ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Robert,

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 5:12 PM, Robert Schroll <rschroll@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Consider this bug:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-ui-toolkit/+bug/1276808.  Yes, it's
> publicly available and open for comments from everyone, but the description
> is simply a link to a private canonical.com document.  That's not truly open
> for community participation.
>

I agree. We use Google docs heavily inside Canonical. Some of those
documents are for public consumption and some contain commercially
sensitive information. When we create documents they're by default set
to Canonical only to ensure security of that sensitive information.
It's an active choice a document maintainer has to make to "open up"
for view or indeed edit by the wider community. This is a good thing.
It would be commercial suicide for Canonical to create all docs open
by default.

Unfortunately the by-product of this is that many documents are
"locked up" inside Canonical, and I appreciate this can cause
frustration for community contributors, developers and other
interested parties. It's a difficult balance to strike. We absolutely
should be told when we've made mistakes by not opening up things that
should be open. So thanks for raising this Robert, I had no idea about
that bug.

On this occasion I've asked the SDK team (who are available on
European times in #ubuntu-app-devel) to take a look at the document
and open if there's nothing commercially sensitive in it.

> So my complaint isn't that Ubuntu isn't completely community-driven, it's
> that we keep saying it is.  Let's not.  Then when we get emails like
> Oliver's, treat it as a request to alter the balance.
>

Couldn't have put it better myself, thanks.

Thanks,
-- 
Alan Pope
Technical Project Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ubuntu.com/