Foreword
When I first heard about Ubuntu back in 2004, a few years before becoming the Ubuntu Community Manager, I was captivated by the approach that Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, was taking with his new venture. Not only did he have a firm commitment to rock-solid technology, forged by a team of open source rock stars with Debian as a foundation, but he underlined his vision with similarly rock-solid commitment to community.
At the time, the industry growing up around open source was still fairly new, Linux was beginning to be commercialized, and community was increasingly seen as an impediment in companies with a traditional software development culture. Corporations and community were beginning to clash, and it was easier for many companies to merely tolerate community rather than embrace it.
Things seemed different with Ubuntu and its primary sponsor, Canonical. Ubuntu took a confident and adventurous approach to their new operating system. They made opinionated decisions about the best tools to satisfy given use cases, integrated exciting new technologies before others were willing to do so, and delivered the whole shebang on a single CD to make distribution and installation easy.
Ubuntu was compelling from a technical and usability standpoint—which in itself was exciting—but as a community management dork, what really excited me was the open and transparent approach to community that Shuttleworth adopted from the project’s very launch. ...