|  |  | News |  | | Oh my. Poor Dave Neary. He was just trying to offer some insight into how GNOME gets put together, and it ends up serving as an outlet valve for some pent-up frustration towards Canonical, in this case via a blog entry by Greg DeKoenigsberg.
Perhaps Dave's presentation could have been a bit "safer" if it had looked at just more recent times, or covered more than just commit rates, but presentation time is limited and, really, any information on how your community works and is put together is invaluable to its health and improvement. If I were part of the GNOME community, I'd be looking for ways to embrace Dave's hard worked for information in positive ways.
Dave's intentions were undoubtedly good and he put an obvious amount of time and effort into his presentation, but was repaid with a very public and unflattering flame war about something rather tangential to his goals with that presentation. Ouch.
Tribalism
Why does this happen? That's a great question, and I'm not sure we can ever have all the answers with perfect accuracy. Maybe we can summarize and approximate, though, and discover useful things as a result. Mark Shuttleworth offers that the problem is tribalism, and that tribalism in the form of fanboyism is Bad(tm). I think Mark hit the heart of the matter.
Here's an unfortunate part of the truth, though: while Mark rightfully comes out against tribalism, Canonical has, in my experience, been as much a part of fostering tribalism in F/OSS as anyone else. In fact, I'd say they are right there among the leaders in doing so: it's a side effect of their immense drive to build a rabidly loyal community around their brand and their propensity to try tell other communities how to do things (e.g. how to schedule their releases).
After all, it's pretty meaningless to be a self appointed dictator for life if you don't have a kingdom to dictate, right? (That's said with my tongue placed firmly in my cheek. :)
Those are rather tribalistic concepts, though, and it is reflected in choices such as Canonical's decision to use launchpad rather than upstream repositories that already exist or how we see Ubuntu LoCo's displacing more diverse Linux interest groups at the local level. It isn't zero-sum, though: Canonical has their reasons and there are benefits that come along with the challenges. I even believe that Canonical's motivations are not conspiratorial in nature, but are similar to those that drive rest of us: making F/OSS awesome. I also recognize that mistakes get made, in spite of those good intentions. Most importantly: Canonical isn't alone in this set of interactions. We are all part of this thing.
If you are an Ubuntu or Canonical fan (or Mark :) and you read that, it might sting a bit (or maybe even a lot) and the instinct might be to react quickly, negatively and loudly. After all, who the hell am I to say something like that, right? :) Instead, maybe we can step back for a moment, turn off the flamethrowers for a little while (there's lots of time and opportunity to use them later if we wish to ;) and really think about the root causes of our tribalism. Much of it is going to turn out to be innocent, but all of it will show where we have room for improvement.
On Being Able To Admit Failure
One thing I've learned in my travels as someone who dabbles from time to time in providing leadership is that in doing so your faults will be put on display for everyone to see. We are each imperfect, we all screw up from time to time and being front-and-center means our screw ups get put front-and-center, too. It is humbling. It can be important to recognize when it happens and (even if it takes a while) come back and go "yep, I screwed up, let's see how we can improve on that going forward..." At that point we all grow and become better people for it. If we do that within our Free software communities, our communities will also become better for it. Linus' ability to do that makes up for many other faults he may exhibit from time to time.
Someone asked me the other day on the kde-promo list how KDE people can expect to get the KDE branding terms "right" when even I don't always get it right! I responded with the most honest answer I had: I still, even now, make mistakes when it comes to the branding terms, in large part because I've been doing the "KDE thing" for so long that it's like an old dog with new tricks. I asked them to continue to point out when I get it wrong so I can improve. It's often hard to say things like that without hedging, especially for those of us with hard heads and big hearts.
I've also discovered that, sadly, I'm going to offend or let down those I love dearly from time to time even though I really don't mean to and don't want to. When that happens, it's often more important to just say I'm sorry without worrying about defending what I did, even if I think it was a misunderstanding or justifiable. I have been working for many years on being able to prioritize the well being of those I care about more than I do about being "right". Let me be honest: it doesn't come naturally to me, and I still fail at times. But ... I also do manage to say "I'm sorry", to look for root causes without looking for blame to attach to it, and most importantly to me: to try and work on improvements that address root issues. I keep trying to remind myself: "I am an imperfect man reaching for the unattainable goal of perfection; and I am inching closer to never getting there every day."
Ok, so what's my point, already? Well ...
When Mark wrote about tribalism, Máirín dredged up in the comments section an unfortunate and regrettable public gaffe on Mark's part from the past and asked him if he'd apologized for that yet. Maybe Mark should consider doing just that, even if he doesn't consider what happened to be wrong in his own mind. It could help drain away some of the poison out there that is used to fuel some of those tribal fires. It certainly can't hurt.
In fact, all of those who have pointed fingers or defended themselves loudly, including (but certainly not limited to) Greg, could maybe try to step aside from their own correctness and ask what are the shared root causes that lead to this state of affairs. Can we instead create discussions with ourselves and with each other that reach for understand but don't include statements of blame or accusation? It is possible to discover the mechanisms of failure in a relationship and come up with new possible solutions to try in blame-neutral ways.
That's just another way of saying that others may be responsible for (a large or small) part of the current dynamic, but we don't need to use that as an excuse to sidestep responsibility for the roles we play in it or as a way to avoid addressing the issues altogether. After all, what's more important: the moral high ground in our own little kingdoms of "Me, Myself and I" or forging a stronger and unstoppable thing together?
On Being Part Of The Problem Solution
The good news is that when we are one of the people caught up in a problem, intentionally or not, we can be part of the solution. Yes, being part of the problem is an opportunity. To illustrate: we may not have invented proprietary software ourselves, but we are/were caught in the midst of the consequences of a world that was dominated by proprietary software; by writing Free software, we are creating part of the solution to the negative effects of that situation.
In the questioning of Canonical's contribution, right now I see a lot of people trying to make the case that they aren't a part of the problem or that others are more a part of the problem than they are. Quite clearly they axiomatically are all shareholders in whatever failure is happening (the flamefest itself is a failure, imho). It is axiomatic because the problem is being driven by how communities are interacting, and the people pointing fingers and making defenses are part of those communities. Some are even responsible for leading the relationship components of those communities. They could be identifying what the challenges are and being part of the solution, regardless of who is contributing what to those challenges in the first place.
If each of the parties (GNOME, Canonical, Red Hat, whoever else) involved took internal stock of the situation they might identify all kinds of things they can each do to improve. How much better than writing witty blog posts that won't alter the status quo that would be! Leadership will be self-evident when people start describing and implementing such improvements, regardless of whether others do so first, later or never.
On Alignment
Starting with the alignment of priorities and agreeing on the context for the conversation would be a reasonable place to start, perhaps. To illustrate what I mean by that: Jono Bacon
used the term "upstream" in his response to the issue in a way that is very different from what the people leveling the complaints at Canonical are. Jono used upstream in terms of Canonical's own efforts: their software developers are upstream of their packagers. However, it seems evident to me that Greg and others are using the term in the context of the global F/OSS economy, where in this case GNOME is the upstream of Canonical. It's the difference between looking at the supply chain within one particular company's factory, and looking at the role of that factory in the greater economy in which it operates.
Due to this difference in context, people are engaged in a conversation about upstream contribution in which both are 'right' in terms of the context they have chosen to speak from. This also means, though, that neither party is really addressing the same issue together. As long as those kinds of context and priority differences are not addressed so that a common conversation can be had, it will be a very long, hard, painful and probably unfruitful conversation.
I've been caught in many such conversations in the past with others in F/OSS. It happens; it's also fixable.
Why Care?
I believe it to be important that we care about these things because they are doing large amounts of unintended damage to F/OSS. But as my step-father used to tell me, "When you point a finger at someone else, you are pointing three fingers back at your own self." (Try it: point at something with your index finger, arm extended. :)
So let me address those three-fingers-pointing-at-myself. To be honest: the relationship between KDE and Canonical has not always been fruitful or friendly, ditto for KDE and Red Hat or KDE and GNOME. Even within KDE we have our moments of discord. It's not easy, it's not simple and I do not want to come off like I'm pretending it is or that my or KDE's track record is perfect either. KDE has managed to improve many of these things, some of them immensely though certainly not to perfection, but you know what is really unfortunate and sad when I reflect up on that? The root causes, tribalism and selfish misalignment of priorities relative to each other, were / are the same as those at the heart of today's tempest in a teapot over Canonical's upstream contribution and/or lack thereof. F/OSS has yet to truly learn the lessons we need to. We keep repeating the same unhealthy behaviors, we keep enabling each other in doing so.
I have to say that it was really tempting to delve into an analysis of what, in my opinion, the specific behaviors are that led to this particular blog storm, but when I thought about it I realized that it's not really my place to do so. After all, I'm not a direct stakeholder in this particular scenario and have not been invited to enter into the middle of what amounts to other people's relationship. So instead, let me get a little philosophical about what it might take to step away from our feudalistic ways:
We ought to be looking for F/OSS communities who can lead in demonstrating positive and useful ways of dealing with these somewhat inevitable moments of conflict. We need to encourage those who aren't leading in this way to improve their game; we need to give each other the opportunity to improve our game by avoiding blame games. We need to support each other in our hard times and our moments of brilliant alignment. For those who insist on tribalism, the rest of us need to move past them and minimize their impact and importance in the F/OSS ecosystem, so as to limit the harm they perpetuate.
We need to learn how to accept that someone is going to be a fan of $DISTRO or $PROJECT without using that against them. We need to learn how to be a fan of $DISTRO or $PROJECT without looking for ways to push for its advantage at the expense of F/OSS in general. We need to learn to recognize each others strengths, as well as to stop claiming that we're strong where we aren't. We need to learn to disagree without sabotaging each other. We need to learn how to cooperate, even sometimes by making local compromises to achieve a higher level of global win. We should be looking at how to put together what we are each doing well into a larger whole, even when we are also competing elsewhere. We can both compete and cooperate without dragging each other down in the process.
The path beyond tribalism is, in my humble opinion, to realize that despite our love for KDE, GNOME, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse and/or fluffy bunnies we must each hold aloft a common goal that trumps all else: F/OSS must succeed. The world is depending on us to do that, because the world needs Freedom, and Free software is an important part of that.
That is the challenge we have before us. Sort of puts things into perspective, doesn't it?
But Before I go ..
Kids are smart. They will learn that when you do something bad you get attention even if it is negative. If they don't get the attention all children need in the course of growing up, they put this together in their head and start to look for ways to break "the rules" to get that attention. To be fair, some adults do that too. :) As an adult who plays a role in the child's life (a parent, especially), that pattern can be prevented by (among other things) paying attention to the things they do that are positive.
In that spirit, I'd like to end this blog post by giving a shout out to a few of the communities out there that are doing good things. Good work deserves attention and recognition, and you shouldn't have to be in the middle of a controversy to get it.
I'm thinking of OpenSuse, for instance: they make hard decisions and are pretty open about how difficult things can be internally at times, but they've consistently been a pleasure to work with, even through difficult times.
I'm thinking of Pardus, a small but hardworking group of people making an awesome distribution aimed primarily at their own region, but who are also doing all kinds of wonderful things technology wise both in their project and upstream.
I'm thinking of Red Flag who, despite other possible negatives, have also been contributing more and more upstream over time.
I'm thinking of Mandriva who, despite their financial bumps over time, have not only never caused grief for us as an upstream project but have contributed significantly.
I'm thinking of the numerous small and medium size businesses who aren't distributions but who are as important as many of the distros in making sure upstream keeps ticking. I'm also thinking about you, reading this blog entry because you care enough about these issues to do so with an open mind.
p.s. I'm concerned, having re-read it (and edited it several times), that this blog entry could come across as preachy. I really hope it doesn't, but I do recognize that my communication skills have limits to them and some may choose to read it that way. It feels rather unsafe to push the "Publish Post" button, and honestly I am hesitant to do so. It seems, however, that these are things that need to be said, and I can only hope that some of it is useful and gets through to those who will make things better than they are now. Deep breath time!
Love and with hope for all the best things in life, Aaron.
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