What would make you become an associate member?

Sense of Direction
For being an Ubuntu based distro, the benefit for the Trisquel team is that there is a company out there (Canonical) that is testing their packages for the Ubuntu release that others can benefit from. Kinda like with CentOS and Scientific Linux where Red Hat puts a lot of money into their Enterprise edition and releases the source code. Trisquel can go back to being a straight Debian distro, but more effort would be needed to bring consistency to what is essentially a rolling distro. Linux Mint does this with their Debian edition and they have had to resort to "update packs" to bring some sanity back.

With all that said, there still is somewhat of a lack of direction for the Trisquel project since it is essentially one guy handling it all. I don't know if people don't want to help or its an ego thing, but it slows down the release. Ubuntu is on a strict 6 month schedule and Linux Mint gets a release within a month after the Ubuntu one. I know that the Trisquel team goes to the beat of their own drum, but when they rely on Ubuntu releases that can have short lifespans, it is important to get a Trisquel release out as soon as possible. Especially if anyone wants to deploy this in the enterprise and the Trisquel team waits a few months and the end user loses at least 3 months of support when they install.

Attitude on the forums
I have always been super gung-ho about this operating system since I installed 4.0. What drew me to the OS was how beautiful it was for a Gnome 2 based distro and the strict adherence to free software. I not only installed it for myself, but other family members who had no issues in using it on a daily basis.

I do admit I have been passionate in my views on these forums, but as of late, I am getting verbally attacked and called a troll. The post I have may have genuine information and opinion, but it doesn't matter to some people. Of course if I respond, I always have someone contacting Ruben asking for my banning and he emails me. I have never resorted to name calling on these forums and it shows the maturity of some of its users.

Conclusion
I know this is a long post, but I have thought about in the past to contribute to this project either by donating or buying something on Think Penguin. Soon after my viewpoint changed after I got the impression that many people on this forum are somewhat cultish and extremely passive aggressive towards a viewpoint. Heck, even if I did contribute, my name would then be tied to this account and I seriously don't trust what some of you would do with that information. Sorry.

So to the team... please develop a schedule on when the next release comes out and at least try to get Unity on 6.0 for some of us users. We need to have some confidence in this project actually following through if they want our money. Please don't turn this project into a glorified panhandler.

Although the schedule is not official, it exists. Trisquel's versions usually are released during the LibrePlanet conference and for the Free Software Day (it is going to be September 15th this year). This bi-annual pace is about five months delayed w.r.t. Ubuntu's. As a home user, I am happy with it: I prefer not to go go through the issues met by early adopters of Ubuntu. For companies/institutions, the five month shift applies to the support and I believe it is not a big deal either since these users usually want to stick to LTS releases (for more stability), which are supported 4 years and 7 months (the 5 year-support of Ubuntu minus the 5 month shift) with a 2 years and 7 months that are overlapping with the availability of the next LTS.

You did not clearly answer Chris' question: "what is holding you back to contribute financially/technically to the project?". Is your answer "I would if the governance makes a commitment to reduce delays w.r.t. Ubuntu's releases and work on a new Unity-based edition"? If so, don't you think your contribution should precede this greatly augmented load of work for the developers (otherwise this augmentation may never be possible)?

t3g: Magic Banana makes a good point here about the problem existing because of the lack of resources (people/money). Rubén doesn't have the time to deal with setting a definite schedule, maintaining the forums, etc. If he gets sick there isn't anybody who can take up the slack. If his other job requires him to work late to meet a deadline that's time from working on Trisquel. With other distributions there are more participants in the development process and paid developers. There is someone to manage the projects. Responsibilities can be delegated. Not so with Trisquel. Even with volunteers it makes more sense for Rubén to do stuff himself because volunteers (except the most dedicated) distract him from getting real work done. They take up more time to manage than they contribute in other words.

If we want to see Trisquel improve then we need to find the money. Especially now. It's not Rubén's burden to get things done on a specific deadline. It's our burden as users to get him situated (financially) so he can meet deadlines.

Rubén's not demanding $99 for each and every upgrade. He's not charging for access to the download servers or repositories. These are things he could charge for and it would still be legitimately free software. Trisquel would still be complaint with the four freedoms.

Trisquel isn't about being available for no cost. It's about the freedom.

t3g: Maybe I should ask you this. It sounds like your reasoning is "Trisquel isn't doing what I want so I won't contribute". Yet you are still using it. It would be one thing if Trisquel was non-free. It seems like another though if it is free and the project simply isn't able to meet your demands. The fact you are using it suggests to me (provided you are able) that you should contribute (if things are to be fair).

You wouldn't go into a restaurant and not tip the waiter when you were served even if they didn't meet your full expectations would you? This does assume you are in a country where the waiter's pay is what you voluntarily tip (largely). I certainly wouldn't.

If Rubén "made official" the unofficial schedule (without any guarantees of course) and put this up on the web site would you contribute? How much would you contribute?

I also just want to point out that Rubén's not actually delaying the release to a detrimental degree. The security updates which are from the Ubuntu project are available for a long time after each new release of Trisquel. This is to give people time to upgrade. The security updates for older short term releases are available for so long that even Trisquel users should not have a problem sticking with an outdated version for a long time. Trisquel 5.0 will get security updates until October 2012. It was released in April. That means you have about 7 months after a new release of Trisquel to upgrade. If you can't find the time to upgrade within that time period you need to look at the long term releases.

One last thing. It might seem childish to attack you- but don't take it too personally. The people here are here for freedom. If your views don't match the accepted definitions of this community then you should find a different distribution/community which does. I think your views actually match the Debians position more than Trisquels or the Free Software Foundation.

I say this because Debian also tries to exclude non-free software all the while supporting it. Debian does not prevent or inhibit (and even encourages it from the Free Software Perspective) the installation of non-free software. They make it slightly more difficult though. They setup separate repositories and instruct users how to install the non-free software. This largely makes it possible to run mostly free software as long as you don't add one of the non-free repositories. Debian does take a stance on freedom though unlike many distributions. Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and most other distributions include non-free drivers/firmware in the shipping ISO. Debian (at least with the most recent version) does not (from my understanding). They now require you to add the non-free repository and manually install non-free firmware.

I sometimes take it from the perspective if I were to start a new company and outfit the computers with a version of GNU/Linux. What do I choose? I'm not going to pay for Red Hat and CentOS is not really my taste. I like the Ubuntu ecosystem and the 5 years of support for the LTS releases, but the main release can dabble in non-free software. Trisquel is FSF approved and pretty so people who are used to Windows 7 will feel at home with the menus and transparent bottom panel.

There's also the worry that the project could go away and not be supported or I have no idea on when a new version comes out if I have 100+ computers. I know my way around a system and wouldn't need a support package from a company like Canonical or Red Hat unless absoluately necessary. Don't have that at this point with Trisquel since the team is so small but maybe down the road?

With the LTS versions of Ubuntu, it is usually recommended to wait for the .1 point release or higher as some fixes with the installer and upgrading from a previous LTS are fixed. I know that Ubuntu 12.04.1 will be released in August and I suppose that would be a good release for Trisquel 6.0 to be based off of. I see the benefits of those who upgrade from Trisquel 4.0 to 6.0 to hopefully be as smooth as Ubuntu 10.04.4 to 12.04.1 since they use the same Update Manager.

I'll be honest... I'm a Unity convert. I'm a Pisces and artistic, so one of the initial reasons for picking Trisquel over Ubuntu was the default theme. I hate the orange and brown theme that Ubuntu uses and if a future Trisquel release can bring over the sexy to Unity in Trisquel 6.0, then I would be giddy.

I think I tried to email grvrulz but his email didn't exist or whatever becuase I'm really gung ho about his themes and curious on his progress is on getting Unity locked and loaded in Trisquel. It would be nice if Unity showed up in LightDM and GDM in Trisquel 5.5. :-(

Oh and one more thing about people ragging on me on these forums... I have a thick skin and kinda have a taste for the theatrical. I did teach improv to students while in college and I don't take it to heart. :-)

I don't want this post be derailed so I'll start:

I am Red Baptist and I used to be a paid blogger and I can translate English to Filipino. I have been a Trisquel GNU/Linux user for over a year and would love to contribute my off-work time and attention to make Trisquel even better. I would contribute financially if not for the meager salary I receive for my family's daily needs.

I would love to get rid of spammers on these forums.

You can contact me thru my profile in these forums or my Statusnet account at parlementum.net.

I can't contribute financially because I do not work and live with my parents. I don't manage my own money. I could translate the website to pt_BR but I'm not sure how to do it. I also have _some_ coding experience in C, Java, Vala, Python and Haskell (though I started to hate this last) from what I've read in books. I've never developed something serious, mostly a little more than book exercises so development tutoring would be a must. A documentation about "how to start helping" - like what skills to expect from you (inkscape, gimp, c, bash, sysadmin etc) - along with the existing "how to help" would be more helpful.

I don't know if it is normal to have only one lead developer. Perhaps it is. A bit of single mindedness is a good thing sometimes, I think. But to have the whole Trisquel OS reliant on a single developer is a bit precarious and can't be a good thing.

How many other developers are actively involved in improving Trisquel?

Would like to support Trisquel. I don't know enough about Linux or distributions to know how I can help (I'm a C/C++/assembly software developer).

Some background:
I believe in Trisquel. I want to support it. I use it on my desktop for MOST computing. I would use it on my laptop all the time even if I could only get even backup drivers to work supporting my laptop's full 1600x1200 resolution, but no matter what I've tried it only comes up 1024x768 with no other settings / options (Toshiba laptop). I could live without everything else support, but not the screen. (And FWIW, even the proprietary AMD driver doesn't work properly on this laptop. If I want to be able to switch back to the laptop's display, I have to boot up using only the laptop's display, and THEN plug in my HDMI cable to use my external monitor (or both). Horrible closed-source drivers :-( ... ).

I would love to use Trisquel for all my computing. I completely fell in love with Trisquel 5.0. Don't like Trisquel 5.5 at all because of GNOME 3 and the fallback mode. But more importantly than that, I need some features its kernel doesn't support (which are really only accelerated AMD graphics as these are integrated into my motherboards).

Right now I use Trisquel 5.0 for 90% of desktop use. And I have no choice but to use Ubuntu on my laptop 100% of the time.

What can I do to help Trisquel? If there's a way I can help get the recently released AMD open-source drivers working ... point me in the right direction and I'll go for it.

Best regards,
Rick C. Hodgin

--- On Thu, 6/7/12, name at domain <name at domain> wrote:

> From: name at domain <name at domain>
> Subject: [Trisquel-users] What would make you become an associate member?
> To: name at domain
> Date: Thursday, June 7, 2012, 8:43 PM
> For those who are not members what is
> holding you back?
>
> I'm also going to ask what skills do people have?
>
> If you can't contribute financially can you contribute some
> other skill? What languages (non-coding) do you know? Are
> you familiar with drupal, administration, or have other
> coding skills? Are you a graphics person? Can you write
> press releases? Are you familiar with SEO techniques?
>
> Maybe we can improve Trisqual's financial resources by
> working together. Simply documenting what people are capable
> of doing and collecting email addresses might be a good
> start.
>

> For those who are not members what is holding you back?
Funds. I am on the verge of donating to freedom (in the form of either
the fsfe or Trisquel membership. I doubt I could afford both) I'm
weighing up the value of my money to each party. I have previously been
a member of the fsf. I am also on the verge of changing job and moving
away; so I don't know what the future holds financially.

> I'm also going to ask what skills do people have?
I'm a computer programmer/software engineer by day (and by night in my
spare time). Although it is not my main domain, I know enough web coding
(server and client side, various technologies) to get by. I am a long
time GNU/Linux user (previously debian, currently migrating to
trisquel).

> If you can't contribute financially can you contribute some other
> skill? What languages (non-coding) do you know? Are you familiar with
> drupal, administration, or have other coding skills? Are you a
> graphics person? Can you write press releases? Are you familiar with
> SEO techniques?
I've spent some time looking through the trisquel repos, trying to get
familiar with how the system works in the hope of spotting a niche my
skills can fill. Any guidance to what needs doing would help.

I am willing to spend some of my free time working on trisquel.

On Jun 7, 2012 7:44 PM, <name at domain> wrote:
>
> For those who are not members what is holding you back?

I just became a member. I have been using GNU/Linux for a little over 15
years both at home and work. I've been through many up's and down's with
many, many distros. Some are nothing but a footnote in computing history.
I became interested in this distro and became a member because this distro,
project, and community has a huge potential and a lot to offer. I want to
be a part of that, and do what I can to help continue the success and build
upon it.

> I'm also going to ask what skills do people have?
>

I am a systems developer and test engineer. In other words... I sling code
and break code. I have already volunteered, but I (and I recommend this to
all volunteers) am taking it slow, observing, and being a sponge at first.
A bunch of gung-ho volunteers running in and creating chaos can doom a
project.

Which leads to my first suggestion: Organize.

There needs to be a volunteer coordinator. A person who organizes the
volunteers by skill and time commitment. A person who can take a list of
tasks that the project needs taken care of and can then assign them out to
their pool of volunteer assets, track them, and minimize the chaos as much
as possible while taking that huge load off of the lead developer's
shoulders.

Cheers,
Jeramy

On 08/06/12 01:43, name at domain wrote:
> I'm also going to ask what skills do people have?
>
I've recently freed up a chunk of my personal time. Trisquel can have it.

I know enough of the following to bug hunt and patch:

C/C++, Python, Bash scripts, PHP

I've done a couple of Drupal sites but that was two years ago.
Obviously I know [X]HTML and CSS well enough, but I'm not up to date
with HTML5 Canvas (I have the books.)

I also write British English well enough to have been published in small
time magazines in non-computing fields. However, I don't have
experience in writing for an International or non-first language
audience so I would need an alt/mentor/editor.

The realities of my disability are that I don't know how much time I can
offer Trisquel. I could for example be in hospital next week, or back
in what you might call 'survival mode' at any time. As such I judge it
a bad use of quidam's time for him to mentor me.

That said, I've had a varied 28 year career in computing. There's none
of the roles in Trisquel that I haven't done as at least part of my job
for other non-free systems. In short I have the skills and concepts not
the Trisquel & GNU/Linux specific knowledges. So pick a priority role,
give me a reading list and someone other than quidam as first line
question answerer and I'll give it a go.

Leny

--
With computer technology we're building a world where Orwell's 1984
could be a childhood fantasy akin to Santa Claus. What makes you
think software without ethics is tenable?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

It's great to hear from everybody. Lets see if we can keep this up!

I'm probably going to contact some people including Rubén and see what he thinks. At a minimal there are some projects I think we could and should start that won't be a distraction to Rubén. One thing we shouldn't do is fear our efforts will be a distraction because then it can be a guaranteed loss on what is otherwise possible.

Another question. Who here knows Trisquel's web site and workings? Who has what editing permissions for translations? Maybe we can get additional languages added.

I think Rubén is the one who has to give these permissions at the moment. Based on what people have said they could do I'll probably write an email or two and see if we can't get a number of things rolling based on said skills and other factors.

And keep this thread going...

I'll become a member today, but I'd also like to help run a Trisquel (or free software/free GNU/Linux in general) YouTube channel, or website, like I posted about months ago. It'd also be cool to run a free software podcast in the way TheLinuxAction show does, or make a more user oriented FAIF.us-like podcast.

I think LibreCast would be a good podcast, and for a Trisquel and free software oriented site or YouTube channel (or both) could be called TrisquelUser (or something else).

Wouldn't it be nice to direct users with common problems to an informative how-to video? A podcast could inform any user about what the components of the latest issues are, or what the beef is about some new version of a free program. Also, most YouTube videos for GNU/Linux help simply suck, and tell users how to work with "Linux" or "open source."

I know it's not much, but I'm pretty good with English grammar and usage. I could help proofread documentation, and things like that.

I have done a bit of programming before, but I've never done any "real" programming. I might be able to help with some programming tasks but I don't even know where to begin.

I think it would be nice if there was some kind of tutorial for new contributors that would show how to do various things. Like examples of past bugs that have been fixed, with a step by step explanation of what was done to fix it.

I've just completed my studies and I'm looking for a job. So I'll be able to be a member once I get a job and some money starts coming. :)

I'm quite proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP and Wordpress, but those look like common things and a lot of people here might have those. I also do some gtk themeing and I'm currently doing the Trisquel theme for gtk3.
I'm learning vala for gtk application development but it's in very early stages.

I know Hindi, that's my mother tongue, and I'll be happy to translate the website :)

I'm already a member. It's probably only a drop in the bucket but I like to think that the monthly contribution keeps the Update Manager popping up in my dock from time-to-time.

I would like to help more! I'm a pythonista but am up for learning whatever. I've looked at a few tickets in the past but couldn't really figure out where to start. Are there tickets that can be piped to newbies that, with a little hand-holding, might get us on the right track?

I read all the posts...
I'm a student and I'm supporting the FSF, I haven't got my money, so I cannot spend it freely. 60$ for the FSF for my parents are enough.
However, I can say something about what I would like in Trisquel...

1) I am a translator of the italian language, we are only three, but we have almost translated all the website in a few months. A big problem is that nobody can admininster translations and translators, only Rubén. Malberts tried to talk to him about that, but there is still no good administration. I had several times to write e-mails or into the IRC channel only for becoming a translator! This is not a good thing!

2)There is no volunteer admin, and so if I have a problem I have always to talk with Rubén that has yet enough problems...

3)The mailing lists are unused, so the lack of organization is more and more...

I'm helping doing translations, I'm not good with programming, I know only a bit of C++, HTML4 and Python, not very much for coding... But if there was someone who coordinates, he could help the learning coders giving them little works to do...

I'll work on this some more once we have a wiki. I think it will be telling though as to this efforts success if we can't even get a wiki up.

I've already summarised everybody in a private wiki of my own. I'll push it up once we have somewhere to post it. I'll see if I can figure out from it which languages we might be able to translate for (and have multiple people) and which we would need more people for. As well as which languages people know and who might be a good person for a council position (management, voting on ideas/proposals/etc and general coordination).

I'm unemployed and very, very poor at the moment. I'll gladly help to fund Trisquel in the future, if i can. In the meantime i may have some skills (and time, for sure) to help in some way: I'm Portuguese and i have already volunteered to translate whatever i can to/from English/Portuguese. Ruben told me we would need at least three persons that could translate to Portuguese to get that started, so i'm waiting. I'm in the translators mailing list but i always feel a little bit lost and dispersed (not really used to these distributed organizational methods. I prefer the "DO THIS" approach. :) )

I also have excellent knowledge in XHTML, CSS and some less in Javascript. I'm starting to learn C and have some previous programming experience in Visual Basic (from back when i was young and innocent and used that other thing some call "operating system", but now i have thrown it out the windows.), also i'm always learning bash.

I always need some starting guidance but if someone gives me something to do related to translating and/or HTML/XHTML,CSS and Javascript i'll sure do it.