Kevin Zak

This fall I resigned my position at InvisionFree after two years of providing support and documentation for its users. After two months of unhappiness, I finally decided to call it quits. This was not because of any one person. It was just a general boredom with what I was doing.

My resignation has reduced the amount of stress in my life significantly. I no longer wake up in the morning wondering if there was a late-night spammer that I now have to deal with before school. I no longer feel the pressure of documentation deadlines and I no longer feel required to log in and answer support tickets each night. While having less stress is usually construed as a good thing, I find myself having more and more free time. When I normally would be writing a documentation or giving support, I have nothing to fill these gaps of time. That is, until now.

Recently I’ve decided to become an active member of the Ubuntu community. Ubuntu is an open source Linux distribution that focuses on usability, regular releases, and freedom from legal restrictions. For over a year I’ve been using Ubuntu and its KDE derivative Kubuntu as a secondary operating system to Windows XP. While I still familiarized myself with Ubuntu and Linux in general, I never used it enough to grasp the concepts behind it. Lately, however, I’ve started using Kubuntu 7.10 full time and I find myself learning more each day.

While maintaining my position as an active member of Kubuntu’s IRC support channel, I now frequently visit the development channel, which is full of well-informed people willing to lend a hand. I’ve also started visiting Ubuntu+1, a channel dedicated to the next version of Kubuntu, whatever that may be. Currently, it is Ubuntu 8.04, which is an LTS release. I’ve recently installed 8.04 and have been testing it out for a few days.

I’ve also started the process of joining the Documentation Team there. I proofread my first documentation today, and I had a lot of fun doing it. An operating system is such a multifaceted thing to document that nearly anyone can find some area their interested in. I can tell already that I’m going to have a lot of fun documenting the system.

As the title indicates, I have an entirely new perspective of Ubuntu. Prior to my decision to become active in the community, I thought of it as simply another operating system. Now, after a couple weeks of seeing the community in action, it’s clear that it is so much more than that. Never before have I seen so many people from all over the world work for such a specific common goal. Whether they go about it the right way or not, everyone has improving Ubuntu on their mind. Programmers, writers, artists, and even the most basic of users want the same thing. The best end result possible. Ubuntu works towards a common goal to achieve a unilaterally desired result, whereas other organizations work toward specific goals to improve what they want, as opposed to what everyone wants. This is essentially what sets Ubuntu apart from any other group, and what makes me so eager to help out the project.