Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership

Mark Shuttleworth

March 10, 2011

Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else. We like competitive markets, competitive technologies, competitive sports, because we feel the end result for consumers or the audience is as good as it possibly could be.

In larger organisations, you get an interesting effect. You get *internal* competition as well as external competition. And that’s healthy too. You get individuals competing for responsibility, and of course you want to make sure that the people who will make the wisest choices carry the responsibilities that demand wisdom, while those who have the most energy carry the responsibilities for which that’s most needed. You get teams competing with each other too – for resources, for attention, for support elsewhere, for moral authority, for publicity. And THAT’s the hardest kind of competition to manage, because it can be destructive to the organisation as a whole.

Even though it’s difficult to manage, internal competition is extremely important, and should not be avoided out of fear. The up side is that you get to keep the best ideas because you allowed them to compete internally. If you try and avoid it, you crowd out new ideas, and end up having to catch up to them. Usually, what goes wrong is that one group gets control of the organisation’s thinking, and takes the view that any ideas which do not come from within that group are a threat, and should be stopped. That’s very dangerous – it’s how great civilisations crash; they fail to embrace new ideas which are not generated at the core.

In Ubuntu, we have a lot of internal competition. Ubuntu and Kubuntu and Xubuntu and Edubuntu and *buntu-at-large have to collaborate and also, to a certain extent, compete. We handle that very well, I think, though occasionally some muppet calls Kubuntu the blue-headed-stepchild etc etc. It’s absolutely clear to everyone, though, that we have a shared interest in delivering ALL these experiences together with as much shared vision and commonality as possible. I consider the competition between these teams healthy and constructive and worth maintaining, even though it requires some fancy footwork and causes occasional strains.

The challenge for Gnome leadership

The sound and fury writ large in blog comments this week is all about how competition is managed.

Gnome is, or should be, bigger than any of the contributing individuals or companies. Gnome leadership should be in a position to harness competition effectively for the good of the project. That does, however, require very firm leadership, and very gutsy decisions. And it requires vigilance against inward thinking. For example, I’ve seen the meme reiterated multiple times that “one should not expect Gnome to embrace ideas which were not generated and hosted purely within Gnome”. That’s chronic inward thinking. Think of all the amazing bits of goodness in the free software stack which were NOT invented in Gnome but are a part of it today. Think how much better it is when goodness is adopted across multiple desktop environments, and how much harder it is to achieve that when something is branded “K” or “G”.

When we articulated our vision for Unity, we were very clear that we wanted to deliver it under the umbrella of Gnome. We picked Gnome-friendly technologies by and large, and where we felt we needed to do something different, that decision required substantial review. We described Unity as “a shell for Gnome” from the beginning, and we have been sincere in that view. We have worked successfully and happily with many, many Gnome projects to integrate Unity API’s into their codebase.

This is because we wanted to be sure that whatever competitive dynamics arose were *internal* to Gnome, and thus contributing to a better result overall in Gnome in the long term.

We’ve failed.

Much of the language, and much of the decision making I’ve observed within Gnome, is based on the idea that Unity is competition WITH Gnome, rather than WITHIN Gnome.

The key example of that is the rejection of Unity’s indicator API’s as external dependencies. That was the opportunity to say “let’s host this competition inside Gnome”. Even now, there’s a lack of clarity as to what was intended by that rejection, with some saying “it was just a reflection of the fact that the API’s were new and not used in any apps”. If that were the case, there would be no need for prior approval as an external dependency; the rejection was clearly an attempt to prevent Gnome applications from engaging around these API’s. It’s substantially failed, as many apps have happily done the work to blend in beautifully in the Unity environment, but there has been a clear attempt to prevent that by those who feel that Unity is a threat to Gnome rather than an opportunity for it.

Dave Neary has to his credit started to ask [ http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/07/has-gnome-rejected-canonical-help/ ] “what’s really going on here”?

In his blog post, he quoted the rationale given for the rejection of Canonical’s indicator API’s, which I’ll re-quote here and analyze in this light:

it doesn’t integrate with gnome-shell

That’s it – right there. Remember, this was a proposal for the indicator API’s to be an *external* dependency for Gnome. That means, Gnome apps can use those API’s *optionally* when they are being run on a platform where they are useful. It has NOTHING to do with the core Gnome vision. External API’s exist precisely BECAUSE it’s useful to encourage people to use Gnome apps on all sorts of platforms, including proprietary ones like Windows and MacOS and Solaris, and they should shine there too.

So the premier reason given for the rejection of these API’s is a reason that, as best we can tell, has never been used against an external dependency proposal before: “it’s different to Gnome”. At the heart of this statement is something deeper: “it’s competition with an idea someone in Gnome wants to pursue”.

What made this single statement heartbreaking for me to see was that it spoke clearly to the end of one of Gnome’s core values: code talks. Here we had API’s which were real, tested code, with patches to many Gnome apps available, that implemented a spec that had been extensively discussed on FreeDesktop.org. This was real code. Yet it was blocked because someone – a Gnome Shell designer – wanted to explore other ideas, ideas which at the time were not working code at all. There’s been a lot of commentary on that decision. Most recently, Aaron Seigo pointed out [ http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/03/collaborations-demise.html ] that this decision was as much a rejection of cross-desktop standards as it was a rejection of Canonical’s code.

Now, I can tell you that I was pretty disgusted with this result.

We had described the work we wanted to do (cleaning up the panel, turning panel icons into menus) to the Gnome Shell designers at the 2008 UX hackfest. McCann denies knowledge today, but it was a clear decision on our part to talk about this work with him at the time, it was reported to me that the conversation had happened, and that we’d received the assurance that such work would be “a valued contribution to the shell”. Clearly, by the time it was delivered, McCann had decided that such assurances were not binding, and that his interest in an alternative panel story trumped both that assurance and the now-extant FreeDesktop.org discussions and spec.

But that’s not the focus of this blog. My focus here is on the management of healthy competition. And external dependencies are the perfect way to do so: they signal that there is a core strategy (in this case whatever Jon McCann wants to do with the panel) and yet there are also other, valid approaches which Gnome apps can embrace. This decision failed to grab that opportunity with both hands. It said “we don’t want this competition WITHIN Gnome”. But the decision cannot remove the competitive force. What that means is that the balance was shifted to competition WITH Gnome.

probably depends on GtkApplication, and would need integration in GTK+ itself

Clearly, both of these positions are flawed. The architecture of the indicator work was designed both for backward compatibility with the systray at the time, and for easy adoption. We have lots of apps using the API’s without either of these points being the case.

we wished there was some constructive discussion around it, pushed by the libappindicator developers; but it didn’t happen

We made the proposal, it was rejected. I can tell you that the people who worked on the proposal consider themselves Gnome people, and they feel they did what was required, and stopped when it was clear they were not going to be accepted. I’ve had people point to this bullet and say “you should have pushed harder”. But proposing an *external* dependency is not the same as trying to convince Shell to adopt something as the mainstream effort. It’s saying “hey, here’s a valid set of API’s apps might want to embrace, let’s let them do so”.

there’s nothing in GNOME needing it

This is a very interesting comment. It’s saying “no Gnome apps have used these API’s”. But the Gnome apps in question were looking to this very process for approval of their desire to use the API’s. You cannot have a process to pre-approve API’s, then decline to do so because “nobody has used the API’s which are not yet approved”. You’re either saying “we just rubber stamp stuff here, go ahead and use whatever you want”, or you’re being asinine.

It’s also saying that Unity is not “in GNOME”. Clearly, a lot of Unity work depends on the adoption of these API’s for a smooth and well-designed panel experience. So once again, we have a statement that Unity is “competition with Gnome” and not “competition within Gnome”.

And finally, it’s predicating this decision on the idea being “in Gnome” is the sole criterion of goodness. There is a cross-desktop specification which defines the appindicator work clearly. The fact that KDE apps Just Work on Unity is thanks to the work done to make this a standard. Gnome devs participated in the process, but appeared not to stick with it. Many or most of the issues they raised were either addressed in the spec or in the implementations of it. They say now that they were not taken seriously, but a reading of the mailing list threads suggests otherwise.

It’s my view that cross-desktop standards are really important. We host both Kubuntu and Ubuntu under our banner, and without such collaboration, that would be virtually impossible. I want Banshee to work as well under Kubuntu as Amarok can under Ubuntu.

What can be done?

This is a critical juncture for the leadership of Gnome. I’ll state plainly that I feel the long tail of good-hearted contributors to Gnome and Gnome applications are being let down by a decision-making process that has let competitive dynamics diminish the scope of Gnome itself. Ideas that are not generated “at the core” have to fight incredibly and unnecessarily hard to get oxygen. Ask the Zeitgeist team. Federico is a hero, but getting room for ideas to be explored should not feel like a frontal assault on a machine gun post.

This is no way to lead a project. This is a recipe for a project that loses great people to environments that are more open to different ways of seeing the world. Elementary. Unity.

Embracing those other ideas and allowing them to compete happily and healthily is the only way to keep the innovation they bring inside your brand. Otherwise, you’re doomed to watching them innovate and then having to “relayout” your own efforts to keep up, badmouthing them in the process.

We started this with a strong, clear statement: Unity is a shell for Gnome. Now Gnome leadership have to decide if they want the fruit of that competition to be an asset to Gnome, or not.

A blessing in disguise

Aaron’s blog post made me think that the right way forward might be to bolster and strengthen the forum for cross-desktop collaboration: FreeDesktop.org.

I have little optimism that the internal code dynamics of Gnome can be fixed – I have seen too many cases where a patch which implements something needed by Unity is dissed, then reimplemented differently, or simply left to rot, to believe that the maintainers in Gnome who have a competitive interest on one side or the other will provide a level playing field for this competition.

However, we have shown a good ability to collaborate around FD.o with KDE and other projects. Perhaps we could strengthen FreeDesktop.org and focus our efforts at collaboration around the definition of standards there. Gnome has failed to take that forum seriously, as evidenced by the frustrations expressed elsewhere. But perhaps if we had both Unity and KDE working well there, Gnome might take a different view. And that would be very good for the free software desktop.

8:56 am