Reaching the developers other evangelists cannot reach

Physicists are confused about how much stuff there is. Apparently, estimates for the total mass of everything in the universe are way higher than the amount of matter that can actually be seen or deduced. The solution here is "dark matter," – matter that can't be seen or detected by us but still exists and probably makes up about 90 percent of all the stuff that there is. Leaving aside how implausible this sounds, it has an interesting parallel with the world of Ubuntu.

Most of the software developers in the world don't interact with the tech community in any meaningful way. They come to work at 9, write code all day, go home at 5, and don't think about their jobs while they're at home. They don't read Reddit or Hacker News or tech books; they don't have a blog about coding; they don't go to hack days or evening meetups or LUGs or follow news about Ubuntu for phones on Google+. They're the dark matter of the developer world.

Evangelism in the free software world is largely a grass-roots effort, an attempt to create a snowballing increase in user base. You tell three people, they each tell three people, they each tell three people, and soon everyone in the world is an Ubuntu user. Start with hardcore Ubuntu people, then grow that group to the interested and motivated, then grow that group to those who enjoy a more pleasant user experience and are motivated enough technically to step away from the norm. Then, grow that group until it's everyone with a computer. Somewhere mixed in among those groups are developers who have the tech savvy to push a USB stick into the drive and install Ubuntu to try it out. And, as noted, most of the developers most of the time aren't anywhere where they'll hear the message that we set out to spread.

[...]