ghoti asked me to talk about being a working parent, having initially misread a "being an incoming parent" prompt from a previous day. Due to my particular circumstances, some of this overlaps with a previous prompt, "working from home", but there's probably a bit more I can write about independently.

I tend not to use the phrase "working parent" to describe myself, since any time I try to do ghoti's full-time-parenting job for more than an hour or two I'm reminded of just how much work it is to do it well! (Although today I got both little children to sleep earlier than usual and without an epic tantrum, so am feeling flush with success, at least until it next goes wrong.) I do sometimes feel that the business of earning money is the easy job in relative terms, and it's all too easy to hide in my study when the children are being particularly difficult. I've been trying to do better at avoiding that.

In practical terms, of course, it means I'm not routinely able to do very much with the children during the week, and if we go away for the weekend I normally have to be back in time to work on Monday. More insidiously, if I've been having a stressful time at work then it's very hard to find much energy to play with the children; unfortunately I don't find that one activity helps me recharge for the other, rather the opposite. So I'm very much hoping that my new job in the new year will leave me with more energy for the evenings and weekends.

On the other hand, my job does pay well enough that the children don't lack much (except space, but we're working on that more gradually), and hopefully that will continue. As the primary earner I do feel a pretty strong responsibility to turn my skillset into a comfortable lifestyle for them.

I may have missed some part of this question, so please do say in comments if this is too narrow an answer and I'll try to expand on it.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

jack asked me about Ubuntu.

( a misguided attempt to squash ten years into a single blog entry )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

New Ubuntu Foundation Announced

Since I've been named to the advisory board, I might not be exactly the most unbiased observer around here, but hey. Opinions obviously my own and not necessarily those of Canonical or the Foundation, etc., etc.

I'm pretty happy about this development, really. Once the press-release gubbins is stripped away, the greatest benefit I see is that it explicitly calls out the rationale for the Foundation as the "philanthropic and non-commercial" nature of the Ubuntu project. Any time a company decides to contribute to free software, or perhaps especially when one starts up that way, people - rightly or wrongly, but naturally - have concerns about its motives; I hope it will alleviate many of those concerns to have Ubuntu explicitly separated out a bit more from Canonical, and perhaps attract more developers who previously didn't want to feel as if they were doing unpaid work for a company. There are a number of precedents for the company/foundation model: Netscape/Mozilla and Red Hat/Fedora come immediately to mind. The Mozilla Foundation is in good shape these days (after a somewhat shakier start), and while it's too early to tell in the case of the Fedora Foundation it's certainly got considerable momentum behind it.

The five-year support thing is something we've been talking about since the very first company meeting, but it didn't make sense to introduce it until we'd been around long enough and doing a good enough job that people would actually believe that kind of talk from a start-up. I'm hopeful that it will get us into the sorts of mainstream corporate environments where they won't open the door to people who only do support for 18 months. Plus, from a purely selfish point of view, it's good to know that my employer plans to be around for the next five years! :-)

I don't know yet whether I'll be employed by the new Foundation or continue to be employed by Canonical/Fieldwave. Obviously I'll still be accountable to the same man at the top no matter which. Still, interesting times, and - with any luck - in a good way.