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Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."
Don't confuse debian with "The OSS Community". They are really not the same, and there is no such thing as "The OSS Community".
Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community
Yeah, anyone who's ever gotten even remotely involved in wikipedia could have seen this one coming a mile away. This is why, at work, you have "project managers", that have final say (and yet, also take the burden and responsibility of making decisions).
Push Button, Receive Bacon
So far the system has worked well for the end user.
And that is a good thing. Linux is moving along at a great pace, even with the little spats here and there. I love that there is alot of different ideas, with people to push them through.
I posted this first to Mark's blog, but I'll repeat it here:
This is a very well-written summation of the issues.
To paraphrase a comment from a message board I visit, "[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone."
Debian provides a wonderful base for many other distributions, not just Ubuntu, and it is a rock-solid platform for servers. It runs on many different architectures, and can be used on machines from a handheld up to a massive server. This is one of its greatest strengths, but also one of its greatest weaknesses.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, is far more focused than Debian is. Starting with the general base (the plateau, as Mark called it), it builds a strong distribution targeted to only 3-4 architectures (counting SPARC), which opens many more options. This is no different than many other distributions have done. For example, Knoppix is another version of Debian with customizations on top of it for a specific platform (or platforms).
Ubuntu can't be everything to everyone, because everyone has different needs and goals, and Ubuntu has a specific focus. Similarly, Debian can't be everything to everyone, because it is a more general distribution, a jack of all trades (and master of none).
Nuff Said.
IMHO, Gnu/Linux on the desktop still kinda sucks right now, but it is advancing rapidly. This makes me want to upgrade my distribution to get the latest and greatest, because it fixes features I really want (multimedia these days). We are quickly getting to a place where most the needs of average users will be well met. Then I won't mind if Debian is a little behind. It's like Windows XP being good enough that most people don't really care about upgrading to Vista. I can't wait until we are in that place, and I hope that then, the impedus to move forward so rapidly is lightened enough to relieve some of the stress on the Debian devs, allowing them more time to work through some of these issues.
LOL
I have to say I have never found Ubuntu easier to install than Debian. (Well I guess Ubuntu has a live cd installer but for me that just takes longer. If I am going to install it, I don't need to good into a full KDE or Gnome environment to do it.)
The two opposite sides of the scale appeared in consecutive posts.
The thorough discussions apparently remove the risk of mistakes associated with conformity, called "groupspeak" by some consulting firms.
However, when all is said and done, the code for a function needs to be stable. At what point does the free-for-all become a liability?
*nix projects a somewhat splintered image. There is a group of users who are unhappy with the other two closed OS vendors, and are surveying the state of affairs. I at least am baffled trying to objectively rate all the variants out there. Does anyone know of a comprehensive feature chart that allows prospective users to scrutinize the specs for their favorite purpose across most of the builds?
We all know what MS is about. Apple's entire existence has been positioned as "the Friendly Branded OS". I have remarked that I will ease into one of the OSS builds. But which one? Red Hat? Debian? uBuntu? Xandros? When I go reseaching, who is a neutral source?
I am quite satisfied that we don't need Every Last User on OSS. There are net jokes about AOL users, and the stereotype exists for a reason. But for the midline user who wants to promote OSS, what if ALL the variants remain incomplete because of the flamewars?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Oh wait...
Project managers do a lot more than "review submitted code/content and decide whether it should be included in the production version of the product." They drive the process, not just filter it.
I would say that the line, "Ubuntu could not exist without Debian," is not an opinion. It is fact. Does this mean that Ubuntu owes anything to Debian? Not really. Other than the GPL obligations, there really isn't anything that Debian could or should ask for in return from Ubuntu.
Anybody who has worked with Debian already should have a deep and profound respect for the fact that Debian is plain and broad. When you sit down at a Debian computer, you are seated before a gateway to what might be the most customizable distribution in existence. All of the packages are roughly as far away as "$ sudo aptitude", and it is all but guaranteed that no matter how complicated or convoluted the package you want is, it will be downloaded and installed, along with dependencies, and you don't have to worry about a damn thing. (If you've ever compiled your own VLC or GIMP, you know what I'm talking about.)
The problem is that people would like to see specialization in Debian. Debian is not for specialization. It's for everybody to make what they want. Taking that away from Debian compromises the entire goal of the project...
~ C.
You take a straightforward, uncontroversial statement (Shuttleworth's blog entry) that practically everyone agrees with. Then you publish a headline saying there's a "conflict", and pretend there's a huge row going on.
Pretty soon you've got a heated argument going on, mostly between people who haven't read the statement that allegedly started it all.
What does it all prove? That Slashdot isn't "stuff that matters" any more, it's stuff that draws mass readership. Just what we were trying to get away from when we first started reading Slashdot ...
The moral of all this is that to make the front page of /. it's better to have a conflict (which are unavoidable with any project the size of Debian) than to have thousands of hours of hard work.
--Go Debian!
http://srom.zgp.org/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I, too, am suckered into feeding the troll...
e x.html
:-)
Just in the super-unlikely case that you haven't actually ever worked on commercial software, I thought I'd give you the link that best describes the real world:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ind
There's a good reason geeks who love code development do so much of it for free. In general, I'd say that OSS projects are better run and executed than commercial projects. They just aren't as well funded
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
So install it using the Failsafe (I think that is the term) option. It boots into an ncurses menu program, just like Debian.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
. . .sell his product: HIS vision of the situation.
."
Well, just whose point of view do you expect him to present?
"Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, although I wish you to find my client not guilty let me go over some points that the prosecution has raised, as I think they are entirely valid. .
KFG
I read the blog post (yes, I know reading the actual articles is unusual for Slashdot, I'm sorry), and as I see it Shuttleworth's point is mostly that Debian should focus on the work on the unstable branch because, plainly, that's what working best.
Maybe he's right. Debian's never been succesful at meeting the scheduled release dates. If Ubuntu is capable of delivering better desktop releases, and in soon perhaps also better server releases, then what's the point of struggling and perpertually flamewaring to do the same inside Debian? Food for thought. Maybe a Debian developer would like to comment on that?
By the way, he openly admits that the unstable branch is vital for Ubuntu which could explain why he thinks that it is better to focus on it.
On behalf of myself and all other Fedora users out there, you sir are a dipshit.
I notice you didn't disagree with him.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
what you want is Microsoft Windows, you should really just use that. Linux isn't Windows, It is made and supported by the people that work hard to make the idea of open source work. Linux is more kinda like art. It is abstract and works and gets features from the millions of ideas that flow into it. Users help users understand it and they help others. It is also really fun to work with. I don't know why you would want it to be Windows.. the world already has one.
> What I want out of Linux:
>
> 1.One GUI.
>
> 2. Ability to play DirectX games.
>
> 3. Double click driver and application installs. "Fire and forget"
>
> 4. No preaching. I don't really give a rat's ass about what is free and what isn't.
As your points, especially the last one, make it abundantly clear, what you want is not Linux but a free[*] clone of Windows. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but what does it have to do with Linux and why any of the developers working on Linux [desktop] should care about what you want?
[*] I presume the cost is the only thing which keeps you from just using the original right now
Personally, I recommend Ubuntu 6.06. I myself recently switched over to it, and have found it to be a very pleasant experiance. I even managed to convince a friend that he should totally switch after, within the space of about 20 minutes, everything "worked." Unlike in previous distos, he was able to get 3d acceleration working properly, dvd+MP3+Other Proprietary codecs, ut2k4, and he just loves the simplicity of apt-get and synaptic. Immediatly before running Ubuntu, he tried running openSUSE, which didn't quite work out for him (couldn't get anything to simply "work"). After 3 days, he removed openSUSE.
Truth be told, I don't think your going to be able to find a Neutral Source. Really, the closest you are going to get to a source you consider Neutral would be yourself. As for a feauter chart, however, that is a bit easier. Wikipedia has one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_d istributions
As far as the debate on the semantics of Mark's post are concerned, I think that it is laughable that the discussion is even taking place. If anyone actually read and understood it, they would see how comical it is that they are arguing over the semantics.
And you want it all to still remain at a cost of zero, I bet.
It always fries my ass when people scream about stuff like "I want to play DirectX games" but aren't willing to pay a single cent to see it happen. How do you think it can be done when you won't pay? Do you think Microsoft are magnanimously giving away DirectX technology? They aren't even giving it to their own products anymore (i.e., DX10 only for Vista).
Ah, screw it, I know I'm feeding trolls but I will go ahead and bash a few more of your idiotic statements.
Double click driver and application installs. Already happens. It's not "double-click" but just as easy. How about the lack of working uninstalls in Windows? When, oh when, will Windows have applications that actually uninstall cleanly? We've had that on Linux forever.
Currently, Google is the #1 tool that Linux admins use for tracking down errors. I can't even figure out why this is a criticism (and not, say, praise for Google). Currently Google is the #1 way Windows admins track down errors too. Why?Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
What I want out of Linux:
:-)
[5-point list elided]
That's cool, and it ties in fine with this discussion: Mark Shuttleworth wrote about a large group of people with conflicting goals. For all that you want a single GUI and consistency, other people love having lots of choice. You don't "give a rat's ass about what is free and what isn't"; lots of people care a lot about it.
Now you can almost certainly find a distro that gives you what you want (well, maybe not DirectX), while others can find distros that suit them. And other people claim that there are too many distributions and that efforts are too spread out. You can't win
#define struct union
The main - and subtlely articulated - point that I gathered from this:
Shuttleworth is ackowledging that many of the Ubuntu users/booster club members are thinking out of their ass. Cruise over to the Uubuntu forums (or any of the unbearable "I just installed Ubuntu" threads on Digg) and you'll see a blatant ignorance of Debian. Not of its existence necessarily, but of Debian's immense role in the Linux world for all of these years. Mark knows it, the Slackware folks know it (but don't want to deal with those sysv scripts), but the "my laptop spins like a floating cube with Ubuntu" crowd don't always get. And their brash attitude is a bit of an embarrassment.
4. No preaching. I don't really give a rat's ass about what is free and what isn't.
That's okay. I, to be totally frank, don't particularly care if you become a linux user or not.
Just makes the meme pool that much larger to draw from I suppose
openSUSE is the project I want to love, but so far can't. I think if it were the same as the Enterprise version, then I would love it. But since I couldn't get YaST to do almost anything I had to drop it, and now love the Ubuntu set up I have with XGL, Compiz, and Slab. I think one of the most important factors in Ubutuntu is its active forums filled with hacks, scripts, and help.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Exactly.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It is not only games, but also not the applications that drive the bussiness desktop today. There's no argument that MS Office suite is more stable than OO.o. On feature-wise though who can argue that OOo is not sufficient for bussiness office needs? The problem with bussiness is support. MS had used vast majority of its resources (at least in past) for this area. And with the name they got from consumer market they had good penetration to bussiness market. And games was a big part of consumer market. If MS was not strong on consumer market, they would not release Windows XP, at least with that much end-user enhancement to Windows 2000.
To be successful in bussiness you need commercial support, and only last couple of years brought that to Linux. RedHat and Novell are doing this, and Cannonical will do that as well. So that bussinesses will rely on Linux because they know that they will have commercial support if they need (and they actually need).
MS has the great advantage of first comer to GUI Workstation for mass deployment. They backed this with pre-installs of bussiness choice of hardware suppliers, like Dell and HP. And Boom!.
Not to mention turf was empty for them *for a while*. It's only matter of time and competition that will get their monopoly in that market, and once you have no monopoly there will be more standarized environment for everyone which means a good advantage to Linux as it's not only liberal but also free.
Mark Shuttleworth is not in a position to tell other projects how to manage a project without conflicts. I recall that just before the Dapper release some German Kubuntu developers threatened to leave the project because Canonical refused to communicate with them. One of these rebelling German guys was the main developer of K/Ubuntu's new live-cd.
Part of the problem seemed to be that these Kubuntu developers were not paid employees. There was one paid employee in the lead of the Kubuntu project and this employee did his best trying to convince people that there was no conflict, although obviously there was. Hiding problems and denying conflicts seems to be the official policy of Mark Shuttleworth's pet project and this carefully built image of easy success that they want to project to the public makes Shuttleworth now think that he can advise other projects about their goals.
"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone," but Mark Shuttleworth is not as innocent as he'd like to appear. He has faced conflicts in managing his own project and I'm not at all sure that he's the right man to tell other projects how to avoid conflicts. And advising Debian to concentrate its efforts on improving Sid is definitely a bad advice, although such decision would certainly suit Ubuntu that is built upon snapshots of Sid.
Er, yes, Mark Shuttlework used to be a Debian developer back in the early 90s, before he made his millions. Why do you think he chose to base Ubuntu off Debian in the first place?
What I want out of Linux: 1.One GUI.
And there's the conflict right there. I want MORE than one GUI! I want choice and options and freedom and configurability and the absence of artificial restrictions.
p.s. But then again, I'm using FreeBSD and not Linux. Maybe you Linux users really do want a centralized dictatorship. Whatever.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Two Vs do not make a W. The above is a troll account designed to annoy Twitter.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What's wrong with a little tension? It's all about how you handle the tension.
It really seems to me that Ubuntu really is more of a community than a just a distro. Packages appear to be carefully selected based on what the community is asking for, and the effect of the community forums for support make it a great distro for the newbie (be nice to the newbie! when properly nurtured, they can grow into gurus!).
I think that if Debian total fell apart for any reason, Ubuntu would continue to move forward. If the community found another distro to serve as a base, I think they would just use that base.
It's all about community, the people. Without that, software really doesn't matter much.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Wow, jb.hl.com, your harassment has reached a whole new level. Feel good about yourself?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Aw, are you sad because your Myspace girlfriend broke up with you?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It is a Beta. It will be nice when it is released but shouldn't compare apples to apples.
This is one of the problems with Debian. Stable while very stable tends to be lag every other distro. Heck most people I know use the testing and often unstable.
I don't call beta software a recent version. I call it a future version.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hmmmm....what you have in most projects are:
* Brilliant Talent. The same brilliant talent may be completely disorganised and hence requires a helping hand. Sometimes great thinkers and sometimes great ideas.
* Supporters. Early adopters, like-minded individuals.
* Acumen - Usually in business. Hole plugging, streamlining, organisational and communication skills.
Even the "OSS Community" is fickle. Sometimes it is just stubborn and sometimes it is the old-dog that won't learn the new trick. You get out of it what you put in.
Arguments (Debates) are good - flaming though....welllll, sometimes someone needs a good slap sometimes.
Right, when will that be? Aside from Office & AutoCAD there are still a LOT of half-assed custom installers full of boiler-plate text that no-one has bothered to customize. (Look for "Your Company Name here" in the "summary" info on a random Windows installer some time. Nullsoft installer really isn't helping matters, and so it Microsoft's lack of good tools for making clean MSIs. Well, and the fact that the MSI format does not make any intuitive sense, it's more or less a binary SQL dump of a bizzare data model for describing parts of a program's installed state, peice by explicit peice. WiX helps, but it still exposes you to the SQL-style silliness, like having to explicitly list every file with it's attributes at least twice in a verbose XML syntax (Once to define it, once to include it in a component that can be installed).
.deb's and there's no comparison, .debs are a LOT less work, are a lot easier to understand what's going on, and actual has a useful way to define prerequisites. That, and even though MSI is only supported on NT-based system Wix requires defining 8.3 format filenames.
I agree Windows would suck a LOT less to maintain if MSI were used, but even Microsoft seems to be moving away from it (not that they ever went whole-hog for it), with the Vista installer. They arn't installing their components from their own managable and patchable package format, the description of the new Vista installer seem to be that it takes a snapshot that somebody at MS duct-taped into working (hopefully) then burned to CD.
Not even Microsoft distributes things as MSIs or MSPs though, they distribute "I 0wnz0r your system!?1111!!111" EXEs. At least MS doesn't gimp their MSIs to refure to install without the setup.exe wrapper, like some companies do.
I've made a few MSIs as well as
I hate Windows because I have to make it do useful thing.
Still, what you really want is a free verison of Windows. This is probably what you're looking for.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I can only repeat what I've already said for NetBSD (see http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=195449&c id=16013982), leadership is the key point of the success/failure of a project. Debian and Ubuntu are two extremes of leadership, while Debian none leaders most probably will fail the outcome of Ubuntu isn't clear. Mark has all the powers of a dictator, lets see if he's able to circumvent the threads this imposes.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html