ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Mathijs Veen <mathijsv33n@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Oliver,

Allow me to respond here as I am not of Canonical but very much part of the
community that is interested in seeing this great project come to life. And
I try to do what little I can to help that along. As do a whole lot of
amazing people from the community every day. (For instance I have just set
my Ubuntu phone to my native language(Dutch). Those translations are
provided by local community (country) teams, called loco's)

You are right though in saying that we could do with a clearer roadmap for
people who want to get involved with the phone/tablet project specifically.
Especially if they are not the greatest coders (like myself). On the other
hand: giving out freebees is not what open source community efforts are
about. It has always been the same simple deal: we all help a little bit to
grow and maintain a piece of software. No one has ownership of it. And in
return we get to use that software and do with it what ever else we want.

Having seen over the past year and a half what a massive task this has
been, I also realize now that we could only have gotten where we are with a
very coordinated and highly structured effort by the canonical people to
jumpstart it. So that is why maybe some people outside the core dev team
feel a bit left out. But they shouldnt, Everyone is needed as this OS is
going to be here for a long time to come.

So if you perhaps want to look at helping out, you may want to check out
http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/
and maybe you already have. If you have special skills or fields of
interest, be it designing, testing, coding, translating or even
communicating, you can just post them here or shout out on one of the IRC
channels. I am sure some community liaison person from Canonical will pick
that up and get in touch with you.

Regarding the device: during a development cycle such as this one, you need
a reference device (atm there are 3), and you dont want to change that
hardware platform all the time during that run. It's just not practical.
But now most of the groudwork is done and a first Release To Manufacturers
is very near. 2 phonemakers have already announced that they will release
ubuntu phones by the end of the year,so you will see more devices. Probably
also some new community ports.
But I for one would not be sad when Nexus4 is no longer that development
platform because personaly I hate that phone :) . I do however love Ubuntu
on the phone (though agreed, Firefox OS is pretty neat as well).

Thanks for the feedback and the interest, Hope to see you around.

Mat



On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 7:45 PM, Oliver Propst <oliver.propst@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi,
> I’m interested in Ubuntu touch for phones and have made a few
> observations regarding it.
>
> As of now the the newest device that is officially supported is still
> the soon two years old Nexus 4, is not about time to consider support a
> newer device?
>
> I find the wiki [1] very scare of details on how to get involved, it
> seems not to be any real effort from Canonical to create a community
> around Ubuntu Phone in the same way with the Ubuntu operating system or
> maybe more relevant for Ubuntu touch, FirefoxOS.
>
> Mozilla for example have a program where community members and
> developers can get testing devices[2] [3], is there any plans for for
> similar initiative around Ubuntu Phones? When Mozilla launch FirefoxOS
> in new markets they tend to work very closely with the local community
> [4], I don’t get the impression that Canonical are doing any real
> efforts in area, (not yet at least).
>
> I really hope Canonical and the phone team learn can some lesson from
> Mozilla and improve (this also includes communication which I think have
> been lacking), it would only increase Ubuntu Phone chances of success.
>
> 1 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
> 2 https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Community/Mobilizers
> 3 https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/TCP
> 4 http://asadotzler.com/2014/07/03/foxtrot-is-here/
> --
> -mvh Oliver Propst
>
>
>
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