Development

How can the user community get involved with the Ubuntu development?

Anybody can help out in the way that best suits their talents or interests. Help is always needed in everything from translation, bug triage, testing, bug fixing to feature development.

The best way to begin is to get in touch with one of the many teams that match what you want to do.

Considering your user base, how much work is done by the community and how much is done by the active developers?

Many of the most active developers are those who participate through the community and are not employed by Canonical Ltd. Ubuntu could simply not exist without them.

How many developers are working on Ubuntu at this moment? Is it paid work?

The community of people working on Ubuntu consists of more than just the developers, but also those who contribute to package maintenance, those who aid in bug triage and fixing, those who perform translations of software, etc.

The numbers are certainly in the hundreds. Many are paid, either by Canonical Ltd or by other companies. Others have gained employment simply by their work.

I've personally reviewed both Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 LTS and there is one thing bugging me. Some translations are missing or incomplete, especially in new tools and applications. Considering your user base I sincerely doubt you lack active translators. So what's up with the missing translations?

While our user base is large enough that missing or wrong translations are noticed, relatively few step up to help out. All you need do is select "Translate this Application" from the Help menu of the problem apps, and start filling in translations!

Any interesting developments targeted for future releases that you are excited about, or just want to share with our readers?

I'm particularly looking forwards to seeing the fruit of the user experience work being done for future releases that will provide a different look for the Ubuntu desktop.

Redhat, Novell, IBM and several other companies have paid developers working on the Linux-kernel and other Linux-related projects. Does Canonical do something like this?

We're a rather smaller company than those you mention; they have teams of people working on single Open Source projects that are larger than our entire company!

This obviously means if you count and compare the simple number of commits, we appear to come out badly in comparison.

Canonical has paid for work on a number of upstream projects, and we have developers who have provided significant contributions to them. As we grow as a company, that number will increase.

Although we're a small company, we have produced a distribution that's being used by millions of people around the world, many of which haven't been introduced to Linux yet. The additional testing and feedback for improvements (as well as bugs) is rarely recognized as a contribution, but ought to be.