum that’s modern and not boring. Instead of sitting in a room playing scales all day, the students are taught popular songs and are encouraged to learn by just playing together“.	Michael Hall is supporting Autism Research Trust and he says “Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorders are developmental disorders that affect a large number of us in the open source community, our friends and our families. Despite it being wide-spread, very little is know about it’s cause, and the only proven treatment is early detection and intervention. The Autism Research Trust funds the ongoing scientific research at Cambridge University into the cause and interventions for Autism“.

Thanks to the team for picking a wonderful range of charities, all of which are great causes!

When, Where, and How

The 24-hour Horsemen Marathon will take place on Thu 4th Oct 2012. We will start the marathon at 3am Pacific / 6am Eastern / 10am UTC / 11am UK / 12pm Europe and finish at the same time the following day.

Be sure to come and join us and provide your support and input. This is an interactive event and we are looking to our community to suggest things we can do, chat to us while the marathon is taking place, and take part. You can do this via the chat and social media facilities that are on our marathon page. Let’s make some epic coin for our charities!

Watch, interact, and donate right from here!

Also, please spread the word about the marathon on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Use the #ubuntumarathon hashtag and be sure to link to http://marathon.ubuntuonair.com/ – thanks!

I haven’t done a video Q+A for a while and I would like to start them up again this week. As such on Wed 26th Sep 2012 at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 6pm UTC / 7pm UK / 8pm Europe I will be streaming live on Ubuntu On Air. Be sure to join me there and bring your questions; anything and everything is welcome!

Recently there has been some concerns about the privacy of the new feature we recently added to the dash in which it can query external resources to provide related results. I just wanted to follow up with some further details about how these searches are performed, the privacy protections that are put in place, and further work going on.

I reached out to John Lenton, who is the Senior Engineering Manager in the Online Services team at Canonical. He was responsible for building the technology that handles the searches from the dash. He says:

When performing a search, you expose no more information to Canonical than the originating IP of your request, the search terms you enter, and the result you click on (if any). We don’t perform any kind of “tracking”; there is nothing really user-identifyable there…the IP address is unreliable for this, and isn’t relied on other than for collapsing multiple searches into one in the reporting, and even this is after passing it through a one-way hash.

Searches are currently performed over plain HTTP to our servers in a data-centre in either London or the USA, and then forwarded to the upstream providers appropriate to the originating request’s geolocation. The only potentially identifying bit of information, the IP address of the originating request, is not forwarded unless explicitly required to perform the search (so far, only one of 20+ upstream providers requires this: the Headweb video source for scandinavian countries needs to do its own geoip).

We appreciate some of the community concerns about these searches operating unencrypted and we are currently working to encrypt these dash searches ready for the release of this feature in Ubuntu 12.10. This should resolve most of the concerns shared about unencrypted traffic.

In terms of logging, the raw httpd logs are only visible to a small group of people whose job requires that they have access and who are trained in respecting people’s privacy in accordance to European law on this matter. The searches themselves, stripped of the IP addresses (replacing them with a one-way hash) are made available to a slightly larger group of people to enable statistical reporting. Because not only the search but also clicking on a result reaches our server (where it is redirected to whatever is appropriate), we will be able to infer what search results people want when searching for particular terms, and at some point in the future this will be used to help us provide better, more relevant results. This statistical gathering of a mapping of search terms to clicked search results is not done yet but will be done soon”.

Please feel free to follow up with any further questions, and we will try to get them answered.

In the last few days there has been some discussion in the community about some improvements that have been added to the dash in Ubuntu 12.10. I wanted to take a few minutes to share some thoughts about these improvements and some of the concerns raised.

If you are anything like me, you are both a producer and consumer. At work and in your hobbies you are likely producing content, and Ubuntu and the many Open Source and commercial applications in the Ubuntu Software Center have long provided plenty of choice for producing great content. In recent years we at Canonical have also invested extensively in adding features in Unity to help make creating things as simple and effective as possible. In Ubuntu 12.04, a good example of this was the HUD, something that I used with the Gimp to produce this blog entry:

The HUD puts search at your fingertips to make operating your productivity applications and your desktop more efficient. Search is a core value in Ubuntu with Unity, and another core goal is that our users should be able to put the dash at the center of their world in being able to find content.

For the producers among you, Unity has long done this. Unity will search your computer and find documents, presentations, applications, and other content and the applications used to create and manage this content.

But we are not just producers. We are all consumers too. I love Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mission Impossible, and The Allman Brothers. I love watching shows, listening to music, and watching content on YouTube and elsewhere. I enjoy being a consumer, and I want my desktop to be at the heart of where I not only work, but also where I also play.

The new features that have been added to the dash help to expand it’s functionality to not only searching your computer but also online too. The result of these improvements is that Ubuntu has now been improved to provide quick access to a wealth of consumer content available to me. Let’s take a quick look.

As an example, I have a lot of music on my computer and I listen to it with Rhythmbox, but there is a lot more music that I don’t have. On Friday night I went to see the awesome Gov’t Mule, and they remind me a lot of the Allman Brothers. So, I get back from the show and I want to listen them and maybe buy some Allman brothers music too. By searching in the dash I can find all the music I own but also see other albums that might interest me:

The More suggestions section at the bottom is part of the new feature that landed in the dash. I can now see content that relates to my search. This is not advertising: this is content related directly to something I am interested in.

I can now right-click an album and see more information:

Here I can see the songs that are on the album with a single click. If I hover over the songs I can click them and hear a quick snippet of the music.

Here Ubuntu has helped me find interesting and new content without having to perform countless Google searches, navigate through various music websites and all their advertising and other such nonsense. It was all integrated right into the Ubuntu desktop.

This also applies to videos, TV shows, and movies. I love to watch shows, and I can search for shows right within the video lens. As an example, I love Mission Impossible, and I can find related content right within the dash:

Again, this not only searches content on my computer, but also multiple online resources. As such I can see YouTube videos as well as paid content that I can purchase from Amazon. Once again, the content is related to whatever I am interested in and searching for. Again, if I right click an item I can see more information:

Both of these features are integrating content that I care about as a consumer right into my desktop. Speaking personally, I love this. This is helping me to browse and consume content more easily than ever before.

One aspect of this new feature that some folks have found a little controversial is that the dash also exposes content from Amazon in the home screen. As an example, as I have written about previously, I am getting really into BBQ right now. If I perform a search in my dash for BBQ I now see the following content:

Here you can see that the dash shows content on my computer (such as the photos I took of my recent cooks), but it also provides some recommendations of products that might relate to my search. Once again this allows the dash to provide visibility on the world both on my computer and outside it.

If any of you are like me and my wife, Amazon is part of our life. We buy products from there all the time (particularly with Amazon Prime), and as such, I often find myself browsing Amazon for products that I am interested in. We even get our coffee regularly shipped to us from Amazon. Now these products are integrated into my regular workflow and I can see products that might help me with the content or topics I am searching for in the dash. Of course, in many cases these products won’t be of interest, but you can simply ignore them; the dash is not intrusive and does not prioritize the product searches over your local content, it merely provides some suggestions of things you might be interested in.

All in all, I personally feel these features add a lot of value to Ubuntu; I feel they make the dash a lot more useful and interesting, and they save me time in finding the content I am interested in both on and offline.

Now, some folks have expressed some concerns about the fact that products are appearing in the dash. It is no secret that for each product sold (not searched) from Amazon or the Ubuntu One Music Store, Canonical takes a small cut. This affiliate revenue is a useful way in which we can generate revenue that we can continue to invest into the Ubuntu project to build new features, maintain our infrastructure, and improve Ubuntu.

Importantly, these music, video, and product suggestions are not advertising, they are search results that relate directly to the content you are searching for in the dash, and these results are presented in a non-intrusive manner.

Now, some of you may have a fundamental objection to Canonical making money from Ubuntu. When I hear this feedback, I usually translate it in my mind to “I have an objection to a company abusing a Free Software Operating System with revenue-generating content“. While I am certainly sympathetic to us not abusing Ubuntu and filling it with adware, bloatware, and crapware, I don’t think there is anything wrong with providing services and content that is strongly related to the needs and interests of Ubuntu users and that can generate revenue to continue the investment in Ubuntu.

If we are going to continue to pay the salaries of hundreds of developers to build new features, continue to maintain and improve Ubuntu, and provide the infrastructure, support, security updates and other content, we need to find ways of making the project self-sustaining from a revenue perspective. Making money is not a bug, abusing Ubuntu with crass irrelevant revenue-generating crap-ware is, and this is why we feel these new features are appropriate: they provide related content and opportunity for our users to acquire those products and help support the project.

I can understand some of the concerns from our community about these features, but I would encourage you to try Ubuntu 12.10 before you make your mind up. These features are neatly and unobtrusively integrated into the dash, and they not only provide a more useful and comprehensive dash in giving you visibility on this content, but it also generates revenue to help continue to grow and improve Ubuntu.

UPDATE: For more details on the privacy side of this feature, see this post.