Six-month cycles are great. Now let's talk about meta-cycles: broader release cycles for major work. I'm very interested in a cross-community conversation about this, so will sketch out some ideas and then encourage people from as many different free software communities as possible to comment here.

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers.

It is not uncommon to read about projects that are suffering from lack of development resources. Let's be honest: no project has 'enough' people, ever. There's always something else that could be getting done 'if only we had another pair of hands!' Some projects suffer more than others, however.

I know this won't get the pageviews that a good rant will, so I guess you could say the rants subsidize the positive articles.

"Achieving synchronization on the scale that Shuttleworth desires would require some open-source software projects to radically change their current development models and adopt a new approach that isn't going to be viable for many projects."

Time-based release cycles have been extremely beneficial for free and open source software projects and the idea has caught on organically. Taking it to the next level, "meta-cycles" for projects and Linux distributions that consume all of the upstream projects, hasn't gone so quickly.

KDE has gone through an impressive evolution of organizational, procedural and community related changes over its lifespan. What started out as a "in-our-spare-time" project became a critical component in many F/OSS operating systems.

Spring is a lovely time of year, when the flowers bloom, the birds sing and community Linux projects release the fruit of their winter labours. Specifically, the Fedora and Ubuntu projects come to the end of their six-month cycles.

Xonotic is a free, open source (GPL), ultra-fast, first-person shooter with multiplayer online matches. The project is geared towards providing addictive arena shooter gameplay which is all spawned and driven by the community itself.