Jono William Aloycius O'Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and general all-round grand bloke today announced the Ubuntu rebranding. I've known about this for a while, because the Canonical brand is being refreshed too and we as a company were shown the new designs and asked for comments a few weeks back. However, this is a chance for me to say thank you to the people who put together the new logos, themes and so on publicly.

Y'see, thank you is something that I don't think gets said enough in the open source world. Of all the things that annoy me about OSS development, this is one of the ones near the top of the list. Everyone who works on Ubuntu, be they Canonical employees or community contributors, works very, very hard to produce a distro that every Ubuntu member can be proud of. But - and I think this is a basic law of nature - the loudest voices we hear are always the ones who hate it, hate what Ubuntu stands for, hate that it's not free enough (for them), hate that Mark has a vision and is dedicated to pushing towards realising that vision.

What you don't see a lot of - or at least don't see as prominently, because let's face it it's easier to jump on the haters bandwagon than it is to stand up to them - is people just saying "thank you" or "thank you for doing an awesome job."

So, to everyone who was involved in the rebranding work - and that doesn't just mean Canonical employees; the community have been involved in this too (though I don't know the details of who exactly):

Thank you

(And let's be clear, this is in no way intended to diminish all the positive comments that I've been seeing. Also, constructive criticisms are a good thing, especially since the new designs are not completely locked down.)

Alright, alright, I admit it. I hate Freedom. Stuff your open source philosophies, your Free Software Foundation, your Libre / Gratis. Knackers to the lot of it.

I want a Mac.

Yes, I do, I want a Mac. I want a shiny, shiny MacBook Pro in all its aluminium unibody glory. I want to fondle its keyboard, hug its metallic curves and yes, possibly, gently lick its screen like a puppy.

Ahem.

Okay, most of what I just wrote is hyperbolic nonsense¹, but in truth I'm seriously considering making my next laptop a MacBook Pro. There are a number of reasons, but I'll outline just the most salient for the sake of brevity:

1. Quality of hardware

I've been a Dell user for a number of years, and my trusted Inspiron 640m has flown countless miles and taken much punishment from me. The keyboard is worn to the point where none of the letters are legible. The hard drive whines weirdly sometimes when it's switched on. The volume controls are, shall we say, eccentric at best.

But from no-one who's ever used a MacBook have I every heard "oh, it's a bit plasticky" or "well, I wish they'd thought the case out a bit better" or "it's just not a machine I'd like to be seen with." MacBooks are the Jaguars of notebooks: even the ones that you think look ugly when they come out actually look astonishingly pretty; you just have to change your terms of reference to accomodate them (this metaphor falls down when we come to the S-Type,  I know; I think that you'll find the S-Type of notebooks to be something in the Acer range).

And the quality of the bits inside isn't to be sniffed at, either. Although they've had their fair share of problems - just like most hardware manufacturers (anyone remember Dell's exploding batteries? I've still got mine somewhere) - they are, for the most part, reliable and well built. They're not as rugged as, say, a Thinkpad, but then I don't actually need a laptop that I can use to beat a thief senseless with and still send an email from later (and come on, seriously, the case is metal).

2. Windows

Let's cut to the quick. If I buy a non-Mac laptop, unless I buy from a very narrow range of manufacturers, I'll get Windows with it. I don't want Windows. Ever. I have no need for it and I wouldn't ever use it now if I didn't have to (see the next section). At least OSX, for all its freedom-hatingness, is Unix-based; at least I'm semi familiar with the way it behaves.

Truth is, I'd still want to run Ubuntu on the thing, either dual booted or inside a VM (can you have VMWare machine use an existing hard disk as its root partition? Just wondering, answers on a postcard), because I'm used to working in Ubuntu for ninety-odd percent of the time. I've no wish to change that. There's only two programs that I'd every really need to run on OSX, which are...

3. Lightroom and Photoshop

There's no nice way to put this: there's just no equivalent digital photography tools in Ubuntu. None. F-Spot isn't a Lightroom equivalent (nor was it meant to be). The Gimp isn't a Photoshop equivalent (it's getting close, but it's not there yet). I am starting out on a path that's hopefully going to lead to at least a semi-pro photography career, and I've gotten used to using pro tools. At the moment I use Lightroom and Photoshop in a Windows VM and it's the hardest, most horrible thing in the entire world. I have to mess about with shared folders in VirtualBox and make sure that partitions are mounted properly all the time before I start Lightroom. I have to keep my Lightroom catalogues on the VM and sync them to my $HOME using Dropbox, because you can't have catalogues on networked volumes (don't ask me why, I've no idea). I have to put up with the horrible, aching, chugging of my entire system if the VM has to use more than a bit of its allotted RAM (and when you're using Photoshop that happens a lot).

Yes, I know it's not free software. If there was a free software alternative that was equal in quality to Lightroom, I'd use it in the blink of an eye. I would. Lightroom makes it astonishingly easy to do 90% of all my post-processing; Photoshop makes it possible (though not necessarily simple) to do the other 10%.

I don't want to keep running these apps on Windows - face it, why would I - but I need to run them *somewhere*. OSX seems like the next best option to an actual free, open-source environment. It's second best - and not even a close second - but I'd rather use Cupertino's baby than Redmond's any day of the week.

Conclusion

Yes, I hate freedom. But only a little bit.

¹Except for the bit about the FSF. Screw 'em.

In bullet-point form, because I'm not capable of anything else right now.

• Banshee is being an arse on Karmic on my desktop machine. Can't figure out why. It freezes up when playing big files (podcasts are particularly affected by this), plays too fast sometimes (so it sounds like I'm fast-forwarding through songs) and other times just crashes for no apparent reason.
• So, I've switched back to Amarok in the mean time, though I don't particularly like Amarok 2, and the way its UI behaves is irritating to me at the moment.
• I've more-or-less, bar some work for the reviewer, fixed bug 471974 which should mean that bugs with lots of subscribers shouldn't time out any more. Hurrah for asynchronicity.
• People keep marking as favourites old photos of mine on Flickr, from the days before I considered myself worthy of having people in front of my lens. Not that I don't appreciate it, but I'd rather people liked the newer stuff.
• I had a crisis of confidence last night (again; how boring you must think me) about photography, mostly, and where I think I want to be. I've made peace - for now - with that particular demon; I don't know quite where I want to go but I think I know some of the things I want to do on the way.
• I've been playing a bit with Tumblr today. I quite like it's simple interface, and I suspect I'd use something like that quite a lot for things bigger-than-a-tweet-but-smaller-than-a-blog-post. Haven't quite worked out how to fit it in with what I do though; maybe aggregating everything together through FeedBurner is the way to go.
• I finished reading Michael Moorcock's Gloriana last night. Good book but didn't really grab me all that much. Somehow it just didn't quite sit right with me, and I don't know why.
• Started reading The Lies of Locke Lamora today, for the second time (I never finished it the first time round because I foolishly left the book on a plane in Schoenefeld Airport in Berlin). It's just as good as I remember.

Anyway, tired, can't think, going to do something that requires no brain.

I agonised a bit before writing this post, partly because it deals with someone who pays my wages, but mostly because I wasn't entirely sure what ground I stood on, morally and philosophically speaking. I'm going to write it anyway, however, because it's an interesting enough problem that I think writing it out will help me get my head around it.

You may or may not have heard about the comments that Mark Shuttleworth made this week in his Ubuntu Open Week session with regard to diversity in the Ubuntu community and solving bug 1. For the record, I'll reproduce them here:

12:31 <@akgraner> <MarkDude> QUESTION how important is having a diverse group of contributors (women & minority folks) to solving Bug 1?

12:31 <+sabdfl> not especially, but it makes the project more interesting

12:31 <+sabdfl> next

...

12:57 <@jcastro> <MarkDude> FOLLOW-UP QUESTION ... did you just say that primarily white dudes are able to address the solving of Bug 1? Women and minorities just make it more interesting? Please clarify.

12:58 <+sabdfl> MarkDude, if you think i can't see a baited trap from this close, you're mistaken

12:59 <+sabdfl> i said that having diversity in the project is a wonderful goal. but it's no more a requirement to fix bug 1 than it is a requirement to do most other things. fundamentalism is something i despise, and that goes for overdone activism too.

12:59 <@jcastro> (that was the last question)

Now, at first when I read this, I thought that I semi agreed with Mark, in that I thought that diversity as a goal was orthogonal to solving bug 1. However, I still didn't feel as though that was quite the right answer. A comment from Mackenzie Morgan over at geekfeminism.org kicked my thinking into gear, though:

The only thing I'm going to say is that since women are 51% of the population, if all women used Windows, it would be impossible for Microsoft to have a minority marketshare.

I don't think this needs any more explanation, but it's it's absolutely a key point. We can't hope to solve bug 1 if we don't have a diverse community. And by that, I mean a more diverse community than we already have. That my fiancée uses Ubuntu is wonderful (that she regularly rages against Windows Vista, which she has to use for work, is also pretty cool), but it's important that we don't lose sight of the fact that in the tech world women are still marginalised and excluded, either explicitly or implicitly.

Another comment on the GF post caught my eye and made me think, too. In response to Jono's comment about Mark's intent and nature (which, for the record, I view as not really relevant to the discussion), Carla Schroder said:

Jono, you're not a woman so it would be surprising if Mark treated you like one. The oft-cited FOSSPOLS study says 80% of women perceive sexism in FOSS, but only 20% of men. What that means to way too many folks is all them derned (sic) women are wrong.

For a while, I sulked about this, and Skud's comment that:

... I want to remind you that as a feminist space we're primarily interested in women's experiences here.

But once I actually applied some thought to the situation, I realised that I was entirely chuffing up the bong pole (as Mr Bacon himself would put it).

The fact is that as a bloke, particularly as a bloke in the community within which this discussion is taking place, I can't possibly appreciate just how these comments affect women in the community, how they make them feel or think about their own involvement. I can try, but oftentimes I need to think very hard about it because I'm just not in a position to be able to empathise (I'm working on this; I can spot sexist comment far better than I used to be able to).

To quote Skud paraphrasing Avenue Q, "Everyone's a little bit sexist sometimes." That includes me. That I admit to it, helps, I think, and I work very hard at examining what I'm doing and saying and thinking to make sure that I discard sexist notions, however mild they may be.

To come back to the point then, I disagree with Mark's assertion that diversity in the community is "no more a requirement to fix bug 1 than it is a requirement to do most other things." I think it's entirely a requirement. At base, as Mackenzie pointed out, if we don't actively seek a diverse community we're automatically losing out on a huge wedge of the human race. More to the point, though, there's absolutely no reason for us to exclude anyone, and every reason for us to work towards including everyone in what is a pretty damn excellent community.

Ubuntu means "humanity towards others," and I think we need to recognise that we need to be active in practicing that notion rather than just being passive about it.

One of the things I said I'd do with the Countdown project is produce a slideshow / video / thing every ten days or so so that people could catch up on the project. So here's the first ten days' worth. Enjoy!

Countdown: The first ten days from Graham Binns on Vimeo.

I've noticed that the video seems a bit jerky in places. I'm not sure if that's just Vimeo - I've noticed on other Vimeo-hosted videos - but should you experience it yourself I'd appreciate it if you let me know.

For the record, this video was produced on an Ubuntu machine using kdenlive.