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The Increasing Importance of Community
Jono Bacon writes "With the success of Ubuntu and Fedora, and the advent of OpenSuSE and Freespire, are businesses and distributions paying more attention to the community? The Increasing Importance of Community discuss this change in focus. What do you all think? Is the community now more of a priority?"
It's a novel idea but "Communities of Practice" are now an enforced thing to take part in where I work. That's right, these CoPs are supposed to give us an opportunity to partake in idea creation and discussion
If I take the word "businesses" to mean literally any kind of business (not just that one operating system maker we all know and love), then I'd propose something like General Motors. Do you think General Motors values community within their company? Probably not. I'm sure they think about local communities but I doubt they're concerned with the communities within their company. That was just an example, I have nothing for or against GM.
Being able to post on a forum (anonymously, if you prefer) about anything from your working conditions to an idea you had is vital to the happiness of the workers. However, I've had bosses that I've pitched this to who just read it as a waste of company time--they feared addicts working the threads 24/7 (much like I do on Slashdot). I would prefer if they would see it as an investment in idea exchanges and employee satisfaction. Ha! That's not their concern!
Back to the original topic, I think that Linux distributions should be more concerned about their corner of the market. Microsoft is their competition. They make an amazing operating system. They aren't going to win the casual computer user by creating a community. They will win them through marketing and raising awareness. It's a cold hard thing to say but I think most of the developers for Linux should be concentrating on educating users about what they can provide. I learned about Linux in college from a friend but, looking back, there's really no reason why some flash advertisement on the side of a website couldn't have done the same.
If you're looking for reasons to get new users,
"Tired of forking money over to Microsoft?"
would probably be more effective than
"Join a community of people who will become abrasive if you're not at their level of intelligence!"
Now, if you're looking at keeping the users involved with the OS and the development of it, this community thing is the answer. I just don't think Linux distros risk losing that support. Their fanbase is extremely solid--the problem is that it is minute compared to Microsoft's.
My work here is dung.
Very much like like politicians do, businesses make an enormous show of letting it be know how much they listen to "the community" all the while screwing thier customers/the-community anytime they can get away with it if they think they can make more money doing it.
.... PS3 .... uhhhh shinnyyy!!!"]
<rant>
It's all part of the growing awareness by businesses that the world is full of blind-following, short-memory, fanboy, brand-fanatic idiots which, as long as they are being fed plenty of PR, will keep buying (not to mention singing praises to) crummy products even when they feel THAT sharp pain in their backsides.
["Sony rootkit, Sony bad, Sony bad!
</rant>
I don't think we should ever underestimate the value a community can create for an operating system. I think the Mac is a great example of this.
No, it's not. I've seen rants at the Mandrake forums and the Gentoo forums that people left Debian because of the community. Attempts to get their questions answered were resulting in that abrasiveness that's so well known in free software arenas.
Debian's community is the archtypical model of how to not have a community.
I've had good luck at both of the places I've mentioned. I especially like the Gentoo's. If you have a piece of software that isn't very well supported by its author, or which is hard to use because it's new and not often configured, you can probably find a guide or something in the Gentoo How-To-wiki.
If you find a quirk in a piece of software that is resulting in unintended behaviour, you can search the forums or bug reports, and probably someone else has encountered the same problem (and if the problem is at least two weeks old, then there's probably a fix).
And if you're not keen for any reading at all to find newbie answers, you can often find help on the Gentoo IRC group (keeping in mind that almost nobody with a job actually hangs out on IRC). If you're willing to wait long enough for a quality answer, you can also get one from the forums. They're known for that, actually.
I've got Debian running at work. Whenever I have a problem with it, I go to one of those places to get it fixed. While the fact that Debian has some community support is laudable, the difference between those communities I mentioned and Debian's is like the difference between a public library and an elementary school's, IMHO.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
But one that will help you fix your product, not just tell you what they like and don't like. And they'll do tech support for free, too.
The Debian community, IMHO, is the model for everything else.
We all know that Linux is nothing but community, but that isn't the issue at hand. The issue at hand is just what role does community play in the field of commercial distros such as Red Hat and SuSe.
Get thee hence and read the actual article. It really isn't all that bad. You'll find that Ubuntu is brought up rather than Debian because Ubuntu is an attempt to make a commercially viable distro on the Debian model of community; and not just "ripping off" its code base for profit.
This puts it in an entirely different catagory from either the true community supported distros such as Debian and the purely commercial distros such as Linspire. It seeks, and at the moment largely defines, the middle ground between the community and the commercial corporation. The very ground the article is addressing as its point of interest.
Fedora, OpenSuSE and Freespire are essentially attempts to "reverse engineer" an Ubuntu type of community from a corporate culture. To bring "community" on board and retain relevance in the community drivin Linux world. They cannot attempt to reverse engineer a Debian type of community in the strict sense because they are all commercial distributions.
Although I tend to detest its use in the IT field, the phrase "impedence mismatch" comes to mind.
If it makes you feel any better Debian isn't specifically mentioned because Debian is the meta concept that the article stands upon. It is assumed as the natural state of things; and that we all share that assumption.
KFG
that has nothing to do with the success of fedora, the fedora foundation was trying to be a legal entity to handle the legal aspect of the distribution and it was determined it was too cumbersome to be effective
http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/583
Supplies!
The psychology and social structure of a bunch of disparate programmers who are not on your payroll is a pill just too difficult to swallow, and one that is usually farmed to the bottom of the 'lets do this' pile.
Are we all just difficult pills? Or are we the cure to the boring workplace?
From the beginning of that paragraph in the article: The mistake a number of companies, both large and small have made when approaching Open Source is that they lack an understanding of the people who drive the technology.
This isn't just true with OSS, it's true with all technology and all technology people. I used to work around project management; there's nothing more galling than the emphasis on the 'FTE' (Full-Time Employee for the non-business folk) and counting them up, shifting them around, plugging in 'Offshore' employees when FTEs are 'reduced' (euphemism for being outsourced). A company doesn't want to get to know its employees anymore -- they are simply commodities that can be swapped out like chips or hard drives most of the time.
When you stretch that to technology, it's important to realize that the knowledge of the individual is not half as important as the ability of a development team manager to let the higher ups and customers know that they have their people 'working on it.' Managers are very averse to trying to find more competent help to replace incompetent help, simply because it might cause the schedule to slip.
Managers with people handling skills are a dying breed in tech.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The community becomes more and more important every day. Since many developers "forget" to write documentation for their applications, the end users are more and more dependent on the community to get their free stuff working. And every remark like "did you RTFM, you $%#$ing n00b?" or "go play with your Windows, loser, if you don't want to learn stuff", certainly makes a lasting impact in the mind of the user community.
as a noob i woudl not mind RTFM responce _if_ the RTFM text were a link to the manual in question redirecting me to the correct section to read ;)