Certificates For Ubuntu Members

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-06-14

The Ubuntu community is a core part of what makes us what we are, and right at the center of that are our Ubuntu Members. Ubuntu Members provide *significant and sustained* contributions over a wide range of areas such as packaging, documentation, programming, translations, advocacy, support, and more. We always want to do our best to recognize and appreciate our many members in the Ubuntu family, across these many different teams and our flavors.

I am pleased to announce a new benefit for new Ubuntu Members. When you become approved as an official Ubuntu Member, you will be mailed a printed certificate signed by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project to recognize your membership. We hope you put it up on your wall where you contribute to Ubuntu and bring freedom and openness to technology.

A few notes:

  • The certificates are rather nice. Designed by the design team and printed on nice stock, they are a nice representation of your membership.
  • We will only send you one certificate; you don’t get a new one when you renew your membership.
  • Due to the fact that we currently have **769** active Ubuntu members, we don’t have the time or resources to send every existing member a certificate automatically (just getting all those addresses would be enough of a challenge!). If however you fill in the form below to request one, we will honor it.
  • If you have any questions or queries with these certificates, please contact michelle@canonical.com who can help.

How To Get Your Certificate

Please only request a certificate if you are an existing Ubuntu Member, otherwise your request will be rejected. If you are not sure if you are a member or not, please check your profile page on Launchpad to see if you are member of the ubuntumembers group.

To get one simply fill in this form.

We hope to send out certificates within 14 days, but we are currently waiting on getting them signed by Mark, so it may take a little longer initially.

Thanks!

Contributed by Jono Bacon

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 320

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-06-11

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #320 for the week June 3 – 9, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
  • Jasna Bencic
  • Paul White
  • Javier Lopez
  • David Morfin
  • Jim Connett
  • Matt Rudge
  • And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 319

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-06-03

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #319 for the week May 27 – June 2, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
  • Jasna Bencic
  • Paul White
  • David Morfin
  • And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Community on ubuntu.com

By dholbach | Published: 2013-05-31

We’re very happy to announce that community.ubuntu.com is now online. It is the primary address for interested Ubuntu users to stay involved and get informed about what our community is doing.

Our new community website: http://community.ubuntu.com/

Our new community website: http://community.ubuntu.com/

A handful of contributors worked hard with the Canonical Design and Web team and from now on it will be easy for us as a community to keep the site up to date.

If you want to help out and improve things, feel free to file bugs on the ubuntu-community-website project, where we keep track of things.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out with this project. Well done! 🙂

Mark Shuttleworth closes Ubuntu bug #1

By pleia2 | Published: 2013-05-31

The first bug filed in the Ubuntu project was filed by Mark Shuttleworth on August 19th, 2004: Microsoft has a majority market share

Today he marked the bug “Fix Released” with the following comment:

Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition, with IOS and Android representing a meaningful share (see http://www.zdnet.com/windows-has-fallen-behind-apple-ios-and-google-android-7000008699/ and in particular http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/008699/meeker620-620×466-620×466.jpg?hash=ZQxmZmDjAz&upscale=1).

Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.

Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it’s important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu’s perspective, this bug is now closed.

There is a social element to this bug report as well, of course. It served for many as a sort of declaration of intent. But it’s better for us to focus our intent on excellence in our own right, rather than our impact on someone else’s product. In the (many) years since this bug was filed, we’ve figured out how to be amazing on the cloud, and I hope soon also how to be amazing for developers on their desktops, and perhaps even for everyday users across that full range of devices. I would rather we find a rallying call that celebrates those insights, and leadership.

It’s worth noting that today, if you’re into cloud computing, the Microsoft IAAS team are both technically excellent and very focused on having ALL OS’s including Linux guests like Ubuntu run extremely well on Azure, making them a pleasure to work with. Perhaps the market shift has played a role in that. Circumstances have changed, institutions have adapted, so should we.

Along those lines, it’s good to reflect on how much has changed since 2004, and how fast it’s changed. For Ubuntu, our goal remains to deliver fantastic experiences: for developers, for people building out production infrastructure, and for end-users on a range of devices. We are doing all of that in an environment that changes completely every decade. So we have to be willing to make big changes ourselves – in our processes, our practices, our tools, and our relationships. Change this bug status is but a tiny example.