LinuxCon: Shuttleworth’s Three Methods to Improve FOSS Development

“This is large part of the strategy behing Canonical’s strict
six-month release for the Ubuntu distribution and the 18-month
Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) cycles.

“It won’t be easy, he told the crowd, but already quite a few
projects are seeing the value of cadence (Shuttleworth cited recent
moves in the KDE Project). Shuttleworth empasized, as he has in the
past, that it doesn’t matter what pattern of cadence projects take,
just so long as that pattern is predictable.

“Quality is another core component of how development projects
can improve. Shuttleworth described how Canonical continually
applies bug tracking data to improve Ubuntu. This seemed to strike
a chord in attendees–several of the post-talk questions dealt with
perceived lacks of response from the Ubuntu bug reporting system.
Shuttleworth replied that even though bug fixes weren’t going to be
immediate, the more people that report a given bug, the higher the
priority that bug would gain.”

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