Open Source Is Not a Democracy

itwbennett writes "A recent kerfuffle within the Ubuntu community serves as a reminder of an inconvenient truth: open source is not a democracy, writes blogger Brian Proffitt. 'The discussion started innocuously enough, within Bug #532633 in light-themes (Ubuntu) on Launchpad, where the order of the window controls within the Light theme were requested to be re-arranged to be on the upper right side of any given window. Light, it seemed, now placed the buttons on the left side, similar to the Mac OS X interface.' The discussion turned into an argument and culminated in this exchange in which Mark Shuttleworth lays down the law: 'It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this... No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"

Comments

-1 Troll

[Concern]

Open source is utterly a democracy.

Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun. Those who come and join you are always there voluntarily, either because they feel like it, or you are payiong them to be there. And maybe no one feels like it. And maybe you don't feel like paying anyone. Maybe you are alone there. Maybe you didn't bother to make your tree at all. But you have that right to, at any moment. And this is utterly democratic, and it is at the heart of why open source exists. In fact, this is why it works so much better.

Shuttleworth has a very big, popular tree. He pays many participants and many others join him for free. He gets to make the decisions in his own tree, because it's his. He can't tell anyone else what to do in theirs.

Now if it's a Bill Gates product, and you do not like where those buttons got moved to, or i.e. you have a critical bug derailing years of your work, or whatever your issue may be, you will be ignored, or if you are very lucky, someone may even explicitly take a moment to personally tell you, "fuck off, peon." Your only real option is not to be so foolish as to use a Bill Gates product again in the future.

But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.

(All those who have never lived under a monarch, dictator, or cabal, please identify yourselves now with cynical comments about your democratic government.)

So I reiterate, as stories go, this is pure -1 Troll. IT World and Proffitt look like an 8 year old trying to say something "controvertial" about global warming by noting that it's snowing outside. I'm a bit sad that Taco rewarded them by sending them some traffic.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)

I love how a lot of comments are all about this is how decisions should be made, just one person at the top gets the final say - period.
Makes it clear, I think. I'll keep on keeping out of F/OSS, thank you very much. I'm not going to waste my time contributing to someone else's dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.

Re:-1 Troll

[mapkinase]

May be short summary of what you've said:

When one says: "this is not democracy" or "this is supposed to be a democracy" he has to specify the scope of the statement.

Free market system is democratic in a sense that everybody can vote with their dollars between products, but individual companies are not democratic.

Open source is democratic: one can join different trees or start your own copy, but individual trees (flavors of the project) are not democratic.

Re:-1 Troll

[tgd]

Thats anarchy, not democracy.

Look 'em up.

Re:-1 Troll

[HungryHobo]

You're free to fix it.
Set up a site, fork the source and run your site as a true democracy.
Every decision can be put to a vote.

When setting it up you can even make sure you're no more equal than anyone else.

Re:-1 Troll

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Communism and democracy are not at odds with each other.

Communism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system.

It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.

Re:-1 Troll

[Lunix Nutcase]

Because everyone is a programmer, right? And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's code bases and every library, UI toolkit etc that are also used, right? Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about fixing other people's code.

Re:-1 Troll

[ext42fs]

Open source is freedom. freedom is not the same as democracy. And science is no democracy either.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people like doing work. They're good at collaborating. They get things done. Other people want to whine for a free lunch. And then they want to whine about how it doesn't have the condiments they wanted. They want to tell other people what to do on their own time and their own nickel.

Just because you live in a trailer and watch TV, and Michael Jordan lives in a mansion and plays basketball, doesn't mean you don't both live in a democracy. Neither one of you tells the other what to do in their own home, right? And you both control your own fate.

No one forces you to contribute to anyone. By all means, do all your own work on your own trees. That's lovely.

Only you do nothing, do you. Or if you do, no one cares about it. Boo, hoo.

You just love the idea of telling those people who have accomplished more, like Michael Jordan (/Shuttleworth), what to do. That's all. And that's anti-democratic. Ironic, eh?

Re:-1 Troll

[samkass]

But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, the assertion that the ideas of a given fork/branch are the sole factor in its success is a vast oversimplification. Program management, project management, marketing, design, and all the other aspects of your standard software production business still apply in open source. Companies don't do that sort of thing because it's fun.

Re:-1 Troll

[mcgrew]

Open source is not a democracy in a corporation like Ubantu. In that case, it's a hierarchy. In a pool of programmers outside the corporate structure it can be a democracy, but doesn't have to be.

Open source is more like art or science, where everything is built on what has come before. Science and art aren't democracies, either.

Re:-1 Troll

[geekoid]

That's not a democracy, in fact that isn't even a sensical comparison.
Yes you can take a copy of the ball and leave, but that's not the same as having a way to make decisions in a group.

Of course, Open Source should not even be compared. One is a way of developing, the other is about how to organize a community. In context, Mark is saying that specific group organizational structure is not a Democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[MightyMartian]

I'm not sure what you're saying. You're advocating that non-contributors to a project get a vote? I mean, I buy goods made in Europe, that doesn't mean I get to decide what the EU rules on what's called "sausage" are.

Re:-1 Troll

[c 0xFF]

What you describe is not a democracy: it's probably closer to anarchy. A free-for-all, with nobody in any position to make any decisions.

Closer to a democracy would be Wikipedia, where the "consensus" idea is the one that prevails, even though it's a free-for-all. But the label "democracy" only works since everybody works off of the same fork and the leadership is (mostly) hands-off. Once the leadership gets involved, it's no longer a democracy.

With open-source, a single person still "owns" a fork. No matter how you try to make it fit, democracy doesn't apply when any one person/group can make the sole decision on what happens, and that leadership cannot be changed. Like it or not, almost all open-source projects have a governing body which answers only to themselves. Once the leadership gets involved in decisions, it's a dictatorship. When they're hands-off, it gives the illusion of being a democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way.

Except that 98% of the population probably lacks the knowledge or ability to do that. And I suspect that the majority would likely lack any motivation to learn how to do any of the things required to move the button themselves.

A democracy where the vast majority of the population lack the expertise required to vote at all isn't very effectual. Although I'm largely being pedantic here, as "the global population" and "ubuntu users" will have somewhat different levels of programming capability and IT expertise.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Because everyone is a voter, right? And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's political views and every statute, agenda etc that are also used, right? Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about voting other people to power.

Re:-1 Troll

[HungryHobo]

The information is out there freely available.

Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about fixing other people's code.

I can't imagine how you could set the barriers any lower....
Compared to most barriers in life they're right down there with the rats leaping over them joyfully.

Because everyone is a programmer, right?

Everyone with the desire to be a programmer, a bit of time, a bit of willpower, a working brain and a net connection.
So sure.
Not everyone.

And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's code bases and every library, UI toolkit etc that are also used, right?

yes. people are not omniscient. it's true.

Re:-1 Troll

[GIL_Dude]

Interesting comment. However, Shuttleworth didn't move his buttons. I, and many others, complained to the Microsoft Office folks during the beta program for Office 2007 when they moved the Outlook send button over to the far right side. They moved it back to the left based on our feedback (against the output of their usability study). Take that as you will - its an anecdote (although a true one), but it does show that your premise does not describe an absolute.

Re:-1 Troll

[jim_v2000]

I hate the argument that "If you don't like how things are going in an OSS project, you can just make your own fork! It's so much better than proprietary software because of that!" The fact is that time and knowledge are barriers that bar most people from doing what you propose. I probably don't know the language the the project was built in, I don't have time to learn it, I don't have the time to get familiar with the project's code, I don't have time to figure out how change it, etc. So yeah, the code is right there, but it's useless to a large majority (probably near 99%) of users. There's a better chance of getting the current development team to make a change than me attempting to make that change on my own.

Also, it's kind of an asshole thing for Canonical to lure people into their "community" and then outright ignore them.

Re:-1 Troll

[diamondsw]

It's not a democracy until you're willing to put in the time and effort to fork it. No one is forking Ubuntu over damn window dressing. Switch themes and be done.

Re:-1 Troll

[TeXMaster]

+10 informative The whole FLOSS mindset is not and has never been about democracy, in the sense of "rule of the people", but always about anarcho-communism, in the sense of "self-rule with sharing of resources". Rather than "-1 Troll", the original article should rather get one of those "obvious post is obvious" macro images. Saying that open source is not a democracy is like saying that the sun isn't green. Except that apparently some people apparently do believe the former.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

It certainly is. You may organize your own tree however you like. You can start a giant company and have a big office and spend a billion dollars on it if you want. Rule it with an iron fist. It doesn't change the fact that the smallest child can still fork your code and do it their own way.

Your giant company cannot tell that child what to do. Nor can the child tell the company what to do.

Websites are also a democratic medium, since we can all participate equally. Each of us brings just our own voice.

If we do not like Taco's story, does that mean the web is not a democracy? But no one says things like this, because they are absurd.

Obviously the web is utterly democratic, but feel free to split that hair and make up another name for what it actually is.

Re:-1 Troll

[dotgain]

That you equate non-programmer with non-contributor makes it quite easy to guess what you are.

Re:-1 Troll

[sammyF70]

You didn't get what GP is pointing out, did you?

You can contribute if you want, but more importantly, you can take the work that someone else made and create your own tree. You don't like the fact that the buttons are now on the left side in Shuttleworth's Ubuntu? Well, just create an ubuntu-based distro with a modified Gnome theme, call it "Linux Fat Wainob" ("Linux For-All-Those-Who-Are-In-Need Of--Buttons-On-The-Right-Edge"), and offer it to the public ... or don't. As someone wise pointed out, "Hell is other people", so you can also choose to keep your own distro for yourself. *NOBODY* is keeping you from doing it, and it's actually a pretty simple process. If Enough people like it, then you'll probably get to the point where someone points out that the yellow theme you're using is pretty pisspoor, and then YOU can tell them to shove it. And the cycle starts again.

Try that with any Windows or MacOSX version and see how, in the best case, you stop getting updates or, in the case that you decided to share your version with others, you get a C&D letter from the right's owners lawyers.

That's why FOSS is a democracy. Proprietary OS's are more like a dictatorship. If you don't like something, you can't do anything about. And if you do, you might get a more or less fair warning from your souvereign.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Anarchy is direct democracy. I looked it up.

Re:-1 Troll

[geekoid]

Troll? WTF. That's one of the lamest moderation ever. Not only am I correct, I was pretty polite about it.

I would love for someone to point out exactly why my post would be a troll? What exactly am I trolling for?

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

You could put it that way. The point is this, the article, starting with its headline, was so utterly wrong versus the facts, that it was pathetic.

Open source is about as undemocratic as Canada's beaches are tropical.

The "free market" is not even as democratic as the "free press" or "open source," because we may have many dollars or few, but we each have only one voice. One pair of hands.

Re:-1 Troll

[TomXP411]

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Whatever you're describing, it's not Democracy. In a democracy, the rules of the majority are binding on the minority. What you describe, however, is essentially the absence of rule - or anarchy.

In a democracy, everyone votes, and everyone follows the rules established by that vote. So if 75% of the people in a pure Democracy decided that it was illegal to wear blue, then the azure lovers have no recourse; they must either abstain from wearing blue or face punishment. The key traits here are: voting, and that decisions of the majority bind the minority. Effectively, minorities have fewer rights than the majority, since they have less power to enforce their will.

In an anarchy, everyone has the same power as another. Blue lovers have the right to leave and form the Sapphire Republic, where everyone wears one article of blue clothing every day. If someone living in Sapphire decides they want to wear green instead, they can pull out of Sapphire and form the Shamrock Union.

And I don't think it actually works better: It's still very difficult to find FOSS applications for many tasks, and it's even more difficult to find FOSS that's equal to or better than commercial versions of the same applications. Anyone who's ever tried to run a project by committee knows that in reality, good old fashioned tyranny is probably the best way to actually get things done.

Re:-1 Troll

[geekoid]

I wish I had mod points. Apparently some moderators have no idea what a democracy is. other then 'democracy is good and open source is good therefore anything you talks about how either one could be different is a troll'

Re:-1 Troll

[twidarkling]

That's not a democracy, that's anarchy. Anyone who doesn't like how the game's going can pick up their ball and go home. Democracy is about building consensus. It's about taking everyone's view point and building the best out of it. It's not "my way or the highway."

However, you're still right, and this is a Troll story. Just because this one project is being run as an aristocracy doesn't mean all projects are.

Re:-1 Troll

[Shetan]

Because everyone is a programmer, right?

If you aren't a programmer and still care that much, you could always PAY a programmer to do the work for you. At least you have the choice. If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.

Re:-1 Troll

[Vahokif]

That might be true in theory but what are the chances that someone is going to use your unsupported fork just because the UI's slightly different?

Re:-1 Troll

[Kjella]

But you must admit forking your own tree is more like being told "If you don't like how the country is run, emigrate" than working within the system. Like you say everyone is free to run their own mini-dictatorship over their own tree, but we wouldn't get very far if people weren't mostly merging it together. That's why we have pseudodemocracies where you give people a huge influence on the project. The whole point is that these voices aren't created equal, though I don't see where anyone would get that impression in the first place. Most every project has senior people whose opinions weigh more than their headcount, patches aren't committed based on democratic polls where one man is one vote in any project I can think of.

Re:-1 Troll

[quantaman]

Actually open source isn't a democracy, it's a meritocracy.

In a democracy everyone gets the same vote, in a meritocracy the power is wielded by those who do the best work.

Meritocracies, at least with open source, actually work better than democracy. In a democracy it's mob rule because most people are making decisions based on very incomplete information. In a meritocracy it's the people who have the knowledge and the ability who decide the direction while the users have very little direct power. Now with a country this could lead to autocracy because the people are trapped in the landmass, but with open source there's no lock-in, thus the leaders can't abuse their power and you get a highly functional political system.

There's a reason people call Linus the benevolent dictator for life, he can do whatever he wants with the source tree, but he makes very good decisions with that power and that's why people follow him.

Re:-1 Troll

[WinterSolstice]

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

For those who feel a need to have complete control over their own desktops.

I see the arguments each direction on this one - and my own view is 'whatever happened to letting the users decide themselves?'
I have spent ages playing with themes on KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker and Enlightenment. If you're not able to customize, just run OSX or Windows and get an OS that someone controls and will actually provide real support for (including paying off vendors to write drivers).

Linux is supposed to be about the anarchy of self-expression and total control of your machine. Canonical, RedHat, SuSE and many others provide varying levels of 'corporate stability' that you can buy into if you're into that sort of thing.

Re:-1 Troll

[h4rr4r]

Then pay someone else to fix it. You won't have that option with a closed source OS.

Re:-1 Troll

[lengau]

The point stands, though. Canonical have a team of UI people. The submitter of the bug is not one of them. He can (and has) made a PPA for his preferred version. But he's not high enough in their hierarchy (which probably means not enough of a contributor) to have a say on what Canonical actually do.

Re:-1 Troll

[91degrees]

But that's not what a democracy means. Democracy means that everyone gets a vote and the government (or whatever the equivalent is in this analogy) is obliged to adopt that decision.

I've never voted for how the Linux kernel or any other open source project should work. I wouldn't be surprised if there was never a binding vote on any open source project. If I can leave and set up my own fork, that doesn't make it a democracy. In fact, the government analogy falls down entirely.

Proprietary consumer software is closer to a democracy. The design decisions made are based on an estimate of what the majority want. Companies use focus groups which will give a fairly good approximation of majority preference. This is why, for example, MS improved the boot speed for Windows XP. The majority wanted it.

Re:-1 Troll

[IGnatius T Foobar]

But in open source, if you so choose, you, or anyone, from the youngest child to Bill Gates himself, can fork Shuttleworth's tree, right then and there. Then you can have it your way. And if you are right, and people care, then people will join you and leave Shuttleworth out in the cold. It's happened many times before. And if not, then maybe your idea just wasn't that great, or that important, after all. Happens all the time. But the result, as with any democracy, is that leadership is largely consensual and generally merit-driven.

Ok then ... I live in the United States, which is supposedly a democracy. How do I go about forking? I'd like to start my own fork of the United States that doesn't include yesterday's government takeover of health care.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.

You own your source tree the same way you own your home or Taco owns this website. There is nothing the least bit undemocratic about being able to have your own code and your own opinion.

But it is only with open source that you can even copy someone else's code and do it your own way. No one can stop you from doing it your way, nor can you stop anyone else from doing it theirs. Hence, not anarchy, or even close.

Re:-1 Troll

[pz]

Open source is democratic: one can join different trees or start your own copy, but individual trees (flavors of the project) are not democratic.

I believe the last three words should instead read, "may or may not be democratic," as whether a tree is organized democratically or under some other management and governance mechanism depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader.

Re:-1 Troll

[rm999]

I think you are misunderstanding the term "democracy"; a democracy only determines what say citizens have in a country, not how "free" outsiders are to visit or study it. Projects like Ubuntu and Windows are not democracies, in the sense that I have no "vote" on decisions they have to make. Wikipedia is closer to being a democracy - more like a Democratic Republic (of course this is debatable).

You are right that I have every right to branch off an open source project like Ubuntu, but I can no longer call it "Ubuntu". This is analogous to a new country forming and reusing the constitution of another country, which has nothing to do with the word "democracy".

Re:-1 Troll

[Mike Buddha]

Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

In France, Marie Antoinette sometimes entertained visitors to her court who had grievances against her sovereign rule. I imagine even she occasionally agreed with someone's grievance and did what they asked.

France was still not a democracy until after the revolution.

Because her indulgence was optional. Anecdotes like this are worse than meaningless. They have the potential to be confusing.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

No not everyone is. But you could pay a programmer to fix it for you.
I find it amusing that FOSS users seem to think that they can dictate what a programmer must due when they are not paying the programmer a single cent.
If you do not like you have several choices.
1. Learn to program and fix it yourself.
2. Pay a programmer to fix it for you.
3. Convince the maintainer to fix it the way you like it.
4. Find a project that works the way you want it to and use that.
5. Start your own project and get others that agree with you to contribute code.

The only option that you don't have is the option to enforce your will on a project maintainer that you do not pay. You can not treat FOSS programmers as your personal code slaves.

Re:-1 Troll

[TheCycoONE]

Open Source is a technocracy. FOSS is generally written by programmers, for programmers. If you are a programmer you can have your way - otherwise if you can impress programmers with your ideas you can get them accepted. Anyone who is not a programmer is free or even encouraged to use FOSS, and likewise they are encouraged to share their ideas on how to improve things but they can't force these changes into practice if programmers don't want to implement them.

A technocracy isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's deceitful to call it a democracy. There could be democratic software, but I've never met a programmer or software company yet willing to develop whatever feature has the most votes at any particular time regardless of personal or corporate interests/approval.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

A contributed== some one that contributes
Code
Artwork
Testing
Documentation
Money

A contributor != user that does none of the above.

Re:-1 Troll

[ComputerSlicer23]

Actually it's not at all a democracy. It's a market. There are two different marketplaces, which are distinct. One market is for developer time, and one market is for users. Each of those affects the other. For the most part, developers aren't going to pour huge amounts of resources into a project no one uses. Users can vote with their feet. If enough users are fleeing because of dumb decisions by developers, a fork might happen, or Shuttleworth might back down. See Pidgin/Gaim/Empathy.

The developer arena is generally a meritocracy. If you've shown up and written lots of code, your opinions carry more weight. If you show up and snipe on a list, and never contribute your opinion carries less weight. User's just want code that helps them get stuff done. If you do that by voting, by fiat, or some other mechanism, they generally don't care. So a developer can fork a code base, and that forces them to take on the burden of doing a lot of work. If they can attract more users, they'll generally attract more developers. That's exactly what Ubuntu has been doing to Debian (and most other Linux distro's for that matter, they built the stuff everybody wanted to use, so they have scores of users, which makes developers want to hack on that). Debian still has users and developers doing a lot of heavy lifting in development and testing. XFree86 vs. Xorg was a revolt over license terms by the devs (Thanks Keith P, et al.). A couple of guys decided that what was happening was stupid, and they fled and put up their own playground, bringing over the last copy of the "free" ball. The users followed, and XFree86 has pretty much dried up (I haven't heard anything about it for years). Look at the old gcc vs. egcs and you'll find that the developers got tired of stupidity, and the users followed the best code base (so much so that the "fork" became the "offical" version after the dust settled). Look at Lucid Emacs vs. GNU Emacs, there it sounds like there's enough compatibility that a clear winner/loser never appeared. Look at the various BSD's, they all split off due to various issues. NetBSD was the "original" and wants to be really portable, FreeBSD decided to make the fastest x86 version of BSD they could, OpenBSD was when Theo had pissed enough folks off they told him to go away, and Dragonfly BSD exists because one guy thought that the new threading/process change over from FreeBSD n to FreeBSD n+1 was a bad idea (I think that was 4->5, but it might be 5->6). Linux ran roughshod over all of those mostly because the Linus was much nicer to deal with, and it wasn't a total distribution. All of the various BSD's are total systems, not just kernels. Linux proper is mostly just a kernel. The reason forks are so uncommon especially of large/critical components, is the burden of doing all the work. Especially as a one man band. You have to start gathering a bunch of followers to help, or you'll fall behind the base code base, at which point, you'll have an old version of the software with a tweak or three. Unless you can attract enough folks to pull over the fixes from the mainline code base, or enough developers that the mainline code base essentially dies, you're an island and an evolutionary dead end for the code base.

Some OpenSource groups *MIGHT* run there things are meritocracies, or as oligarchies, and some might run the choices as "democracies", but I believe you're either abusing the term democracy, or you don't know what it really means.

It's a market place, the only question is will this bother enough users to get them to move to a different code base? Will this bother enough developers to get them to fork? My hunch is that as long as there exists a theme that moves the buttons back, most people won't care. I use Mac and Linux, and generally I just don't care. My muscle memory is for them to be on the right, but I got over it. Nobody is going to want to setup all of the infrastructure necessary to do a large scale replacement Ubuntu over this. It's too big, and too much work. If it were something like Pidgin vs. Empathy, it might happen.

Kirby

Re:-1 Troll

[pnewhook]

Don't you remember any lessons from the 60s? Freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose.

Re:-1 Troll

[DrVxD]

Because everyone is a programmer, right?

No

And everyone is intimately familiar with everyone else's code bases and every library, UI toolkit etc that are also used, right?

No

Yeah, except for these quite high barriers to entry, yes everyone can go about fixing other people's code.

If it matters enough to you, then you have options; you could:
1) LEARN enough to do it yourself
2) Pay somebody who's already done the learning to do it for you
3) Find somebody who's already done the learning and wants the feature you want badly enough to do it for you.

If you can't be bothered to do any of the above, then it's obviously not that important to you

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"Open source is utterly a democracy."

But it does not involve voting about how to fix a bug.

Linus is the dictator of the kernel project, but one submits to his rule voluntarily (or one plays no role in the project).

Otoh, in some OS projects design decisions are arrived on by majority vote.

Re:-1 Troll

[hardburn]

Why should systems of government at large be applied to software projects?

Open Source is neither democratic or communist, because Open Source is not a government.

Re:-1 Troll

[MightyMartian]

Where did I say "programmer" in my post? I said contributor.

Re:-1 Troll

[Lunix Nutcase]

You're advocating that non-contributors to a project get a vote?

Of course. Most businesses, like Canonical, want customers.

Re:-1 Troll

[melikamp]

But it is only with open source that you can even copy someone else's code and do it your own way.

You need more than just open source for that. You really do need the freedoms 0-3 in order to participate with your one voice in a democratic system: to take a communal work, improve it, and make the improved version public.

In a world without copyright and patents, "open source" would be synonymous with "free software", but at the moment they are utterly different, and your democracy argument only makes sense if the software is FOSS, not merely OS.

Re:-1 Troll

[c 0xFF]

Of course the strong rule the weak. Why is that a bad thing (at least, in the programming sense)? There are many, many programmers who should have little to no voice in what patches should be applied, simply because they are weak programmers!

But that's beside the point.

What you originally described is, by definition, anarchy. There is no centralized control, nobody to make decisions on what happens in general.

Within your own fork, you have free reign. This is totalitarianism within your fork. You apply whatever patches you see appropriate, and nothing else. Maybe you are "benevolent" and allow write access to your repository, but you still have the controlling voice whenever you want to exercise it.

The brilliance behind FOSS is that anarchy and totalitarianism can actually strike a balance that feels a lot like democracy: individuals have enough of a voice (by having the capability to fork) that the totalitarians are kept in check.

Re:-1 Troll

[lordholm]

That is incorrect, communism is also a political system. Even though, according to the original ideas, a communistic society (not the state since the states would be abolished, though who would define laws without states I have no idea of) would be democratic (the workers would decide what to produce in a democratic way). Communistic theory dictates that the proletarian revolution would need to be carried out followed by a period of proletarian dictatorship.

Thus, while somehow, the final outcome would be partially democratic (certainly not democracy as we know it), the way there would definitely not be democratic, and would actually be run as a dictatorship. This is at odds with the very foundation of democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.

Ahh - the self-delusional. Those who believe that there is no ego or infighting within the walls of Microsoft. Those who can willfully ignore Windows' changes and the variations of even Microsoft's own applications. What a blissful world that must be.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.

If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, why did you buy Windows 7?

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful, you strayed dangerously near the topic while bashing Microsoft. Can't have that, wouldn't be very Slashdot.

Re:-1 Troll

[lymond01]

Being a user and providing feedback is absolutely a contribution. Developers and designers cannot possibly create a great product without feedback from the people who will be using it.

Re:-1 Troll

[Magic5Ball]

One person deciding in a group of one is quite removed from a process which considers perspectives of both the majority and the minority among several. Forking is no more a democratic decision than living in a bomb shelter.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi IGnatius. In the USA and other Enlightenment-era democracies, a set of rules, elections, courts, constitutional guarantees, and social norms are designed to distil public opinion into action, and sometimes even in the USA, they work. There is no system yet devised that will make everyone happy with the results.

There's no actual rule that a democracy must be defined in a particular way. The only constants in the definition (according to wikipedia) are equality and freedom.

In open source, we have a digital medium and freedom from scarcity. Our freedom and equality are more baked in and fewer rules and contrivances are needed.

And I sympathize that you don't like healthcare reform. Hey, I hated the Iraq war. And the privatization of the army - and of high-functioning public utilities such as electric power (ala Enron). And the PATRIOT act. And the regressive tax policy. And the deficit spending. And the retreat from financial market regulation. And the ban on federal stem cell research funding. And I could go on and on. So you know, sometimes you win some, and sometimes you lose some. If you want a more uninterrupted hold on political power, try to avoid military quagmires, economic meltdowns due to obviously lax regulatory regimes (especially after crowing so loudly about how your tax cuts on the rich will help the economy), and... in case it should come up, avoid the temptation to reward no-talent political cronies with jobs heading up vital agencies, like FEMA.

I actually think this healthcare plan is stupid too - but only because it's not simple, efficient, single-payer, like they have in all the other happy, prosperous nations of the first world.

Re:-1 Troll

[The Mighty Buzzard]

That's not a democracy. In a democracy whatever 50.000001% of the people prefer, the rest are just freaking stuck with. It's even worse in a representative democracy, witness the healthcare bill that just passed with a solid majority of the people not wanting it.

Opensource is more along the lines of barely structured anarchy. If you don't like how someone does something you either fork their code or find someone else who already has, and do things however you like. The only rules telling you what you can and cannot do are the license the code is released under. Almost all actual creative control is left to the individual, unless they voluntarily surrender it for the sake of convenience.

Re:-1 Troll

[nstlgc]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.
Isn't that exactly what's happening here? Sure, I can fork my own copy of Ubuntu because I want the buttons in a different order, but how practical is that? Canonical is strong - they have alot of things going on that are not related to the button order and for which I still want to use 'their' branch of Ubuntu. I am weak - I don't have the time to merge all their updates with my code, rebuild, etc. Hence, I just let it go keep using Ubuntu, ignoring the whole button order thing.

How is that not the strong ruling the weak?

Re:-1 Troll

[MightyMartian]

I'm not saying they don't. But ultimate Contributors (with a capital "C") are the ones who make the decision. If they screw things up by altering aspects of the software too much (which I'll freely admit happens), then either the software will get forked or fade away. But at the end of the day, the contributors, in varying degrees, depending on what they contribute, are going to have a part in the decision making process much greater than a guy who is basically a user.

That being said, there clearly is a lack of unified UI vision in a lot of FOSS stuff on Ubuntu. Perhaps if the project was a bit more a dictatorship, like a lot of proprietary software houses, this aspect wouldn't be such an issue. Of course, even proprietary software can do radical things to interfaces based solely on what a few focus groups give thumbs up to; witness the ribbon in Office 2007.

Re:-1 Troll

[mpe]

Projects like Ubuntu and Windows are not democracies, in the sense that I have no "vote" on decisions they have to make.

Plenty of non democracies have voting. The people who actually invented the concept didn't actually have much "voting" anyway.

Wikipedia is closer to being a democracy - more like a Democratic Republic (of course this is debatable).

Thing is that any entity calling itself a "Democratic Republic" is more likely to be an oligarchy or tyrany.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you!

I can't tell you how often I get people commanding me to add feature x (where x involves hundreds of hours or coding) and when I say "no, that's not the direction I want my project to go in" I get totally flamed.

Personally, I only know the Wii Homebrew community. I always hoped other OSS communities had nicer users, but now I wonder.

Oh, and for the last time:

• No, I won't add MP3 playback to my app.
• No, I won't make everything in my app skinnable.
• No, I won't overhaul everything because you think it'd be 'cool'.

(end of rant)

Re:-1 Troll

[TeXMaster]

Anarchy is direct democracy. I looked it up.

Well, you looked it up wrong. One of the pillars of anarchy is that man should not have power over man, whereas democracy is based on the idea that the majority should have the power to impose its will over the rest of the population. The only case when anarchy and direct democracy match is when you have a 100% agreement on everything.

Re:-1 Troll

[einhverfr]

Agreed. Users are of course able to vote with feet regardless of what the development team decides to do.

One way I look at this is that open source projects are basically mini-states with perfectly open borders. Many are dictatorships. Some are republics. We definitely shouldn't fully democratize the design process. Design and development teams should be relatively small. However, the ability to vote with feet keeps a lot of problems in check.

Re:-1 Troll

[ifrag]

Yeah, exactly what I thought. In fact, is there anything preventing simply copying the theme files from the prior release? I suppose it would be more difficult if the format of the theme files changed, but probably still wouldn't require any code changes either way.

Re:-1 Troll

[keeboo]

I hate the argument that "If you don't like how things are going in an OSS project, you can just make your own fork! It's so much better than proprietary software because of that!" The fact is that time and knowledge are barriers that bar most people from doing what you propose. I probably don't know the language the the project was built in, I don't have time to learn it, I don't have the time to get familiar with the project's code, I don't have time to figure out how change it, etc. So yeah, the code is right there, but it's useless to a large majority (probably near 99%) of users. There's a better chance of getting the current development team to make a change than me attempting to make that change on my own.

You're being oversimplistic.
You see, in most countries you have the right to property. You can have your own house, that's your right. The fact you don't have the _money_ to buy a house does not invalidate such right.

If you wanted to modify a FOSS yourself and lack the knowledge, nothing prevents you from learning how to program.
And it's even more insteresting that that: you don't have to program at all, in order to take advantage of the open-sourcedness. If you have money for that, you may simply pay other people to develop/customize the software as much as you want.
FOSS is not a right to enjoy from slave labour, don't expect people doing XYZ for you only because you want that. -- I would like someone to clean my house for free, would you do that for me?

Also, it's kind of an asshole thing for Canonical to lure people into their "community" and then outright ignore them.

I don't know how Ubuntu was advertised before, regarding development specifically (I don't use Ubuntu myself, so it's outside my radar range anyway).
Unless they claimed something not consistent with that position, they may develop their distro as they like. FOSS-ness alone does not give you the right to interfere in their decisions.

Re:-1 Troll

[MooseTick]

"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.

Yay, someone with an actual understanding of Marx's view of the endgame in the material dialectic! Once communism is manifest, a classless and stateless society will exist, with decisions about how to make use of the means of production made by consensus among the workers. In effect, you have an anarchy, in the original sense of the term (from the Greek, "without ruler").

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Anarchist. Anarchism is Democratic, and I have no idea what you meant by that statement.

Re:-1 Troll

[royallthefourth]

Maybe Lenin thought dictatorship was the first step on the road to a worker's paradise, but he doesn't speak for everyone, especially not today.

Modern communists have the perspective to see how the Bolsheviks (among other groups) failed themselves and would rather not repeat their mistakes.

Re:-1 Troll

[Speare]

Apparently some moderators have no idea what a democracy is. other then 'democracy is good and open source is good therefore anything you talks about how either one could be different is a troll'

"But... but... it has electrolytes!" "Yeah, do you even know what electrolytes are exactly?" "It's what plants crave!"

Re:-1 Troll

[TeXMaster]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

Sorry, but that's simply wrong. One of the foundations of anarchy is that no man should rule another. Whether and how that's practically possible is obviously a very longly debatable topic, but if you have the strong ruling the weak you don't have anarchy (biacracy, maybe?)

Re:-1 Troll

[edw]

This is a pointless argument over definitions, but since you're attempting to co-opt for your own purposes the definition of a highly valuable piece of definitional real estate, I'm going to bite.

What you describe as "democracy" is not democracy. That everyone has the freedom to take their marbles and go home (i.e. create their own distribution) is not democracy. It's freedom. Freedom and democracy are related in that the latter is often seen as a way of achieving the former.

Democracy denotes a broad range of methods for collective decision making, among them representative and direct democracy.

An open source project is whatever the hell you want it to be. "Whatever the hell you want" is not democracy. That is freedom, to a first order approximation. The organizational and social and economic dynamics of free software vis-a-vis proprietary code are subtle and multilayered and not suited to simplistic reduction to a term like democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[mugurel]

actually, this is the only reply i've read that makes sense. sorry my modpoints expired yesterday.

Re:-1 Troll

[ProzacPatient]

I think you mean more along the lines of socialism, but I get what you are saying.
I wish more people understood this instead of believing whatever Fox News tells them.

Re:-1 Troll

[nine-times]

I'd also argue with the idea that "open source is communism".

Capitalism is an economic system which enables people to allocate their economic resources how they see fit. The fact that individuals and companies participating in open source projects voluntarily share their work does not mean that they're operating outside of the framework of capitalism. Capitalism does not dictate that a person cannot choose to share, nor does it imply that sharing is inappropriate.

It's also worth noting that many open source projects are run by companies which are run for profit.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

I looked it up.

Democracy is not defined in a standard way. The things common to all definitions are equality and freedom.

Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak. For example, if I don't like Shuttleworth's tree, in anarchy, I can shoot him, unless he shoots me first.

Meanwhile, in the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.

Re:-1 Troll

[keeboo]

But that's not what a democracy means. Democracy means that everyone gets a vote and the government (or whatever the equivalent is in this analogy) is obliged to adopt that decision. I've never voted for how the Linux kernel or any other open source project should work. I wouldn't be surprised if there was never a binding vote on any open source project. If I can leave and set up my own fork, that doesn't make it a democracy. In fact, the government analogy falls down entirely. Proprietary consumer software is closer to a democracy. The design decisions made are based on an estimate of what the majority want. Companies use focus groups which will give a fairly good approximation of majority preference. This is why, for example, MS improved the boot speed for Windows XP. The majority wanted it.

Sorry, but that's a flawed argument.
Even you agree that Democracy is about the majority imposing their decisions. That alone breaks the argument of "closer-to-democracy prorietary software" because people cannot command a company to do anything. It's the company itself that decides, for its own good, to do this or that.

If, for example, you participate in the Linux kernel development you will have a voice proportional to your contributions. You don't need a nobility title or money to be in such position. -- While not really a Democracy (more like a Meritocracy), it's far more reachable to people than proprietary software.
Can you (binding) vote on the future Windows kernel features?

Re:-1 Troll

[wjousts]

Except it doesn't end there. You hire a programmer to fix X for you. Great. Now the original project you forked continues development and implements a bunch of features you'd like to have, but not X. Now you have to hire another programmer to either fork again off the main project and add X, or implement all the new features in your original fork.

It may only be a small amount of work, or it could be a huge undertaking if the original project has changed significantly and X is non-trivial. It may be that it's now impossible to implement X again in the same way as you did before, or it might be impossible (or at least very difficult) to copy the new features into your branch because of some fundamental changes.

Not that a closed source OS is a solution, there you'd be shit out of luck right from the start. But let's not down-play the challenges of creating (and maintaining) your own fork of an open-source project.

Re:-1 Troll

[elrous0]

Yeah, well I have a big gang of marauders with shotguns and dunebuggies, and we say you're WRONG!

Re:-1 Troll

[TheCarp]

Actually, sort of. Open Source is not a democracy. Its more like, an infintiely distributed set of micoautocracies.

So...its my project, we do it my way, and btw, fuck you. This is an autocracy damnit!

But... its sort of like when you bitch about the government and people say "well if you don't like it, then leave" well, its almost like, you had the choice. Like instead of bitching about the autocrat, you can just build a throne, toss on a crown, and lead away whoever will come.

Just imagine if you could post "Soverign Kingdom of Phil" in front of your house, and be free from all government coercion, liability, and benefit. Of course, now you have to make progress on your own, but, your the king. Heavy is the head that wears the micro-crown.

In that way, its more of what many anarchists advocate for. Everyone works together by choice, and if you don't like how the group makes decisions, you don't have to be part of the group, go find another group, or found your own.

Democracy isn't "I do what I want" so much as "We do what a majority of us decided". (or a republic, we all do what the representatives that we picked got together and decided)

-Steve

Re:-1 Troll

[eugene2k]

>Open source is communism, not democracy
This is like comparing smells and colors. Communism and democracy are in entirely different groups. As wikipedia tells us:
1. Communism is a social structure in which classes are abolished and property is commonly controlled, as well as a political philosophy and social movement that advocates and aims to create such a society.
2. Democracy is a political government carried out either directly by the people (direct democracy) or by means of elected representatives of the people (Representative democracy).

Re:-1 Troll

[pseudorand]

> Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it, isn't that fun.

But in America, the success of our democracy (or, more accurately, our capitalist system where each dollar, rather than each citizen, gets a vote) has let to illegal immigrants pounding at the multi-billion dollar automated border fences trying to get in. In an open-source democracy, the maintainers are hoping for an influx of contributors who will fix their bugs at below minimum wage (free, in fact) and hope they get enough users that they can figure out a way to turn a profit from their endeavors.

Fortunately you are correct about not having to use Shuttleworth's tree. I've ditched Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and many more for a lot less than the placement of some buttons. That'll show em. I'm now a happy Parsix user, at least until the next time I upgrade a package and figure out what they've done to screw that one up too!

Re:-1 Troll

[at_slashdot]

You can't have communism without telling people that they don't dispose freely of their time and the product of their time and effort (sure even in democracies and capitalism there are things like taxes and regulations, but communism cannot simply exist if it lets people be free and decide for themselves what to do with their time, effort and their products).

So if communism restricts freedom so severely you'd be hard pressed to show how a democracy would work in such a society... now, it's also a matter how you define democracy, if you define only by "everybody gets to vote" or if you define it as liberal democracy is usually defined including individual rights and freedoms.

Re:-1 Troll

[Shark]

I don't think it's very doable to equate either of those to open source. But it fits the bill of a true free market pretty well. The major commodities are features, interfaces, code, etc. The regulations are (open) standards. Producers are coders, consumers are users. You 'vote' with your use of the software, buying into whatever commodities you need. You invest by contributing your code...

Might be the reason why it works so well. And makes one pause when they try to equate it to economic 'communism' (central economic planning), which is essentially much more like closed source software.

I think the issue here is that there is a distinction between open source as a whole, and an open source project, which might have whatever internal structure it finds most efficient... And in such cases, the most efficient model so far would be best described as 'benevolent dictatorship'. And to go back to my earlier analogy, the same apparently goes in a free market where most successful companies have a visionary CEO at the top.

In fact, if you just take away copyrights, patents, trade secrets and government (regulation) sponsored monopolies, you would likely find the free market to be as free (and chaotic) as open source.

Re:-1 Troll

[dan828]

Freedom to pack up your toys and leave to go do your own thing elsewhere isn't democracy unless you change the meaning of the term.

Re:-1 Troll

[IdleTime]

Just do:
1. Alt+F2
2 Enter 'gconf-editor'
3. Go to 'Apps - Metacity - General'
4. Edit key 'button_layout'
5. Move the colon (:) to the left rather than to the right. E.g. Change it from 'minimize,maximize,close:' to ':minimize,maximize,close'.

Problem solved!

Re:-1 Troll

[jim_v2000]

"If you wanted to modify a FOSS yourself and lack the knowledge, nothing prevents you from learning how to program."

Time, my friend, time. We all have only so much time. Things that take large amounts of my time are the most expensive of all. People seem to fail to take that cost into account when discussing FOSS.

(And to head off the fanboys, using Linux for my home server has saved me time, so calm down.)

Re:-1 Troll

[jedidiah]

> You're free to fix it.

This is assinine.

Nothing was broken to begin with.

This is why everyone is throwing WTF's at Shuttleworth. There is no good reason to make this
change therefore it should not be made. It doesn't improve upon anything and actually breaks
the sort of UI principles that people like to bludgeon Linux over the head with.

Basic window controls should either be setup to allow for the easiest possible migration for
people fleeing the market leader or they should be consistent with established practice.

Changing them just to be cute is bogus. All it will do is annoy the current users and confuse the new ones.

The first step after installing Ubuntu should not need to be "install sane theme".

Re:-1 Troll

[TheCarp]

Actually, didn't those ideas at least go back to Marx? Though, I always read the communist manifesto as less "this is how to bring about a workers paradise" or "we should fight the class war" as much as "This is the progression that I see happening" or "this is the war thats been going on for generations".

Also I will point out, as you may know, there are a number of communist communities, even here in the US, that have been operating, quietly, for generations, and living just fine in their communities. Look at "the farm" down in TN for some great examples of how more modern/progressive communists organize.

Its far less oppressive than you might think. They have organized around a system where people just...have normal every day paying jobs. They all pay into a common fund, get an allowance to live off of, and even get a pension from their community. They seem to live (according to articles that I have read) more like a large communal tribe than a town or city of disconnected individuals.

-Steve

Re:-1 Troll

[Magic5Ball]

Software creation is not governance, but it certainly is an important result of governance. Every non-trivial software is at least a permissive policy which enables, but more importantly, encourages particular uses and representations of your data. This means that you are correct.

Does your computer desktop clock show seconds, other time zones, or a 24-hour format? Why or why not?

If the anti-IE crowd is correct, the provision of a functional default (or even a large set of defaults) is a de-facto policy choice by the software publisher to constrain users' tendency to seek and implement alternative softwares (policies) based on different practical or moral values than those of the publisher. The values embedded in a corporate publisher (as an organization, regardless of its economic interests) as well as the process by which it formulates policy is most certainly a process of governance which operational policies may or may not value views of particular kinds of stakeholders.

Open source is certainly closer to a "rule by the people" kind of policy system than systems in which source code is less freely available, but public source code alone (like reams of legislation) does not make a system democratic. Just as one cannot claim to compile (let alone distribute) any previous or current version of "United States of America" from the legislative source tree without context and infrastructure not documented in the source, one is not able to meaningfully compile or distribute something as big and complicated as Ubuntu without context and infrastructure not documented in the source.

For the zealots to claim that Ubuntu is democratic because anyone can download a DVD's worth of source and build (an extremely narrow version of) it is to explicitly disclaim the value of the knowledge, experience, and values, of each of the Ubuntu contributors who have ever contributed to the project, and to trivialize the cost of entry barriers represented by the institutions which operate the infrastructure required by a vibrant community.

My homebrew version of Ubuntu is likely to have as many degree of freedom and dependencies on the institutions and communities of the real Ubuntu, as a Montana survivalist has on the institutions and communities of the United States: A very few additional freedoms at the cost of inefficiently compensating for a great many dependencies.

Re:-1 Troll

[eugene2k]

And communism is said to come after the dictatorship, not during it.

Re:-1 Troll

[TheRealGrogan]

No, it's not really a democracy. Telling people to go create their own fork of a project is like saying "If you don't like the way our government does things, leave and go start your own country". (Sound familiar?)

That's not criticism, for not everything can be a democracy, it's just a fact. Imagine if you had to get a consensus or majority vote to get anything done?

Open Source projects are more like a meritocracy. The people who contribute the most to the project have the most clout in making decisions.

Re:-1 Troll

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

You are either trolling or obtuse beyond belief.

Open Source is capitalism with democratic characteristics, not communism. Anybody who owns a source tree and the server it lives on is absolute dictator(benevolent or otherwise) of that source tree. Simple property rights here, about as far from communism as it gets. However, everyone is free to get their own source tree and server, and be absolute dictator thereof.

However, since being a dictator alone is typically both tedious and hard work, and the costs of entry are really low(cheap VPS, sourceforge, Google Code, your home box running Git, whatever, plus a fork of the code), the system ends up being quasi-democratic in many respects. Dictators can be as abusive as they like; but they can't stop people leaving and setting up their own little empires, which places strong practical constraints on the dictatorialness of the dictators. You can do whatever you want; but unless your actions, on average, attract more people than they piss off, you'll have an empty kingdom soon.

Re:-1 Troll

[bberens]

"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

It's not really impractical so much as most people don't care *enough*. I'm sure you could go over to Rentacoder or something and find someone in India or China willing to move the window control buttons on that theme for under $100 on a particular build of Ubuntu. The Microsoft stock comparison is laughable. The issue is that for the people involved the time and/or money to make it the way they want it isn't *worth* the cost, no matter how little that cost might be.

Re:-1 Troll

[jedidiah]

Defaults should always be sensible and handle the typical case.

This is just basic common sense (Unix) design.

Something that's too weird or fancy violates everyone's expectations. That's why really freaky things don't gain much traction (and Linux ends up being accused of copying this that or the other).

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

It happens everywhere.
The thing is that you only ever get to hear from maybe 1% of the users of any program.
I also fear that it is human nature to put more effort into complaining than saying thanks.

A good example is Slashcode. I wish that when you click on log in and Slashdot opens the log in window that it would give the user name focus. "No on the left side of Slashdot but on the log in pop up window"
I could always check out the source in GIT make the change and submit it. The thing is that I don't really want to take the time set up Slashcode on my dev system and test it.
So I live with it because I have not made the effort to fix it myself.
If they do fix it great but if not I just have to live with it and frankly it isn't that big of an issue.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSource is not democracy: is forkcracy, a much more powerful mechanism indeed.

Re:-1 Troll

[Skrapion]

Actually, if we're still talking about running OSS as a democracy, I doubt you would actually have to pay a programmer.

Ubuntu has a massive number of users. If there truly is a 51% majority of users that want this feature, it's safe to say that at least one of those users has the means and inclination to build a new binary.

Re:-1 Troll

[Teun]

You can't (OK, shouldn't) mix up the system buttons on the windows frame with application buttons inside the frame.(P> The latter have always been left justified.

This is similar to one of the GUI problems with Office 2007, the large colourful blob in the left top corner that looks mostly like decoration but hides a bunch of non-trivial functions.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

No, open source is metirocratic thalassocracy. I have no idea what that even means, but it seems to be in vogue to identify source code with political movements, so why not?

Re:-1 Troll

[bberens]

I think people are looking at this all wrong. Who are these people who are so tightly wound about where the window control buttons are that they'd start flame wars over it? My wife uses EEEBuntu on her netbook. She is a casual computer user... internet, e-mail, IM, and that's about it. If I changed her theme and it made the window controls be on the *wrong* side of the window it would take her about 10 seconds to adjust, she might think to herself "That's weird that they're over there now." and move on with her life never to think about it again. People who are that finicky over relatively minor UI changes to a particular theme in a free/niche operating system have serious emotional problems.

Re:-1 Troll

[AlgorithMan]

"Yeah, well I have a big gang of marauders"
with hookers! and blackjack!
infact - forget the gang!

Re:-1 Troll

[mpfife]

We just got much closer to a Communist Democracy today in fact.

Hope you're all out there shopping for your now GOVERNMENT MANDATED health insurance - that or you can pay 2% of your annual income as a penalty.

Land of the Free indeed - land of the free lunch

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

No, it is not anarchy. If the strong rule the weak, then we do not have equality, nor do we have freedom. These two things are the essential components of democracy.

You are free to make up new definitions for words, I guess, but that is all you are doing at this point.

I think your confusion may be coming from how the democracies you are familiar with are designed. Yes, the USA or France, etc. may have a particular set of rules, but democracy does not equal centralized control, or secret ballots, or an elaborate system. Three people on an island can have a democracy even if they do not have a scrap of paper, any running water, or a toilet.

The fact is, in open source, and unlike in anarchy, we are all free and all equal. Mark Shuttleworth is no more a totalitarian open source developer than you would be a totalitarian homeowner, for telling me I cannot sleep over at your house tonight.

Re:-1 Troll

[FictionPimp]

I think everyone has a vote. The vote is simple. If you like a product you will use it, you will tell your friends about it, and you will (hopefully) report bugs and help people solve support issues. If ubuntu starts making changes that I don't agree with (the kind of change listed above is something that may fall into that category) then I will vote by switching to another operating system (distro). If ubuntu can't get enough 'votes' they will just turn into a circle jerk of a few devs and everyone else will use an operating system that gives them what they want.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad example, themes already exist for Windows which move the titlebar buttons.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I know for a fact I can modify Windows 7 to look however, the hell I want it to. I don't see the big deal. Shuttleworth seems to like the retarded Mac interface good for him get a different theme and be done with it.

Re:-1 Troll

[bberens]

But this isn't about situations whether the buttons are on one side or the other. This is about whether the buttons are on one side or the other in a *particular* theme. Unless you didn't read the example from the summary...

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

The proletarian dictatorship that Marx described is merely a transitional phase between capitalism and pure communism, which is a society with no state or class.

Re:-1 Troll

[hercubus]

There are some pissed off people who would really like to "fork Shutteworth's tree" right about now :)

On the other hand, please pardon me for pointing out that the Gates meme is obsolete. Himself is off in Africa saving lives, so to speak.

I believe we're supposed to be hatin' on Ballmer and Jobs these days, not Saint Willum of Gates.

Re:-1 Troll

[Greg_D]

That's like saying that someone isn't holding you down if you can still wiggle your toes.

Re:-1 Troll

[Shark]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

And in a democracy, the many rule the few. Both are quite well suited to the oppression you describe, it's just the group being oppressed that changes. Open source has a constitution (like the GPL) ensures that even the many cannot take away your freedom to fork whatever you want and your ownership the code you wrote. Democracy in itself is not a good form of government at all.

Re:-1 Troll

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The brilliance behind FOSS is that anarchy and totalitarianism can actually strike a balance that feels a lot like democracy:

Perhaps there should be a name for such a system - I nominate forkocracy.

Neo said there is no spoon, but there definitely is a fork.

Re:-1 Troll

[RichiH]

While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

This might be true (though grammatically wrong) but you are disregarding about seven to nine orders of magnitude ($1,000 to $10,000 vs $100,000,000,000 to $1,000,000,000,000). And if we are talking buying someone a beer we are down to $2 to $5.

Re:-1 Troll

[Meneguzzi]

Aside from your last comment, I could not agree more. And I think it is completely fair and right that the people toiling away at code for free get to decide what they do with their free time. Now as for Linux, although I think that his original work was brilliant, in recent years I'm not so sure he is not stifling other volunteers from working in the Kernel, and the people who are being rejected do have a lot of merit and have put a lot of effort into the kernel, but no significant say in the direction it is taking.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

You may as well propose a kind of economics that does not use money, but where instead every participant just does what is fair.

Everyone knows how that works out.

We are not discussing how anarchy works in your imagination. We are discussing how things actually work.

Re:-1 Troll

[Skrapion]

Democracy is not defined in a standard way. The things common to all definitions are equality and freedom.*

* YMMV

Re:-1 Troll

[Blakey Rat]

Meritocracy is also misleading, though. It could simply be the person who has the most *free time* to do the work, not the person who does the best work.

Re:-1 Troll

[StuartHankins]

The DOJ has already limited what Microsoft can and can't put in its OS. To the point that you do not instigate another legal battle with them, sure you could add whatever you want. But before you start releasing your Photoshop- or Quicken-killer along with Windows, you might want to rethink it.

Open source could not suffer from this because by definition it's never a monopoly.

Re:-1 Troll

[kdekorte]

The US is not a democracy it is a republic, check the pledge of allegiance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic

Re:-1 Troll

[FireFury03]

While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

Maybe hiring someone to modify a Free OS is impractical for an individual, but it certainly isn't for a business. Businesses contract developers to modify existing Free software projects all the time. Even for a small business, paying a developer to spend a few hours implementing/fixing a feature in an existing Free software project is perfectly reasonable and frequently happens, meanwhile you'd have to be a pretty damned big business to alter the course of an MS product (either by being a big enough customer that they care about you, or by having enough money to buy a controlling share of MS).

Re:-1 Troll

[Shoden]

Wikipedia may make for interesting and informative reading, but I wouldn't rely on it for accurate definitions. And you even managed to quote part of the article that's marked as "dubious". Nice.

How about going to a dictionary for a definition:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2 : a political unit that has a democratic government
3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States
4 : the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5 : the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

The key point in the primary definition of democracy is "rule of the majority". There is no rule of the majority in open source, anyone can use whichever tree they choose or develop their own. If it was a democracy, users could only choose to use trees that had been approved by the majority.

Now, let's look at anarchy:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy
1 a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2 a : absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order :

Is there a government in open source? No. Do users enjoy complete freedom without government in open source, being able to use whichever tree they want or develop their own if no existing ones meet their needs? Yes. Is there an authority in open source that must be obeyed? No. Seems like anarchy to me.

Re:-1 Troll

[Neon Aardvark]

Yeah, with the people starving to death in the gulags being able to vote on the next annual tractor quota.

Re:-1 Troll

[Zenaku]

whether a tree is organized democratically or under some other management and governance mechanism depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader.

Do you not see the absurdity in your above statement? If the manner in which a project is governed "depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader," than it is NOT democratic. Even if the dictator has chosen for the time being to abide by the will of the majority, he still has the power and authority to unilaterally discard that policy as soon as he and the majority disagree.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.

If the reasons are good, I think I'd rather have the changes and am glad those people stick to Windows so I can keep using an OS that chooses quality over quantity.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

OK, you found another source with a different definition. This is a reputable way to argue and I appreciate it.

Of course, you're still wrong. You don't think democracy is primarily about equality and freedom? You want to argue otherwise? You are on thin rhetorical ice.

You think that statement is dubious? It wasn't made up by an anonymous internet user. Here's the source for that statement used in wikipedia. It is Aristotle.

Is there a government in open source? Yes. Open source operates under the governments of the societies we live in. Most practitioners are operating under a common set of criminal and civil laws that set the backdrop for how open source software can work.

"absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order :" - In other words, Anarchy is not GPL compatible. Thanks very much. You proved my point even more strongly than I did.

Re:-1 Troll

[phantomfive]

It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.

Along this line, I've often wondered why no communist country naturally morphed into a democracy, and why they all ended up with the dictatorship, because democracy seems like such a good fit with communism. I would really like to know why it always went the other way.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

What you describe is called Freedom or Liberty, not Democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[sheph]

Yes, but is it really worth it to fork over the placement of buttons? It seems rather absurd. Shuttleworth was correct, maybe not as diplomatic as he could've been, but still you just can't please everybody.

Re:-1 Troll

[Phil06]

You can't have a mix of communism and capitalism, everone must agree for communism to work. That's not democracy. In practice, communism has only existed under totalitarianism where you get killed or jailed if you disagree.

Re:-1 Troll

[bkr1_2k]

If you submit feedback, of any form, you are a contributor. You may not be a large contributor (in terms of data, not physical size) but you most definitely are a contributor.

Re:-1 Troll

[wiredlogic]

If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you.

I would be surprised if the graphical shell in Win7 cannot be replaced wholesale. This has been possible in all previous versions of windows since 3.0.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, who cares, you can change it back anyway.

Re:-1 Troll

[Shoden]

You're correct in that anarchy is undemocratic, but for the wrong reason. If the strong rule the weak, you no longer have anarchy, since anarchy is by definition "the absence of government or authority" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy). The strong ruling the weak could more correctly be considered a form of meritocracy, which is "a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meritocracy).

Unfortunately, it's true that anarchy can easily be replaced by some other form of government, including a "strong ruling the weak" type meritocracy.

However, you're wrong in claiming that open source is democratic, since a key part of democracy is "rule of the majority" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy). Democracy places authority in the will of the people, and the minority must submit to the majority. In open source, there is no authority, and people are free to do with their tree as they wish, without the majority having any control over them.

Open source is anarchy, and pretty much even manages to achieve it in the utopian sense. There's no motive for violence, coercion, or theft in open source because we're dealing with a product that lacks scarcity.

"But it is only with open source that you can even copy someone else's code and do it your own way. No one can stop you from doing it your way, nor can you stop anyone else from doing it theirs. Hence, not anarchy, or even close."

Actually, that is exactly anarchy.

Re:-1 Troll

[91degrees]

If, for example, you participate in the Linux kernel development you will have a voice proportional to your contributions.

Which completely breaks the "democracy" argument.

Can you (binding) vote on the future Windows kernel features?

Each purchaser has the right to approve or disapprove of the complete package by buying it or not. The price is more or less the same for everyone. So, sorta. I certainly have no more control with Linux. My only option is to fork. Then you'll get a strict meritocracy as the most successful version will become the defacto standard.

Re:-1 Troll

[turbidostato]

"Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)"

Bullshit. Open Source is meritocracy: the one with better merits gets to stablish what's done.

Of course the most affordable merit is your own time and ability but money will work just as good.

Re:-1 Troll

[eiMichael]

If it really is that simple (which could be put into a desktop shortcut) and it's causing hours upon hours of flame war, I now have a new respect for discussing the differences between emacs and vi.

Re:-1 Troll

[palegray.net]

Here's the problem: Ubuntu is a large organization that many people have come to know and trust (to a greater or lesser degree). While it's certainly true that anyone can fork open source code and do it "their way," they're not going to get the same attention paid to their version. This is fine for the user in question, except of course for the fact that he now has to maintain his own thing separately.

This is a fine illustration of a situation where something can "by definition" work a certain way on paper, but doesn't correlate with the real world when carried through to its logical conclusion. I suppose you could say the guy who forked could get as big as Ubuntu, but that's rather unlikely for the vast majority of cases. Thus, the outcome is anything but democratic in practice. I'm not passing a value judgment on that, just calling it like it is.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, many people have tried to point this out to you, but you don't seem to be listening... The meaning of the word 'Democracy' is not what you think it is.

# the political orientation of those who favor government by the people or by their elected representatives
# a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them
# majority rule: the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

The relevant meaning here, really, is the third on that list.

Also, as previously pointed out to you, what you describe is essentially much more aligned with this

The state of a society being without authoritarians or a governing body; Anarchism; the political theory that a community is best organized by the voluntary cooperation of individuals, rather than by government, which is regarded as being coercive by nature; A chaotic and confusing absence of ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anarchy

Re:-1 Troll

[jedidiah]

apt-get mark-is-no-designer

The guy that filed the original bug could even have his own PPA for just this purpose.

However, it shouldn't be necessary.

Defaults should be sane.

Re:-1 Troll

[ajs]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

This is a radical over-simplification to the point of being nonsensical. There are dozens of flavors of anarchy, all of which have their own unique relationship to this statement. Of course, one could suggest that anarchies seek to weaken the rule of law, and thus afford the strong greater ease in subjecting the weak, and in some cases that's a reasonable claim, but that's not what you said.

In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.

If that were sufficient definition of democracy, then prisons would be democratic. Everyone can yell into the central halls and all anyone can do to suppress your voice is to commit violence against you (e.g. shut you up physically), which is always an option in any situation where members of the social group have access to one another.

No, the definition of democracy hinges on a social contract whereby the society as a whole agree to be bound by majority decisions. The ability to partake in that process is only the first step. Open source projects rarely require such a social contract (some of the larger ones do). They are typically loose confederations which behave as benevolent dictatorships and whose resources the group is allowed to leave with, should they decide to disband.

The reason this is practical in the open source world is that the resources have no inherent cost other than time, and their value is not diminished by forking. This, of course, is not true of land, food and natural resources, which is why the open source model doesn't work in the real world.

Re:-1 Troll

[Zaphod The 42nd]

http://www.brawndo.com/

I swear, FOX spent more money marketing and distributing BRAWNDO than they did idiocracy.

Stupid studio. >_>

Re:-1 Troll

[Runaway1956]

Actually, Shuttleworth HAS been forked multiple times already. OpenGEU, Ultimate Linux, and others. I'm to lazy to look right now, but there are Linux distros out there that take the best that Ubuntu has to offer, then modifies that best into something DIFFERENT. I'll not say they are "better", but the fact is, the finished product meets the needs of those people "better" than Shuttleworth's official tree does.

Re:-1 Troll

[c-reus]

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company.

MSFT is traded through pubic areas?

Re:-1 Troll

[Mike Buddha]

If you need to change your software interface every time you update, then you didn't spend enough time and effort designing the interface in the first place, which is a huge criticism I have of open source software. Things like UI's and documentation are seen as tertiary to a project, instead of core, where they should be. I've been using Linux since 1995 and this attitude of putting users last has permeated the culture of open source, to the detriment of many projects.

Design your user interfaces with the same care and diligence as you define your application's architecture and you won't need to fiddle with it every week.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Democracy is not "i don't like this president, so I'll start another country." (or I don't like this bill, or I don't like whatever).
Democracy is not about having a choice.
Democracy is about having influence on a choice.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a developer? It would be really cool if you added MP3 playback and skinning in the slash codes!!

Re:-1 Troll

[FreudianNightmare]

Democracy - literally meaning rule/government by (the) people. Your stated reasons for open source being 'democratic' (don't like something? then you can do it differently) have no relation to this. 'Pure' Democracy requires equality, for sure, but it is NOT primarily, or even peripherally about freedom. Any form of 'government' is the restriction of individual freedoms of action by its very nature. If it were not, it would not be 'governing' anything.

Re:-1 Troll

[Runaway1956]

Impractical, how? As in, "It's not important enough for me to shell out 50 or 500 bucks to get it done."? Or, as in "I would have to hire an entire development team to do something that I'm not even sure CAN BE done!"?

The fact is, as mentioned above, someone has already set up a PPA repository with which to do this little task, FOR FREE. So, how is it impractical? Your statement seems to make no sense at all.

Re:-1 Troll

[hairyfeet]

You can and make it look like anything from Win98 to a Mac, for a whole $30. Not really a big deal.

Re:-1 Troll

[Lumpy]

Then why do you use windows?

Office 2000-2003 Major changes.
Office 2003-2008 HORRIBLE HUGE CHANGES.

2000-XP Big changes
XP-Vista BIG changes
Vista-W7 Big changes.

So what was your point? in fact the ONLY OS I have used that has remained stable in it's UI has been OSX and Linux at it's base (Slackware for example). Windows has changed radically every release.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so obvious and intuitive, I can't believe I never thought of doing that. Especially since I'm using a distro that aims to be user-friendly.

2010: Year of Linux on the Desktop!

Re:-1 Troll

[Darinbob]

Everyone is allowed to create their own branch of the code and make their own decisions there. This is exactly what many of the Linux distributions have already done, including Ubuntu. Ubuntu wouldn't exist except that some people decided that they had a better idea than the existing ones.

Yes, if someone has their own organization then they can call the shots. Are you a dictator because you have control over what happens in your own house? This applies to corporations, where someone else calls the shots and if you work for a corporation then you're contributing to someone else's dictatorship. If you're a private contractor, then you have to do what the customer says (if you want to get paid that is) and contribute to the customer's dictatorship.

Re:-1 Troll

[Lumpy]

6. Pay the maintainer enough money to see it your way. Honestly if you waved a $1,000,000 check in their face they certainly would ditch their stance and say, "OHH BRILLIANT! RIGHT AWAY SIR!"

you cant get any more democratic than that! It's almost identical to the way the US government works!

Re:-1 Troll

[keeboo]

If, for example, you participate in the Linux kernel development you will have a voice proportional to your contributions.

Which completely breaks the "democracy" argument.

I think you're mixing up things. I did not claim FOSS is inherently democratic, my point is about your claims that proprietary software is "closer to democracy" which I disagree.

Can you (binding) vote on the future Windows kernel features?

Each purchaser has the right to approve or disapprove of the complete package by buying it or not. The price is more or less the same for everyone. So, sorta. I certainly have no more control with Linux. My only option is to fork. Then you'll get a strict meritocracy as the most successful version will become the defacto standard.

I'll give you an example: Red Hat contributes heavily to several key projects. You may pay for a RHEL copy, thus voting with your wallet aswell, I don't see how proprietary software has an advantage in this aspect.

Microsoft, specifically, cannot claim even that. How much of "voting with your wallet" applies when almost every domestic PC comes, by default, with a Windows license?

Forking is not your only option if you want to affect the development directly. Contributors typically have a say on the project, just be one of those.
You don't even have to write a single line of code: you may sponsor a project, you may even hire developers.
When it comes to proprietary software, you don't have such options to begin with.

Re:-1 Troll

[WinterSolstice]

Exactly!
Ship a standard, and as long as a user can tweak it to their tastes, it's all good.

This is part of my dislike of OSX, BTW. It's just sick that Windows is more customizable a GUI than OSX.

I don't care where Canonical puts the buttons on their 'default GUI', I will only care if they remove the ability for me to easily put them anywhere I like.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

" for practical purposes"

Re:-1 Troll

[sourcerror]

" Whether and how that's practically possible is obviously a very longly debatable topic, but if you have the strong ruling the weak you don't have anarchy "

That means that anarchy is an inherently fragile and temporal situation (directly leading to a mediaval style vassal system, where the weaker subordinates themselves to the stronger in exchange for protection (lack of harassment)).

Re:-1 Troll

[selven]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

Look at that word again. An-archy. No ruler. If you have the strong ruling over the weak, you have a ruler, and therefore no anarchy. Anarchy is impractical beyond a certain size and difficult to maintain, but in a functioning anarchy no one has control over what you do or don't do. I agree that anarchy is undemocratic, since in a demo-cracy the people are in control of everything. In an anarchy, each individual is in control over himself.

Re:-1 Troll

[sourcerror]

Paying for customization might cost more than buying a propriatary solution (especially for small businesses).

Re:-1 Troll

[rcamans]

In a Democracy, you get to vote on who represents you in government. You get to vote on some issues which will cost you taxpayer dollars, and you get to vote on some other issues. This does not mean you get what you want.
In a software democracy, you would get to vote on who represents you on decision-making on software appearances, abilities, and changes. You would still not automatically get what you want.
In open source, you can change software behavior and appearances only if you have the knowledge and ability to. And that new tree would not be automatically updated with fixes and changes to the old tree. So you still do not automatically get what you want.
If you do not have the ability to program in the right language, you do not even get to try to get what you want.
Open source is not a right or entitlement. At all levels, you have to work for it, to at least some extent.

Re:-1 Troll

[arose]

What people tend to do is option 4, ignore the whole thing and use something else.

If the something else actually does what you want, that is not a given.

Re:-1 Troll

[Hatta]

Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak

No one rules anyone under Anarchy, by definition. ("an archos"). What you really mean to say here is that what most people call Anarchy is not, and would be better described as Warlordism.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

In the modern world, an open source project is utterly democratic, because everyone gets one voice, and no one can suppress it.

Forking someone else's project doesn't give you a damned voice, it creates a new project, and a new dictator. A billion little dictators is NOT a democracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[Concern]

This is actually a very interesting issue. I would argue that, just as the GPL actually increases software freedom by imposing some limited rules on distribution, democracy is very tightly bound to freedom, by virtue of being the best principle (or set of principles) thus far devised to increase it.

Re:-1 Troll

[megajason]

And the biggest, most important point is that they all volunteered to be a part of the community. One of the major reasons all of the countries that have tried communism have become centrally controlled dictatorships is that they didn't make participation optional. The large group of people who didn't want anything to do with it had to be forced to participate which justified more power for the "organizers."

Communism, progressivism, conservatism, etc aren't problems by themselves. They become problems when the people believing in them feel they have the authority to force everyone else to participate.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's great. It'll improve healthcare coverage for my (employed and self-employed) friends and members of my family, as well as ensure that if my wife and I lose our jobs, we'll be able to get health insurance and her existing medical problems won't prevent that. I say bring on the socialism.

It's also somewhat entertaining American "conservatives" stammer and spit with incoherent, utterly impotent rage about it.

Re:-1 Troll

[Lundse]

Exactly. Whoever disagrees has a right to fork the project and do whatever he wants. The only thing he is being denied (in this specific case quite politely by Shuttleworth) is to use the existing project's resources!
This is not anti-democratic, the guy's opinion of what Shuttleworth, and those who chose to follow him, just ended up being heard, but not followed. Is your bar for democracy that every open source project should be voted on by the world assembly, or what exactly is the claim here?

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"(...) Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
  - Winston Churchill

Re:-1 Troll

[pz]

whether a tree is organized democratically or under some other management and governance mechanism depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader.

Do you not see the absurdity in your above statement? If the manner in which a project is governed "depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader," than it is NOT democratic. Even if the dictator has chosen for the time being to abide by the will of the majority, he still has the power and authority to unilaterally discard that policy as soon as he and the majority disagree.

Sorry, I should have been more clear about that: it depends on the whims and ideals of the leadership as the organization is created. Naturally, governance can change, but if, at some point, the people in charge of a project agree to create a democratic governance, then that presumably includes the potential for replacing the leadership.

Having just finished establishing the governance for a non-profit, these sorts of issues have been on my mind of late.

Re:-1 Troll

[Myopic]

I don't think "democracy" means what you think it means.

Re:-1 Troll

[NotBornYesterday]

I'm reminded of the saying "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", because comparing political systems, economic systems, and software development & licensing models just doesn't add up.

I can understand the desire to view open source like a democracy, because it empowers the individual. However, the key tenet of democracy is majority rule. You don't build software that way, and despite the Windows hegemony, we don't choose our OS that way either. Rather than creating a single democracy, open source enables every individual either to create their own sovereign dictatorship, or choose to live within the (hopefully benevolent) dictatorship someone else has set up.

I can understand those who compare open source to communism, because of its free-to-everyone aspects, but the successful capitalist business models built around open source projects pretty much disprove that theory. Furthermore, communism is based on the premise that the fruits of labor belong to all. Open source code has specific owners; we benefit from their labor strictly because of how they license their property. The freedoms accorded by FOSS licensing do not imply the sharing of code ownership.

Re:-1 Troll

[IICV]

I would argue that GPL projects, by the requirements of the license, create a type of government that is neither democracy nor dictatorship; it's a new form that only works when the resources that are being governed are freely and cheaply available for copying, and imo is far better than either democracy or dictatorship. The person who currently hosts the resources is an absolute dictator for that fork of the project - but anyone who thinks they can do better is free to fork the project and start their own version.

It's well-known that the best and most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship; there's just no beating having one person at the top who controls everything, as long as he's good at it. The reason why dictatorships in general suck as a system of government is because their effectiveness is directly related to how good of a dictator the guy at the top is - and there's no guarantee he won't be an inbred idiot. Democracies, on the other hand, have a sort of averaging effect; when everyone has to vote on policy, you'll rarely make obviously bad decisions, but you'll also rarely take necessary decisive action.

The current system we have in the United States is something of an attempt to merge the two; we have a bunch of dictators who are stringently limited in different ways, and are elected to office democratically. However, it's still not that great - in order to force these mini-dictators to relinquish their power eventually, we have to restrict them so much that they lose their effectiveness as dictators; besides curtailing their power, we effectively force them to spend a significant amount of time convincing people that they should be re-elected.

GPL projects, on the other hand, are much closer to an ideal mixture of democracy and dictatorship. When you fork a project, you and you alone have sole control over who contributes to the fork; you are an absolute, perfect dictator in that realm. However, at any time anyone who chooses to can decided to secede from your project's "nation", and in turn become the absolute dictator of their own project; unlike in real life, nobody loses anything but manpower when this happens, because all the "nation project"'s resources are freely copyable. Thus, every GPL project's dictator must compete with other GPL projects not on who has the best project resources, but who is the best dictator. If you think you could rule more fairly and evenly than Mark Shuttleworth, you are entirely free to fork Ubuntu and try your hand at it; if you think that Shuttleworth is not leading Ubuntu in the right direction as a project, you are free to fork it and lead it some other way. If Mark Shuttleworth dies and his replacement sucks as a leader, I'm sure someone will fork Ubuntu and carry on.

It is, I think, almost an ideal form of government: natural selection will kill off projects whose owners mismanage their resources, and projects whose owners manage things well will prosper.

Re:-1 Troll

[TheCarp]

I tend to agree but... I also label myself as an anti-authoritarian. I would say the same thing of democracies and republics.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Communism and democracy are not at odds with each other.

Communism is an economic system. Democracy is a political system.

It's possible for a system to be both. In fact, a genuine communist system would have to be democratic.

Thats actually wrong,

Communism is both a political and economic system, at least as envisioned by Karl Marx, where the state would evaporate after the revolution,

nice try though

Re:-1 Troll

[shadowrat]

The OP was pretty accurate about what choices are available to us at each turn. However, i think the analogy of democracy is wrong. The communism analogy isn't right either.

Open Source is Anarchy. Anyone can take the source and do anything they want at anytime. If our political system were open source, and you didn't like the new healthcare bill, you could just declare yourself soverign. That's anarchy. Just like in the real world, only the most skilled leaders can order the chaos through charisma or force or some combination of both.

big projects are like countries. They have their own takes on politics. some might be more democratic than others. The nice thing is it's all very abstract and Mark Shuttleworth hasn't threatened to imprison or kill anyone for forking Ubuntu.

Re:-1 Troll

[Ogi_UnixNut]

I disagree. The amount of money you'd have to have to buy enough voting stock of MS to have them unequivocally change the code to your liking is huge. You could probably get an entire programming company, and get them to write you your very own GUI for Linux for a similar price.

Re:-1 Troll

[migla]

Depends on definitions.

Anarchy means you don't have a ruler. If the strong rule the weak, by definition, you don't have anarchy. So, nobody rules anybody. Logically, that must mean that everybody rules everybody, just a little bit (unless you have the option to fork off and make a separate anarchy).

So, everybody gets a say about everything. That's exactly synonymous to "utterly democratic".

I'm not necessarily trying to contradict you here. As I said, it depends on definitions. "Utterly democratic" sounds good to me.

Re:-1 Troll

[HungryHobo]

you seem to have misinterpreted what "it" is.

The complaint I was addressing was
"Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others"

Re:-1 Troll

[Alef]

Free market system is democratic in a sense that everybody can vote with their dollars

That is only democratic as long as the wealth is distributed reasonably evenly among the population. Otherwise it becomes a plutocracy.

Re:-1 Troll

[wisnoskij]

Completely agree.
I think how someone got confused and thought that it was not a democracy is if you just consider democracies slogan "government for the people, by the people".
It obviously does not work out exactly like that.
To use an analogy:
anyone can theoretically be a politician. But only elected politicians get to be vote on how the country will operate.

Re:-1 Troll

[jellomizer]

Democracy or not. If you don't do what the people want your project will not succeed. Just today I got a back a rather snide response to a bug I put in 6 months ago (expecting to know what package was causing a problem on all my applications). My response was after upgrading to Windows 7 it seem to fix all the problems.

Which is true, After going to windows 7 I have been having a lot less problem then with Linux. Linux has been falling behind and it is mostly due to the key people not wanting to listen to its users. Either expecting them to be idiots or whiny.

Re:-1 Troll

[HungryHobo]

I was originally refering to the GP point

"Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others"

That if you don't like how choices are made you can always set up your own fork where all choices are made on the basis of whatever you like.

Re:-1 Troll

[Zoxed]

> So yeah, the code is right there, but it's useless to a large majority (probably near 99%) of users.

They may not directly take advantage of it: but they *benefit* from it. For example Xfree forked to X.org: most users probably did not know/care what "Xfree" was, but when a minority of users got tired of the Xfree problems they forked it, made a better product and now (AFAIK) most linux users are using the new X.org (still not knowing what it is). 99% of users did *not* look at the source, but they did benefit.

If Xfree had been proprietary we would be stuck with Xfree.

Re:-1 Troll

[ruemere]

This should be marked funny, possibly sarcastic, not interesting.

Regards,
Ruemere

Re:-1 Troll

[LBDobbs]

I fall back to Princess Bride, I don't think that word means what your think it means. Open Source is anarchistic, not democratic. If it were democratic, a vote would be taken and the issue decided thus binding everyone in the given community to that decision. On any given project, at any given time, anyone can take the source tree and change everything about it without the consent, or even the knowledge, of the original developer or team. Nobody is bound to an existing set of design constraints.

Re:-1 Troll

[msuarezalvarez]

"Pubically traded" is a rather good descrition...

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

sure foss is autocracy, the thing is, if you don't like the one you are under, you are free to go and make your own, no shackles to keep you serving any one master

Re:-1 Troll

[megajason]

I agree. Pure democracy is nothing but two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. The trick is find the absolute minimum amount of government that maximizes individual liberty. At the end of the day, anything any government does will be forcing somebody against their will. Unfortunately this fact is conveniently forgotten or disregarded by most legislators.

Re:-1 Troll

[keeboo]

Paying for customization might cost more than buying a propriatary solution (especially for small businesses).

Oh, and customization is really an option for most proprietary software!

Concerning proprietary software, you pay for that and _hope_ the company will maintain/extend the software in a way suitable for you. If they don't, what are your options then?

Re:-1 Troll

[dkleinsc]

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

Maybe outside the realm of "most individuals", but $10,000 needed to pay for a coder to do what you ask is considerably less than $250 million or so needed to buy enough of Microsoft to make them pay the slightest bit of attention to your demands. And that kind of value is not an investment that is so huge that most small or mid-sized businesses don't have that option.

And of course, the other alternative is to code it yourself.

Re:-1 Troll

[samurphy21]

I'm no political scientist, but I don't think that communism and democracy are mutually exclusive. A commune can vote democratically on decisions to be made by the whole.

In fact, all votes being equal factors into communism quite well.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

It already has skinning.
MP3? Never. Ogg is free as in speech. If you don't know that much it isn't worth my time to reply to you!
Just kidding folks.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

But what you contribute could be crap.
If you send a bug report with data then yes that is part of testing so I covered that. If you put a in a suggestion that they buttons should be on the right like windows and not the left and file it as a bug?
Not so much.
So not not all feedback is contributing to a project. Sometimes it is actually detracting from a project.

Re:-1 Troll

[skydyr]

I suspect that the qualities needed to lead a successful revolution and to take and hold on to power in a nation are at odds with the qualities needed to lead a successful transition to a communistic democracy.

As far as I can tell, all the national communist governments currently in operation came into being through revolution, rather than evolution.

You can look at India from independence through to the late 80s and early 90s, when it was greatly opened to foreign investment, as being a relatively communistic democracy for a counterpoint to your assertion, though this is of course debatable. There, as well, it has clearly transitioned FROM that state to a more standard capitalistic democracy.

It is also possible that human nature causes a group of people to effect laws that they believe will make their own situation better without improving (or to the detriment of) others', and that this would cause a communistic democracy to transition to something more meritocratic.

Re:-1 Troll

[dangitman]

Of course the strong rule the weak. Why is that a bad thing (at least, in the programming sense)? There are many, many programmers who should have little to no voice in what patches should be applied, simply because they are weak programmers!

But being a good programmer doesn't necessarily mean you are a good project leader, a good designer, or can even make good decisions about software development. In fact, it is often quite the opposite, because the programmer often can't see the forest for the trees.

The issue this article is discussing actually has nothing to do with programming, it's about interface design.

Re:-1 Troll

[Chris Burke]

Of course they get a vote. Most of them choose to vote for less ego stroking and stupid political infighting so they cast their vote for Windows. Believe it or not, most people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it, regardless of the reasons behind the changes.

Ah, so they vote for having the ego stroking and political infighting happen behind closed doors in a process they are never allowed to even watch, much less participate in. They get the sudden changes handed down from on high without even knowing that there were dissenting opinions. I can see the advantage.

I don't get what the big deal is. So you don't get to tell Mark Shuttleworth what to do. When was that ever an advertised feature of Ubuntu? You can submit bug reports or observations or your comments on how things should be, but when has that ever been implied to be a mandate for developers to go do it?

Where was the implication that Ubuntu was a Democracy?

Ubuntu is as Open and Free as ever. The community is as strong as ever (and you can have strong communities around completely proprietary software).

It sounds like the real problem is that they wanted something, and didn't get it, but thought they should. Which means guess what, welcome to ego stroking and political infighting.

Re:-1 Troll

[harmonise]

Then why do you use windows?

Office 2000-2003 Major changes.
Office 2003-2008 HORRIBLE HUGE CHANGES.

Office is not Windows. Office 2000 and 2003 will run just fine on the newest version of Windows.

Windows has changed radically every release.

Windows releases are also supported for a long time. 12+ years for XP, and you can still run current and 12-years-old software on it if that's what suits your needs. That's hard to do with Linux distros. You upgrade the OS and it upgrades every other program even if you don't want them to be upgraded.

Re:-1 Troll

[dangitman]

In a democracy everyone gets the same vote, in a meritocracy the power is wielded by those who do the best work.

Only in a very narrow sense. It tends to reward programmers, and programmers don't always make good decisions when it comes to issues not related to programming - of which there are many in software development.

Re:-1 Troll

[ultranova]

Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)

Open source is a near-post-scarcity economy. Everything can be dublicated effortlessly and endlessly, and is free for the taking. The only thing still scarce is the skill to modify stuff to better suit you and come up with new stuff, but even that is changing with the advent of new programming languages and ever-smarter compilers. Rather than working for money, people (well, some of them) work for prestige and for fun.

That's what our society will look like once nanomanufacturing, strong AI and other future-tech stuff comes to pass. We'll all be doing whatever we damn well want to rather than whatever puts bread on the table. Of course we'll also be fighting Monsonto's patent lawyers claiming that the molecular structure of bread our nanobots just manufactured is derivative of their patents and we should thus pay them for nothing, but that's IP law for you ;).

Re:-1 Troll

[geekoid]

haha. Apples OS has gone through major changes and bad parts, and 'Linux' makes no sense in this comparison. You really need to compare flavors.

Red hat has gone through major change, some times sucky changes. as have SUSE, Slackware.

Re:-1 Troll

[Magic5Ball]

Firefox 3 beta 3ish un-moved its home button after widespread complaints hit the mainstream IT press to undo the unexplained decision by project leaders (Bug #404109).

Re:-1 Troll

[geekoid]

No, it's not.

It's not a government, it's a license.
Yes, you are free to fork it and dictate how it's governed, but you are creating a different way to run it.

I can for it and not let anyone else determine what I do with it, or I can have every one dictate the changes to go into it.

"most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship"
the only people who say that are people whose government happens to be benevolent in a way they like.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

oh come on seriously? this is rated as interesting?

MSFT is a publicly traded company but can only be bought (maybe) by the richest person in the world or a cooperative of the richest persons in the world (if at that). How is that the same as a group of individuals (say 10) paying 100 dollars each to a programmer to change something in the Ubuntu distribution. I mean really how is that the same. The latter is very possible (governments, businesses and local charities do that every year!), the former is a fantasy. Really? +4 interesting?

Re:-1 Troll

[linzeal]

You gives a fuck what Aristotle said he also justified slavery and was in bed with the ruling elite at the time. His idea of democracy was a way for land owners to extend their rule over the vast majority of the population. He believed that people like carpenters, engineers and other working classes were beneath some sort of Kingdom of Philosophers.

Anarchism is a very broad and deep ideology and for you to paint it with one brush shows you are wholly ignorant on the subject. There is everything from Anarcho-syndicalism which espouses rule by cooperative economic system which could have police and even a military as part of its government to things like Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (like what Burning Man once was) which believe that wherever there is the will to freedom and autonomy there can be 'zones' that exist outside of all governments. There is also the idea of Direct Democracy, which besides being the most pure democratic ideology by eliminating rule by Representatives, Kings or Priests fits in perfectly within Anarchist Ideology.

Rule by force is a form of all centralized governments not most forms of Anarchism.

Re:-1 Troll

[breagerey]

freedom != democracy

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say Linux you really mean Ubuntu or gnome. Have you tried KDE in the last couple of years?

KDE4.4.1 is now stable and has really nice usability features (that no longer need 3d to use) and has the added bonus of coming with a google earth style app that replaces the wallpaper - out the box...

The last few years of KDE development have not been stable however,

Re:-1 Troll

[Omestes]

We just got much closer to a Communist Democracy today in fact.
Hope you're all out there shopping for your now GOVERNMENT MANDATED health insurance - that or you can pay 2% of your annual income as a penalty.

Land of the Free indeed - land of the free lunch

Do you even know what communism is? Obama's health care isn't it, nor does it even come close to it. It is probably even the direct opposite of it, since it is mandating people to give money to insurance companies, meaning it is corporatist (or fascist), not communist. If we got the public option (or better, lined the insurance companies up against the wall, and ONLY had public health care) then we're coming closer to socialism, which, again, isn't communism.

Get off the "communism is bad, therefore everything I don't like is communism" vibe. It doesn't make you sound smart.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"... totalitarianism within your fork."

Say it isn't so! All these years and I hadn't noticed!

Re:-1 Troll

[IICV]

No, it's not.

It's not a government, it's a license.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand that, but I clearly said:

I would argue that GPL projects, by the requirements of the license, create a type of government that is neither democracy nor dictatorship

(relevant segment in bold)

The GPL is a license, yes. However, the form of government that gathers around GPL projects is a neat mixture of democracy and dictatorship, and one that I would argue brings together the best attributes of both.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

...can't you just move the buttons in gconf-editor?

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything is utterly a democracy. Even with closed source, you are free to hire someone to 'obtain' the source, to move to another country with lax rules, and create your own version of the software.

Just because it's technically possible doesn't make it feasible.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like saying, "Open Source Is Not A Fish."

Re:-1 Troll

[mysidia]

You have the option to keep using XP and blow off Windows 7 entirely.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

God, what would I give for mod points right now?

Bravo. I award you three internets.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, is this really an impassioned defence of any form of anarchism as a workable method of organizing anything larger than a trip to the donut shop? You will have better luck joining the flat earth club.

We had anarchy for much of human history, and it was a bloodbath of epic proportions. We ran screaming from it as soon as we had enough collective brain cells to do so and never looked back.

Anarchism is the cry of a wailing infant. It appeals to the red faced baby inside us that still shouts I DO NOT LIKE TEH RULES!!! And some few of us have enough ignorance of history and human nature to confuse it for a real political philosophy.

You do realize that social animals always form rules by which to organize themselves, and means to enforce those rules, don't you?

Counterargument: "But this one time, teh rules were not written on parchment, so it's still teh anarchy, woooo!"

Anarchism is so immediately awful that pro-anarchists have an extraordinarily difficult time finding any examples of successful societies which live by their principles, but even the few they tend to cite are usually not anarchist in anything but an incorrectly applied label, because they still depended on rules to work, and those rules were still enforced collectively (regardless of whether that enforcement happened via informal forms of coercion, such as beatings and lynchings, or people in uniform). Yes, if you twist it enough, you can call any damn thing anarchism and work the outsider cachet. ;)

I love that you cited burning man, you utter fool. Yes, burning man is laden with rules.

http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html

It's the perfect example that an irrational desire to never organize will create misery that people - even many anarchists - will immediately move to alleviate.

Oh, you went to burning man back in the day, and had a great time, right? So there was no reason for the rules, since their absence didn't affect you. Hence, waaaaaah.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what you're saying is that it isn't *ELECTORAL* democracy. There are many forms of democracy, electoral being the one that most people are familiar with.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Its common practice to put this sort of thing in a bug report, especially if you think its a bug. (If you read the actual report, you would notice the first posters believed it was a bug.)

Oh im posting anon arnt I.. hmm here *Insert ad hominem attack here*

Re:-1 Troll

[mysidia]

3. Convince the maintainer to fix it the way you like it.

Which is exactly what they are trying to do, by using very strong words, demands, and trying to get a 'vote' to convince the maintainer that their position is popular and the maintainer should fix it.

Even if Open source isn't a democracy, the results of a vote/study should be persuasive, provided the study was conducted in a fair unbiased way that didn't allow supporters to self-select (since apathetic users who liked the change would be less likely to show up at a 'vote' about undoing the change -- in fact, the vocal minority opposing a certain design change might get more votes their way, due only to the fact that more of the opponents are concerned about the matter, and supporters barely notice a vote is going on).

Re:-1 Troll

[mysidia]

That's not democratic... that's either plutocracy or capitalist.

Anyways, Open Source projects are not a form of government, they don't make rules or laws -- they write code.

I'm not sure it makes sense to use descriptions of government to describe the process of writing code and deciding what goes in and what goes out.

The US District court of Eastern Texas isn't a democracy either.

That fact doesn't mean the US government is not democratic.

Re:-1 Troll

[Cwix]

Buying a software company and having them code you your own GUI : $300,000

Buying enough stock in microsoft that you can force millions of users to use your design changes : Priceless

Re:-1 Troll

[mysidia]

Why not just make it close,minimize,maximize:minimize,maximize,close Then everyone can be happy?

Re:-1 Troll

[linzeal]

You have no idea what you are talking about, all of your points are exasperations of ignorance that you turn into barbs. Anarchy etymologically means without rulers, not without rules. Let me reiterate that. Anarchism, the modern political ideology which has been written on by such philosophers as Chomsky, Bakunin and Kropotkin still involves a government just one without any rule-making representative or royal government. During the Spanish Civil war these modern Anarchistic political and economic ideologies were followed by 100's of thousand of people and dozens of cities, towns and provinces within Spain. They might not of been perfect but we will never know how well they would of worked long term because they were crushed by Communists and Fascists before they could get off the ground. Burning man was not always 'laden with rules' that is why I said what it 'once was'. Google its history. Reading comprehension is a useful skill, you might want to work on it.

Re:-1 Troll

[Chris Burke]

What you really mean to say here is that what most people call Anarchy is not, and would be better described as Warlordism.

Or rather, Anarchy is only Anarchy for about ten minutes and then becomes Warlordism as a matter of course.

No system of "government" is more quickly and more completely corrupted into its opposite -- and this by design.

Re:-1 Troll

[mysidia]

Unfortunately it may be in part an explanation for the downfall of Unix on the desktop (and for the success of Unix in the datacenter). Nothing too weird or fancy means you can't impress people much either, since, well, fancy things are usually what commercial OSes provide :)

One of the major ways consumers are convinced to install a piece of software, or buy something is because it does something fancy, looks cool, or has these sophisticated features, in a way that shows it has this advantage over the competition. As long as Unix has none of that to offer by default readily accessible out of the box, it will be at a disadvantage.

But it does mean the result is probably more stable (nothing fancy = reduced complexity = fewer bugs)

Which is great for server farms.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

My criticisms of democracy only go as far as to agree with what James Madison and H.L. Menkin said about democracy. To say that if you reject pure democracy then you must prefer an dictator and that all dictators are evil is just absurd. Some things just should not be a majority vote of anyone that has an opinion just as science does not become truth with consensus.
 
Open Source is a meritocracy where your voice is heard relative to your contribution and against the weight of the merit of your opposition. The best part is that nobody's basic necessities are dependent upon the success of the open source project but in very limited circumstances, and money is not the primary driving force behind decision making.
 
Open source community in general is good at keeping communication lines open and the pool of ideas is greatly valued. If democracy to you is where a lot of people are free to give input, fine, but I don't want to hear you complain when the idea board is flooded with "make it work better", and "this sucks, you should do it different."
 
In my humble opinion, "democracy" is a very poor word choices to describe the nature of the open source community, or even an individual project.
 
Microsoft listens and then does whatever people ask for. The Linux community listens to people, but then does it right. Maybe democracy is the best form of government / organization for many reasons, but that doesn't mean the shortcomings simply don't exist. What frequently impresses me the most about the open source community is the ability to gather such diverse input without blinding people from doing what they know is most practical in principle to the best of their knowledge. I see it as fundamentally more beautiful than democracy without loss of generality for its merits.

Re:-1 Troll

[mrmeval]

You can't get someone making something to do it your way without the standard requisites such as pay, food, sex, clothing, booze, snuggles, hugs, asking them to do it, influencing them to see doing it in such a positive light they do it, psychological or physical abuse, etc.

Currently the more popular way is to get government to go beat them up for you.

Re:-1 Troll

[samirbenabid]

You forgot localization.

Re:-1 Troll

[werwerf]

"The best argument against democracy is obtained talking five minutes with the average voter" - Winston Churchill ... And he was a democrat!

No project should ever be a democracy, it is plain nonsense...

Discuss about ideas, propose things, whatever... But a clear guidance and leadership takes you to the end...

Re:-1 Troll

[Draek]

With apologies to Asimov:

Building your own netbook is impractical to most people. Building your own space station is, similarly, impractical for both people. But if you believe both are equally impractical, your brain is more impractical than both of them combined.

You simply can't compare paying a programmer to work for you, something that many companies both large and small do everyday, with purchasing one of the biggest companies on the planet just to get them to switch an element in its interface.

Re:-1 Troll

[icebraining]

Maybe he likes everything else. And if only he could change the UI, he would get his perfect OS. Pity :)

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

MSFT is a pubically company

wat?

Re:-1 Troll

[lordmetroid]

It is not democracy, democracy means the minority gets repressed. If I fork, no one will shut me down because I am developing a version that caters to my minority views. Hence free software is better than democracy, it is almost total customer freedom.

Re:-1 Troll

[lordmetroid]

Ohh, you mean like the current situation, where the bigest warlod is opressing a whole lot of people and other smaller ones are scurrying around in the shadows trying to compete. The sooner you realize that the world is always in anarchy the better you are off.

Re:-1 Troll

[Myrddin Wyllt]

...And makes one pause when they try to equate it to economic 'communism' (central economic planning)...

You keep using that word my friend - I do not think it means what you think it means.

Many people have equated FOSS with 'communism', but no-one seriously sees any connection between Soviet Bloc state capitalism and the free software movement. The 'other side' pretend they do, but that's just FUD, surely? (Or perhaps not; the opposition to universal health care in the US confused the hell out of me - there still seems to be an almost McCarthyist zeal in America which denys that co-operation and concrete goals can ever, under any circumstances, be superior to competition and blind market forces, even though one gave you Apollo and the other gave you General Motors.)

Many people in Europe see the obvious parallels between FOSS and Socialism/Communism and have no problem with that, it seems that many in the US, even the ones that deride Bible Belters for blindly following an outdated and ludicrous ideology, are guilty of the same fault - the Cold War is over, guys - you won - why are you still drinking the same old Kool-Aid? Sometimes co-operation can be a "good thing".

Re:-1 Troll

[baegucb]

"I'm a bit sad that Taco rewarded them by sending them some traffic."

You RTFA? You must be new here.

Re:-1 Troll

[Secret Rabbit]

You need to go back and learn what a democracy is. Because, you clearly don't understand that the ability to fork is not equal to the ability to vote.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

The XP extended support was an aberration because vista flopped. What MS would like to offer for support is 5 years for six-pack Joe, and 5 years more if you're willing to pay extra. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years for everybody, and 2 years more for server packages. Link

PD: CAPCHA: colors

Re:-1 Troll

[Forty Two Tenfold]

they cast their vote for Windows

people don't like software that changes every time you try to use it

Actually that was the exact reason I quit using MS's sorry lame attempts at software never even reaching the XP stage. Their products kept changing with next to none backward compatibility, bloating out of proportions and with actually no real improvement. Every new release required getting used to new "improved" (they called it that to make it sell, but I never really benefited from the changes) way of doing old things. GNU software on the other hand has been steadily improving on the ease of use and stability with great backward compatibility.

Re:-1 Troll

[Philip_the_physicist]

Those ideas go back to Marx and Engels, but they were not the only communist philosophers, and while their ideas are influential, Marxism is not the only form of communism, just like the US Libertarian party isn't the only kind of libertarian.

Re:-1 Troll

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

I never suggested that a communist state was good or desirable. I merely stated some implications of it.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Anarchic state?

Re:-1 Troll

[dudpixel]

so if you're not using F/OSS because its not a democracy, what the hell ARE you using that supposedly is?

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

And the parent was correct. In open source, the majority does not have power over the minority. It is not democracy.

You see, as previously noted, the minority simply fork. Anarchism, it is.

Re:-1 Troll

[drsmithy]

in fact the ONLY OS I have used that has remained stable in it's UI has been OSX

The OS X UI has changed significantly since its first release. Expose is the most obvious example, but there are many more.

Windows has changed radically every release.

Your bias is laughably obvious you say that Windows has "changed radically" between each release, while also saying neither OS X nor Linux have changed.

Re:-1 Troll

[drsmithy]

Design your user interfaces with the same care and diligence as you define your application's architecture and you won't need to fiddle with it every week.

So since the fundamental Windows UI has remained basically unchanged since 1995, I guess that means Microsoft did a good job ?

Re:-1 Troll

[keeboo]

"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

Is this comment of yours for real? It sounds delirious.

"have them change whatever you like in the code"? This is going to cost you $billions.
Are you that much out of reality to compare hiring a coder to that?

Re:-1 Troll

[crispytwo]

What you describe is an anarchy and not a democracy.

Democracy requires voting, and, coincidently following what the result of that vote is. In your described tree, voting may or may not occur, and even if it does, it can be ignored. Basically, you look after your neighbors and they may return the favor -- it is usually in their best interest to do so, if they like it, or somewhat like it.

No, Open Source is not a democracy. It is anarchy. Wonderful, unabashed, and fully appreciated anarchy. There is no better place to be.

for reference:
anarchy: a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society.

apply this to your life and it will improve.

Re:-1 Troll

[crispytwo]

No, no. The "free market system" is not democratic either. It is much closer to a dictatorship. "Vote with your dollar" is a naive and foolish saying.

Re:-1 Troll

[mahadiga]

I think open source is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knesset

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

... yes but if you have, say 60:40 split, all you have to do in anarchy is to view it as a two groups that have 100% agreement :)

Re:-1 Troll

[the_womble]

Given that Mark Shuttleworth usually describes himself as "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" of Ubuntu, no one claimed it was democratic.

On the other hand, although the project is not democratic, the software is free, so you are free to fork it if you wish.

Re:-1 Troll

[the_womble]

"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

It's not really impractical so much as most people don't care *enough*. I'm sure you could go over to Rentacoder or something and find someone in India or China willing to move the window control buttons on that theme for under $100 on a particular build of Ubuntu. The Microsoft stock comparison is laughable. The issue is that for the people involved the time and/or money to make it the way they want it isn't *worth* the cost, no matter how little that cost might be.

"If you don't like the interface changes in Windows 7, you don't have the option to either change it yourself or pay someone who knows how to change it for you."

Last I heard, MSFT is a pubically traded company. You CAN buy it and have them change whatever you like in the code. While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.

It's not really impractical so much as most people don't care *enough*. I'm sure you could go over to Rentacoder or something and find someone in India or China willing to move the window control buttons on that theme for under $100 on a particular build of Ubuntu. The Microsoft stock comparison is laughable. The issue is that for the people involved the time and/or money to make it the way they want it isn't *worth* the cost, no matter how little that cost might be.

An earlier comment pointed out that its in the bug submitter's PPA, presumably hosted by Launchpad: so you do not have to pay anything.

What this is an example of, is that you may not have to pay to make a change. If lots of people want the same change, only one has to do it and make it available.

Re:-1 Troll

[Threni]

"Oh, no room for Bender, huh? Fine! I'll go build my own lunar lander, with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack. Ahh, screw the whole thing!"

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Re:-1 Troll

[socheres]

well then, so if contributors don't get to vote, in this democracy that you speak of (in which they fork, don't vote) them maybe they can revoke the right to use their contributed code ?...

ah that's not possible either.. and i guess this time a law of nature will be invoked instead of the concept of democracy.

screw you guys, i'm going home :)

Re:-1 Troll

[AlexParadise]

That's not democracy, that's the creation of many states by civil war. Each tree still has its own government, and Shuttleworth's can remain a dictatorship. Which I for one am perfectly happy about.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

That would make a great marketing slogan. "Windows. For the people who abhor change."

Re:-1 Troll

[drinkypoo]

What you describe is not a democracy: it's probably closer to anarchy. A free-for-all, with nobody in any position to make any decisions.

There's no such thing as anarchy among social creatures. They always establish an order (if one is not selected for them genetically.)

Once the leadership gets involved in decisions, it's a dictatorship. When they're hands-off, it gives the illusion of being a democracy.

Open Source is not a democracy or, inherently, any other kind of ocracy, for just this reason. Just as a government is made up of people, so is a FOSS project. The effects of the governments in the place where they live (regarding intellectual property, and other issues) will affect the project.

A distinction must also be drawn between Open Source software, where you may get the source and redistribute your changes at least as a patchset, and Free Software, which is covered by a Free software license like the GPL. Some projects are organized as a dictatorship; others operate in other ways, for example with foundations and councils. Some, of course, are even commercial ventures. Which brings me around to my next point; it seems like what really matters here is the ownership of the code and the license under which it is published. If you hold copyright on a large body of code, then you exert actual influence in the world of software. If that code is Open it is more likely to be active, which gives it currency. That's not the only way to make code active, of course; you can create a commercial product and use some of the proceeds to fund development. But Open Source provides a means for a single organization or indeed individual to whom a large amount of code is contributed (and to whom copyright is assigned) to exert significant power in the "market". Lines of code people care about become like units of economic currency. Free Software seems a true implementation of a Free Market, which is perhaps only possible in the idealized world of computer software, constructed purely of ideas.

Re:-1 Troll

[Yvanhoe]

The model of individual open source projects has been coined as "Benevolent dictatorship" (apparently a pun on Linus Torvalds' middle name : Benedict). This is especially because of this that open source licenses were made.

Democracy has no meaning in software development : the majority may want something, if it is technically incorrect it will just not work. Democracy in software development is meaningless. This is the realm of the meritocracy : want something ? code it. Can't code ? your opinion has few merit.

Re:-1 Troll

[dpastern]

I totally agree with you. Sadly, most on here won't, because their l33t Linux users (or they think they are). Do you think Apple has its developers making decisions on UI etc? No way. I guarantee they have a dedicated UI department that designs the interfaces and then gives intructions to the development team to make those UIs come alive via programming. Programmers don't think like ordinary people. Programmers don't seem to mind complex. Or illogical. Ordinary users do.

It's sad to see you marked as a troll, but that's a sign of the pro Linux /. times we're in.

There's a reason why Linux is losing market to others (Windows 7/OS X) - because it's ugly and its' over complex to both install, use and administrate. There is no common logic to it. These very people who've voted your comment down are the cause of this, and the real reason why Linux is losing market share on the desktop (not that it had much to begin with). As a point of example, I was showing off my new MacBook Pro to a friend on Saturday night just gone, and he knows a bit about Macs and is also a Linux enthusiast and you know what he said? "You know, Linux has an expose like application, but they fucked with it so much that they ruined it". Apple got it right, didn't tinker with it just to show how l33t they are. Programming just because you can doesn't make it right. Programming to a defined logical purpose is an altogether different thing. This particular guy was a long time Ubuntu user and evangalist but has now switched (mostly) to Windows 7, because it not only looks good, but it's UI suits him better than Ubuntu's was. Interesting.

You can mod me down as a troll all you like, I don't really care. But, in Ten or so years, when Linux on the desktop is all but dead, and most developers have left it because there's no one to program for, you might understand what I'm saying. Ordinary users drive software. If you have the arrogance of most of the Linux kernel development community, and it seems, the Ubuntu community, and tell your ordinary users to piss off, then you'll lose them. Maybe not all of them, maybe not all of them in one go, but they will eventually move to other operating systems and designers that *listen*.

Dave

Re:-1 Troll

[dpastern]

Yeah, that's a really good attitude towards your users. You know what most intelligent users are going to say to you don't you? You can shove your program where the sun don't shine.

This is the exact attitude that is a HUGE turnoff for every newbie Linux user. It's people like you who have killed the spirit in GNU/Linux and, I might add, done a lot of damage to the image.

Keep it up and you won't have many users in the western world. Sure, the poor might go for you and your software, but only until they develop and have the money to buy *real* software.

Dave

Re:-1 Troll

[azgard]

Actually, no. You get it backwards. I am not sure what anarchy is, but I am quite sure that democracy demands that man doesn't have power over other man.

What you are saying about the power of the majority is wrong. Democracy is not a dictatorship of majority. The decisive majority in democracy is decided at each voting, but in dictatorship of majority, the majority is pre-selected and then decides. That's a different system.

Re:-1 Troll

[ThatsNotPudding]

If one more person brings up anarchy, I'm gonna bring down society.

Re:-1 Troll

[TheCarp]

Of course, as Ben Franklin finished that one liberty is a well armed sheep.

Re:-1 Troll

[kinnell]

No. Anarchy is undemocratic, because for practical purposes, in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

If the strong rule the weak, it's not really an anarchy is it?

Re:-1 Troll

[Risen888]

I would appreciate a citation for this.

Re:-1 Troll

[Risen888]

I hate the argument that "If you don't like how things are going in an OSS project, you can just make your own fork! It's so much better than proprietary software because of that!" The fact is that time and knowledge are barriers that bar most people from doing what you propose. I probably don't know the language the the project was built in, I don't have time to learn it, I don't have the time to get familiar with the project's code, I don't have time to figure out how change it, etc. So yeah, the code is right there, but it's useless to a large majority (probably near 99%) of users. There's a better chance of getting the current development team to make a change than me attempting to make that change on my own.

Well, them's the breaks. The license says the code must be available. It says nothing about making it easy for Jim.

Also, it's kind of an asshole thing for Canonical to lure people into their "community" and then outright ignore them.

This, OTOH, I do agree with, because it's not what they advertise. If Ubuntu's all "community community community!" until the moment it becomes inconvenient, well, fuck them.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

If you define anarchy in that way, then it has never existed, and can never exist, in any place where there is more than one person at a time. So I don't think that's very useful. But of course you may use the word however you like.

Re:-1 Troll

[nikanj]

Except that in this case people are not demanding for the developers to write new code - the outcry is against changes that have already been made.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

We've read the same materials. Only where I saw consistent failure, you saw success that merely ended by cruel coincidence, every single time.

What I put forth to you is the position that human beings will never meet each other without one dominating another. And they never will, until such time as they cease to be human. Even at what you would consider to be their prime, your supposed anarchist states had "rulers" - those feared by others, who were able to exercise authority or coercion.

Unfortunately, by being in denial about this aspect of humanity, you deprive yourself of a vital remedy for your own misery. It is the remedy taken, in haste, by everyone foolish enough to believe the dream of anarchism. And that is to create rules to better select your authorities (rather than allowing the most ruthless to select themselves, as they always will otherwise)... and to moderate their power, once you have selected them.

Re:-1 Troll

[Aphoxema]

Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)

I love how a lot of comments are all about this is how decisions should be made, just one person at the top gets the final say - period.
Makes it clear, I think. I'll keep on keeping out of F/OSS, thank you very much. I'm not going to waste my time contributing to someone else's dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.

Open Source is far more like a democracy made up of smaller communisms.

Re:-1 Troll

[mapkinase]

My statement was a little confusing. In the quoted I meant democracy ONLY in a sense of presence of consumer products, not political leadership.

In the latter sense, our political leadership of course has to pass approval of the riches, but in the former sense, the consumer products we see on the market are "democratic" (up to the limits of IQ of a general public which could be fooled by marketing). It's "we" who chose them. (There are other limitations, of course).

Re:-1 Troll

[mapkinase]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1591162&cid=31585254

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

The free market system is not at all democratic, because it fails the principle of one person == one vote.

In fact, a free market system naturally tends towards an oligarchy, where all the power is in the hands of those at the top with the most money.

Re:-1 Troll

[Mike Buddha]

Yes, in fact it does. I think more telling is that not only have they not needed to modify their design, but others, including the Linux windows managers and Mac OSX, have copied it.

Re:-1 Troll

[Mike Buddha]

Ahh, the Ad Hominem attack coupled with the straw man fallacy. Those who believe that they can extrapolate an absurd assumption from a very clear, straight forward statement. Those who can willingly deflect from Open Source's failures rather than accept a valid critique and learn from their mistakes. What a blissful world that must be.

Re:-1 Troll

[Mike Buddha]

I use windows because I got sick of having my desktop and projects break from week to week using a "Stable" OS distribution because of the mercurial whims of an army of petty dictators. I'd rather have a single dictator than an army to deal with, period.

Re:-1 Troll

[godefroi]

So wait, any "contribution" that doesn't agree with the beliefs of the reigning elite (biggest contributors) is detracting from the project?

Sounds like democracy to me...

Re:-1 Troll

[godefroi]

So Cuba is a democracy, because you're free to jump on a boat, paddle to an uninhabited scrap of land somewhere, and set up your own society?

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

If the world was of unlimited size, and boat trips were instantaneous, free of cost, and could be taken from your easy chair, you would have something.

Re:-1 Troll

[dotgain]

Context. I read posts in the context of the post to which they are replying. Go back, read your parent, then your post. You'll see.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

He who pays the bills gets the say. You can pay in cash or labor in FOSS.
Just as you don't have to listen to a vote of your entire town on what you will eat for dinner. The major contributors are not the slaves of the users.
What is very democratic is if you don't like it you can fork the project and or go to another.
The only limits are set by your abilities and desire. All in all a very free system I think.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is a netocracy

Linux is an oligarchy

Linux kernel is a meritocracy

Open source is communism.

Cool thing is they all exist at the same time in every distro

(Don't worry, Windows OS is a empire and Apple OSX is a dictatorship anyway)...

Re:-1 Troll

[belg4mit]

Stardock WindowBlinds anyone?
Surely of the hundreds of themes available, there must be one with the controls on the left :-P

Re:-1 Troll

[stonewolf]

You do not have to be a programmer to do what HungryHobo suggested. Nothing he described requires any programming knowledge.

What you do have to be is someone who can lead and someone who has enough money to pay to set up the web site. Of course, you can get the website for free.

If you have a good concept and can communicate it effectively you can start an open source project. Open source projects can be based around art, music, hardware, anything at all.

A good leader with a compelling vision will attract the other talents needed to get the project done.

Some people will take risk and just try to do something. If it doesn't work out they chalk it up to experience and move on. Other people think way to long and way to hard about all the reasons they should and shouldn't do something. If they decide to do something, and it doesn't work, they wind up on antidepressants and/or become impotent. The second type loves to laugh at people who have a failed project. The first type laughs at people who are too scared to try.

Some of us measure our lives by the stories we have to tell. Ever had the president and CEO of a hundred million dollar start up pound the floor between you feet with hammer? No? Why not? You don't think CEOs are sane do you?

What type are you? Me, I've done 5 starts ups.

Stonewolf

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Communities such as the ones you describe are a beautiful example of what is possible in a free society when people are able to use their means as they choose.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

in an anarchic state, the strong rule the weak.

Yes, the strong. Like cops, bosses, generals, politicians, and priests, all of which are key fixtures in anarchical societies.

Democracies have none of these things, and are therefore societies in which everyone is equal, and in which the only rules are those of reciprocity and social responsibility. In a democracy, everyone is unbound by strange laws passed down from high and far away places - rules are made by the people for whom they exist. In democracies, economic inequalities don't exist, as all productive machinery is available for all to use, and as a result a true equality of opportunity exists: nobody is pressured by economic forces into work s/he can't stand. In democracies, there is no state machinery set up to enable people to own or profit from the work of others. In democracies, decisions are made by consensus - and great effort goes into reaching that consensus - because majority rule is seen as...

Oh, no, wait. I got the words "democracy" and "anarchy" mixed up completely. And so did you.

Re:-1 Troll

[Hurricane78]

Free market system is democratic in a sense that everybody can vote with their dollars between products, but individual companies are not democratic.

Are you kidding?
The so-called “free” market is defined as having no rules/regulations whatsoever.
Which is the definition of the law of the jungle.
Which is the exact opposite of democracy. (Yeah, right wing nutters: Choose one! >:-D)

Reality does not adhere to your silly little oversimplified model.
With you free-market-ers it’s like with the treehuggers:
A happy happy dream land, that unfortunately is not reality.

Re:-1 Troll

[Hurricane78]

Man, you think like an engineer. Seemingly unable to think outside the box.
As if the incredibly crappy and bad interface of windows, buttons and dialogs were the pinnacle of all UI development forever until the end of all time. ^^
I’m not talking about colorful clickable cuteness. I’m talking about efficiency.

Migration compatibility is a really stupid goal. Because it by definition never allows you to become BETTER than what people are migration from. So people will never have a reason to change. KDE and Gnome suffer extremely from this imitation rage.
But do you know what was the first time I heard female friends say “I want that too!” related to Linux? When I showed them Compiz!!

And yes, I know this, because I actually design better interfaces. Interfaces that allow the ease of use of Notepad AND the power of VI, without ANY compromises. Period. And I threw buttons bars, windows, menus, modal dialogs, monolithic apps, task bars, (desk|app|*)lets, and anything mouse-only over board.

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

The XP extended support was an aberration because vista flopped. What MS would like to offer for support is 5 years for six-pack Joe, and 5 years more if you're willing to pay extra. Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 5 years for everybody, and 2 years more for server packages. Link

PD: CAPCHA: colors

Actually LTS is 3 years, 5 years for server.

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

Windows has changed radically every release.

But not so radically they feel the need to fuck with UI intuitiveness for no reason whatsoever.

Yes, the Min/Max/Close sequence in on the right has been in place long enough that it IS the first place users look, so by moving it elsewhere violates intuitiveness.

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

Thats actually wrong,

Communism is both a political and economic system, at least as envisioned by Karl Marx, where the state would evaporate after the revolution,

nice try though

And if there's no state, who makes the decisions?

The people. Sounds like the actual definition of "democracy" to me.

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

"Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others :)"

Bullshit. Open Source is meritocracy: the one with better merits gets to stablish what's done.

Of course the most affordable merit is your own time and ability but money will work just as good.

As a whole, perhaps. Individual projects vary widely. Ubuntu is 100% plutocracy. Shuttleworth may not be able to tell his UI from a hole in the ground, but he's got the money and he made it clear. It's the golden rule.

Re:-1 Troll

[randyleepublic]

>> someone may even explicitly take a moment to personally tell you, "fuck off, peon."

Oh! That's what they meant when they said, "It is a bug." "We have no plans to fix it."

Re:-1 Troll

[mapkinase]

I am not a fan of a free market either. But by design the market system is that the customer votes for the products with their dollars and by design it's supposed to be a consumer driven (hence "democracy"): bad products will go away, good products win.

And this system works to a certain extent at a certain scale: for example, at a farmer's market. However, at larger scales free market system (combined with interest system - this is very important factor) leads to imperialism - concentration of capital in few hands and as a result, no choice for consumers, no market democracy.

My example referred only to the situations where free market works: diversity of fairly competing producers. Since it was not a post about free market, it did not matter for me that in modern reality free market does not work in developed countries.

Re:-1 Troll

[godefroi]

Forking a project isn't democratic at all. It may be free, but it's not democratic. Maybe you should tell your government you don't agree with them and that you're just going to set up your own... think they'll go along?

Re:-1 Troll

[godefroi]

*sigh* I'm trying to draw the distinction here between FREE and DEMOCRATIC. They are not the same thing. Just because you can fork a project at will (FREE) doesn't give you a vote in how the original project is run (DEMOCRATIC). Let's be honest with ourselves here... while most foss is FREE, it isn't DEMOCRATIC at all.

Re:-1 Troll

[LWATCDR]

You are so confused. Democracy isn't freedom? It is the tyranny of the masses but works pretty well for national governments.
In a Democracy everybody gets a vote to tell you what to do.
FOSS is about freedom in theory. The developers do it because they want to or sometimes because the want to get paid to.
They have the freedom to do what they want how they want to. If they want to listen to your suggestion they can if they don't they can.
They are totally free.
And you are totally free to not like it and to take the code and do what you want with it.
But the user base has no right to treat the developers as an unpaid code slave to their will.
It isn't a government, it isn't a democracy. It is free.
And that is that. If you don't like it then start a distro where every end user gets to vote on the design.
I vote for pink ponies.

Re:-1 Troll

[turbidostato]

" Shuttleworth may not be able to tell his UI from a hole in the ground, but he's got the money"

Therefore he has the better merits.

QED.

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

Must be a usage of the word "Merit" I was not previously aware of.

Re:-1 Troll

[turbidostato]

"Must be a usage of the word "Merit" I was not previously aware of."

So it must be. Even as a general matter, one of the meanings of merit is "Demonstrated ability or achievement": take for granted that money is a great source fo merit because of its "demonstrated ability or achievement".

But regarding open source you can order merits (the ability to reach achievement) this way:

1) Doing it yourself
2) Using your money so others will do it in your regard
3) Taking what you can for free
4) Bemoaning and crying to get nothing but upset people of higher ranks

You see, all this was about people at level 4 doing their labour (moaning) and somebody at level 2 (Shuttleworth) explaining that 2 > 4 and that means that it's he the one that gets to make things happening the way he wants, not them.

Shuttleworth's was not an exercise of dictatorship, as you seem to think, but just a plain explanation of how things happen.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Its far less oppressive than you might think. They have organized around a system where people just...have normal every day paying jobs. They all pay into a common fund, get an allowance to live off of, and even get a pension from their community. They seem to live (according to articles that I have read) more like a large communal tribe than a town or city of disconnected individuals.

“Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there’s a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forthy-eight, then fifty-six – for your neighbor’s supper – for his wife’s operation – for his child’s measles – for his mother’s wheel chair – for his uncle’s shirt – for his nephew’s schooling – for the baby next door – for the baby to be born – for anyone anywhere around you – it’s theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures – and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end From each according to his ability, to each according to his need

http://fvdb.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/the-twentieth-century-motor-company-in-the-making/

Re:-1 Troll

[geminidomino]

"Must be a usage of the word "Merit" I was not previously aware of."

So it must be. Even as a general matter, one of the meanings of merit is "Demonstrated ability or achievement": take for granted that money is a great source fo merit because of its "demonstrated ability or achievement".

But regarding open source you can order merits (the ability to reach achievement) this way:

1) Doing it yourself
2) Using your money so others will do it in your regard
3) Taking what you can for free
4) Bemoaning and crying to get nothing but upset people of higher ranks

You see, all this was about people at level 4 doing their labour (moaning) and somebody at level 2 (Shuttleworth) explaining that 2 > 4 and that means that it's he the one that gets to make things happening the way he wants, not them.

Shuttleworth's was not an exercise of dictatorship, as you seem to think, but just a plain explanation of how things happen.

When did I ever use the word "dictatorship?"

You incorrectly stated that this system is an example of a "meritocracy." The leader of Ubuntu does not have the ability, he has the money to buy the time of people with the ability.

It is not ability that determines leadership, it's money. That makes it, by definition, a plutocracy, not a meritocracy.

Any other points you made on the subject are orthogonal to the matter at hand. I don't care if ubuntu is a plutocracy, I was just calling you on your false statement.

Re:-1 Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

So by that virtue, OSS is a netocracy/democracy. As a slightly above average user, I have to deal with jerks like Ulrich Depper (he should be renamed Depp, which is lamer in German) or Mark "Shuttlecraft", cross fingers and hope that somebody who is a good programmer/influential rich bad ass will fork it.

Luckily, there is always the freedom to organize and start your own. While it makes you a pariah in both worlds (people tend to shun individualists in democracies, and support by mainstream technologies tends to be lower for more individual software projects), you still can choose what's what on your computer.

Re:-1 Troll

[turbidostato]

"When did I ever use the word "dictatorship?""

"plutocracy" then. Feel better?

"You incorrectly stated that this system is an example of a "meritocracy." The leader of Ubuntu does not have the ability, he has the money to buy the time of people with the ability."

That's your opinion. Mine is that you incorrectly misunderstand "ability" for "technical ability". That Shuttleworth has the ability to make Ubuntu happen is not an opinion but an stated fact since Ubuntu in fact happens because the obvious reason that he has both the intention and the ability (word that comes from "able" not from "technician") to make it happen.

"It is not ability that determines leadership, it's money."

Again you misunderstand "ability" for "technical ability". Leadership becomes determined by... leadership abilities, not the lessen of them is money to make things happen as planned.

"That makes it, by definition, a plutocracy, not a meritocracy."

Not, and not by definition. While it's true that "plutocracy" is (by wikipedia) "...rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth" that a needed condition, but not a sufficient one.

The same definition follows with "In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low" which is far away for the reality here: Debian is a well-known and respected Linux distribution as it is Ubuntu. They both are in the position they are for their own merits which is the mark of a meritocracy while the abilities used to achieve that similar position are quite different: money and goal on the focus in the case of Ubuntu, volonteer effort and pure technical reasons on the other. *Both* are abilities since they *both* are *able* to push their respective projects to a notable position. Since it's not money the only asset that stablishes or garantees a meritorial position on the Linux world (you have Red Hat or Ubuntu, but you have Debian, Slackware or Arch too) nor it is the main merit even within Ubuntu (are top Ubuntu individuals chosen because of the money wealth they control or, maybe, because they have already demonstrated their value for the project? and remember that quite some of then are current and former Debian Developers themselves).

"Any other points you made on the subject are orthogonal"

Sure they are! Since they are there "just" to support my claim, they must be orthogonal to the subject, yeah, sure.

"I don't care if ubuntu is a plutocracy, I was just calling you on your false statement."

I hear the call; it's only it's not a false statement by any regard. Or are the packages within Ubuntu chosen by the money amount provided by their respective stakeholders?

Re:-1 Troll

[godefroi]

I think you misunderstand me (I think... your post is hard to follow...).

Trust me, I'm with the developers here. For sure MY users get very little say how MY software works... I write it for myself, the way I want it.

Re:-1 Troll

[sourcerror]

Oh, and customization is really an option for most proprietary software!

If you buy the software that already does what you need you don't need customization. (There are areas, where there isn't good OSS alernatives.)

Vote with your feet

[Anonymous Coward]

Fork the source and tell the dictators to go fork themselves.

Re:Vote with your feet

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and everyone will just leave Canonical out in the cold because 3 fucking buttons got moved. You neckbeards amaze me constantly.

Any software project that is a Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Is doomed to fail.

Re:Any software project that is a Democracy

[Minwee]

That must be why they changed their name to Miro.

Re:Any software project that is a Democracy

[gad_zuki!]

>Is doomed to fail.

May I present to the court, exhibit A, The Homer.

Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[scenestar]

Ubuntu has becoming more and more interwoven with Debian

It's time to cut all ties, before it becomes a corporate ball and chain.

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[postbigbang]

Your posting makes not a bit of sense. Could you qualify that? In English? Please?

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[jplopez]

Ubuntu has becoming? That's unpossible!

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[jim_v2000]

Dramatic much?

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[Culture20]

Dramatic much?

Dramatic Every. Freaking. TIME!

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[eclectro]

Ubuntu has becoming? That's unpossible!

And hence the name of the fork of became "Unbuntu."

Re:Get Canonicall OUT of Debian environment

[Jorl17]

That's far more than insightful, that's the plain truth.

Was it ever a democracy?

[gravyface]

Benevolent dictatorship is probably the most fitting pseudo-political label.

Re:Was it ever a democracy?

[shutdown -p now]

Key word here is "benevolent".

There's nothing benevolent about this design decision. It's utterly stupid and beyond excuse. I won't even bother explaining why, because you can read the numerous rationales in links from TFA, and find countless more on Google in 5 seconds. It was also already discussed on Slashdot.

My favourite,

[dotgain]

in Gnome, in this order "Restart", "Cancel", "Shut Down".

We all know what a jackass is....

[rimcrazy]

It is a Thoroughbred designed by a committee, or in this case a huge community. Good for Mark. Inputs are important but final design decisions should not be subject to a vote.

Re:We all know what a jackass is....

[Rand Race]

I hate that analogy.

Jackasses are beasts of burden, dray animals. Donkeys WORK and they work hard. They're smart, tough and eminently useful.

Thoroughbreds are high-strung single-purpose overbred dimwitted toys that only indulgent wealthy people own or want.

Re:We all know what a jackass is....

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Mark managed the situation. He was decisive without being either flippant or disrespectful. He saw and understood both sides of the argument and made a call. Good work.

Is IT management so bad that we all see this as remarkable?

Re:We all know what a jackass is....

[Anonymous Coward]

final design decisions should not be subject to a vote.

That's obviously whats in contention here. The common folk are rebelling against their imperialist dictator.

Re:We all know what a jackass is....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a severe case of authoritarian personality. You admire Shuttleworth because he's stinking rich and powerful. Yes, design by committee often doesn't work, but that doesn't mean that design by whim of somebody who happens to be The Boss Of It All works any better.

Some strong indications that there's something wrong with Shuttleworth and with the Ubuntu process:
* His underhanded way of sliding this in shortly before feature freeze of an LTS release
* His condescending way of explaining the change by not explaining it: he wants to open up some space on the right because he would like to try out "something" in half a year...
* His resorting to power instead of reason
* The sycophantic behavior of people in middle positions, praising the change as soon as they realized it comes from Shuttleworth, even if nobody understands what problem it's trying to solve

People complaining.....

[Jason Quinn]

People complaining *is* a form of data. I wish Shuttleworth would acknowledge that.

Re:People complaining.....

[Volante3192]

He did. He said it's welcome.

That still does not mean Canonical will do what the complainers want.

Re:People complaining.....

[geekoid]

he does. However there becomes a point when it become pointless. Flamewars, for example.

really this should be solved under two criteria:

What is the the science behind human design say?
What is the expect behavior?

There may be a way to do something more efficiently, but do you an ingrained habit of how something is currently used it may be counterproductive to change it.
List all those reason, then decide.

Re:People complaining.....

[kgo]

Not very useful data. If ubuntu has eight million users like they claim, they only need four million and one to complain to change the settings... Even if, say one-thousand, or even ten-thousand people signed a petition to get the buttons back on the other side, it's pretty meaningless. Maybe everyone who signed represents a hundred people who don't like it but didn't bother to complain. Maybe it's one-to-one. There's really no way to know what the numbers mean and extrapolate that out.

Re:People complaining.....

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but there is a noise level of "people gripe about every change, no matter how minor." You have to be able to separate the people with genuine complaints from the people griping because it's different-- that's not an easy task!

Making it even worse, on the Internet, a single complainer can look like a dozen or more different people with very little effort.

Re:People complaining.....

[Skrapion]

Yes, it is a form of data.

Of course, it's also a self-selected sample, which makes it virtually useless, for the same reason that a web poll is useless.

Re:People complaining.....

[Draek]

How much software do you have on your computer right now? how many times have you wrote to a project maintainer to say "hey, I tried your project and it works fine, keep up the good work!"?

And that is why people do not, and *should* not, put much weight behind the complainers.

Ubuntu is a club

[jofas]

Hence why it's ok for Ubuntu to have "gold members" who get t shirts and junk for being "active contributors."

Re:Ubuntu is a club

[mcgrew]

Is it a wood or an iron?

Re:Ubuntu is a club

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an Iron, Woods is fscked right now Ubuntu not so much...

but wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's NOT snowing outside.... hmmm. 0_o

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Democracy is a really nice word but it's meaning is amorphous at best. Usually it is used to give the Westerners among us (myself included) a warm fuzzy. I don't want anything made by committee. Open source is more free market than democratic: if it works it survives and if it doesn't it dies.

This article seems like a gigantic troll.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want anything made by committee.

Han: "We don't have time to discuss this in a committee!"

Leia: "I am NOT a committee!"

Sorry, had to be said. :)

On the more serious side, though, he does have a (sort of a) point. Someone has to make a decision on how something gets arranged, and if we argue and harp and fret over it, then it will take years to get anything done. Now, I'm not cynical about democracy, but I do have one complaint about ours. Put anything through Congress, and it will take years for anything to happen to it. Let's not make open source like that.

What should have happened in this instance? The complainer should have forked the source and made his own. I'm sure that there are plenty of other people who see it his way who would be happy to maintain it. That's what Linux has been doing for years, and it's what makes Linux so great.

Another thing they could have done is make it an option and let the end user decide where the buttons go. Then you're better than both Windows AND Mac.

side note: CAPTCHA is "jackass"

Re:So what?

[bynary]

I don't want anything made by committee

You took the words right out of my mouth. I also do not want anything made by a single, misguided individual.

Compare to the US Democratic Process

[itomato]

The people do not directly get to vote on things like, oh, I dunno.. Health Care Bills, whether we go to war, who we want as President. Input is offered, sometimes accepted, but let's face it - once the reins are in someone else's hands the ego prevents a welcome and good-natured pass.

It's about control and structure, not about pure natural selection at the hands of plebes.

Ubuntu is just as Democratic as the USA, for better or worse.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[tgd]

The US is a republic, not a democracy.

The difference may be something glossed over in schools in the US, but the different was *important* to the people who created the US's system of government.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Wyatt Earp]

The United States of America has never ever been a direct Democracy and they never pretended to be. The United States of America is a Republic, stronger at the Federal level than it used to be and should be, but thats besides the point.

At the local level its a representative democracy (in some places direct democracy). We elect people to hold an office, school board, water board, sheriff, sometimes Judge, Mayor, town councillors, etc. We elect people to the county/parish and state offices.

It used to be that the state appointed the Senators but now its an elected position, so we vote for Congressmen and Senators to represent us at the national level and we get to vote for who we want as President and then the Electoral College votes for the President.

I'm damned glad that the US isn't a direct democracy, the people are too damned fickle.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[FTWinston]

Then you'd better start lobbying

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

> The US is a republic, not a democracy.

It's a democratic republic, a form of democracy. Just because we elect representatives instead of holding plebiscites does not make it not a democracy.

Reciting some phrase you were told in grade school civics without further qualification does not make you smart or even look smart.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's true that we don't get to vote directly on "health care" bills and war declarations, the result is still our fault.
We voters *elect* into office the people who vote on bills and declarations. Too many of us base our vote on sound bites and, more recently, the cult of personality. That is the problem- we don't have (or take) the time to do enough research on who we're voting for. Most of us listen to one perspective or the other when we should be open-minded and listen to both perspectives.

Meanwhile, back on the original topic; if people don't like the way the interface has changed in Ubuntu they can start another variant.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that it's easy to move to a different distribution if you don't like the direction yours is going in. It's not easy to move to a different country if you don't like the decisions your leaders are making. That does make open source a bit more democratic.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is a republic, not a democracy.

And it all works well until some oriental looking bitch posts a vote of no confidence in the chancellor, and gets an even worse bastard who can force-choke people elected.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

If I hear this semantic nitpickery one more time I'm going to punch myself in the face. Fine, there is a specific governmental structure "democracy" that the US doesn't fit. We get it. Thank you for your pedantry. Everyone who isn't an insufferable douche also knows that there is a broader use of the term "democracy" that encompasses all forms of government wherein the exercise of power can be meaningfully traced to regular elections by a broad, if not universal, selection of the adult population of the governed.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Anonymous Coward]

Those statements now belong to the ages, as they now presently represent nothing against what modern textbooks say.

History is constantly being rewritten. Soon, history will be for philosophers, and economics will become the historical forte. Alternative economic theory and money systems will be heretical against the almighty umbrella of pure capitalism. Bow down and relish in the future greed awaiting humanity.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[ThrowAwaySociety]

The US is a republic, not a democracy.

The difference may be something glossed over in schools in the US, but the different was *important* to the people who created the US's system of government.

Because there isn't a difference. Republicanism is a way of implementing democracy.

Just because the US "Republican" Party and the US "Democratic" party are at loggerheads doesn't mean the concepts of republicanism and democracy are in any way opposed

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Chris Burke]

The US is a republic, not a democracy.

The U.S. is a republic because it's leader is a President, not a Monarch.

The comparison you meant to make is "The US is a Representative Democracy, not a Direct Democracy."

Both are kinds of Democracy.

My schooling did not gloss over the differences, it actually taught them correctly.

The only one who uses "republic" and "democracy" like you do is the CIA World Factbook, and it's wildly inconsistent and basically random in how it applies its terms. Don't learn civics from the CIA.

Re:Compare to the US Democratic Process

[Patch86]

I hate when people say that.

It is both. Full stop.

A republic means "a country ruled by someone other than a monarch". The US is certainly one of those, as is France, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, etc.

A democracy means "a country whose governance is ultimately answerable to the people". In the US, the president, Congress, state governors, sanitation officials, and the rest are all chosen as a result of public ballots.

Your claim is often made because the US founding fathers were openly critical of "democracy"; at the time the term referred almost exclusively to direct democracy (which these days is extremely rare on a national scale), whereas the system that they were pioneering was a much more nuanced and novel form of representative democracy (electoral colleges, double elected congress, etc.). It's also a fallacy to assume that the modern US is anything like how the founding fathers envisaged it... /end political sciences rant.

He's right to tell the guy to stick it...

[NRP128]

If the dude doesn't like it, he can go devote hours upon hours to his own fork of Debian or better yet, he can run his own version of the ubuntu code. What about all the people who WANTED the buttons on the other side? Suddenly ONLY his opinion matters?

Open Source software is has to be a Republic. Ultimately somebody has to make decisions that influence the whole, or they get made by a small committee, not the entire user base at large. You can get "elected" to represent your peers by putting in time, work, and being damned good at it. THEN you can start influencing decisions and shaping the future. Standing on the sidelines bitching about the results just makes you look like a fucking idiot.

Re:He's right to tell the guy to stick it...

[Risen888]

What about all the people who WANTED the buttons on the other side?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Scientific method

[Enokcc]

Open source is not a democracy. I would consider it to resemble scientific method more than that.

FORK THE MOFO, FORK I SAY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then after you fork shuttleworth, fork the world !!

Cry babies !!

Why pick on Bill Gates instead of Microsoft?

[Fastfwd]

Or any other closed source company that makes a software you need/want?

Why left?

[brunes69]

What is the logic of having the buttons on the left? The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side, and an idle mouse cursor is on the right side. Therefore, widnow controls should be ont he right side, where possible. Putting it on the left for no good reason* just makes you have to mouse farther to accomplish the same task.

* And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason.

Re:Why left?

[santax]

They want to create room on the right so in a future version they can experiment with 'innovative' options where that space has become available.

Re:Why left?

[DdJ]

I certainly agree that "because Mac does it" is not a good reason. But that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason -- you've made a straw man argument, IMO.

And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much.

But I can think of some reasons that might apply: "as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done, therefore putting elements there minimizes gratuitous movement of those elements" could easily be a factor in a reasonable decision along these lines. Or "as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense".

If you don't agree with the conclusion, prove to the design team that you're enough of a design expert that they should pay attention to you, and have the discussion with them.

Re:Why left?

[Shadow Wrought]

True. If it weren't a stupid decision it wouldn't be an issue.

Re:Why left?

[icannotthinkofaname]

Mark Shuttleworth wants to de-clutter the right so as to add nifty new stuff on the right in the future.

Re:Why left?

[guruevi]

I believe the reason the Mac does this is because you don't need those 3 buttons as often. According to the Apple Design Guidelines, the initial window size (when you open the program) should be adjusted to the size of the content that's going to be in it. Scrolling to left-right or excessive whitespace should not exist (according to the specs). Since the underlying layers use PDF-like properties to render window content, all content should be uniform regardless of the media it's being carried on (print or screen).

I don't know if there are similar guidelines in Gnome/Windows but it seems that a lot of developers on those platforms don't really care so you're continuously adjusting windows, so it should probably be on the right.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being right-handed has nothing to do with it. There is no handedness in a mouse-driven GUI; you operate everything with your only hand, the mouse pointer. Regardless of whether you're right- or left-handed. Your mouse pointer does not stay on the right side of the screen, nor is it easier to leave it there.

It has more to do with reading: Western languages are right-to-left. Menus and toolbars are right-justified for this reason. You could view the window controls as just another toolbar.

The best arrangement is probably the one used on Classic Mac, Windows 3.1, and CDE, among others. The "close" option was on one end, and the zoom/tile options were on the other. That way, you never accidentally closed a window when you missed the zoom or iconify control.

Re:Why left?

[NRP128]

You're assuming that everybody idles with their mouse on the right. I'm right handed and idle on the left. Why? Because I READ left-to-right. I view controls left-to-right. I read the MenuBar left to right. I look at a table left-to-right, top to bottom. When I look a window on a computer, I look left to right. When I cascade windows, I want them cascaded left to right, so that the upper left corner of every window is visible (and closable).

I have a wheel, a trackpad, and arrow keys to control my position in a window, other than as a visual indicator of my position in the Window, a Scrollbar serves little purpose.

Right-justified stuff pisses me off. If you read in one of the dozens of languages that runs right-to-left, i'm sure you'd feel the same way about left-justified.

Re:Why left?

[geekoid]

You make a lot of assumptions.

"The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side,"

Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?

And no 'It's obvious' doesn't cut it. Data only.

Why do you assume if the scroll bar is on the right , then windows on the right is more efficient?

"Putting it on the left for no good reason* just makes you have to mouse farther to accomplish the same task."
First, you are simple stating 'no good reason' without any backing. Strawman.
Second, what do you base where the mouse is most likely to be at any moment?

"* And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason."
No, but why Mac does it may be a good reason.

~~~ About your sig ~~~~~

heh, I love stuff like that. While they may have a good reason for doing it that way, claiming it's green for marketing reason crack me up.

After they give you your coffee, you should pout it from your mug into a paper cup. To make a point.

Re:Why left?

[Steauengeglase]

"And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much."
Job security?

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which they couldn't do by leaving them on the right and putting the new stuff on the left? That'll never work.

Re:Why left?

[bothemeson]

Finally, someone who has done their research.

Re:Why left?

[Stormwatch]

And no, "because Mac does it" is not a good reason.

Actually, that must be the reason: they want to make Ubuntu more "user-friendly", so they just rip off the Mac. Sadly, it seems they don't truly understand what gives the Mac such reputation. So they can't even rip it off correctly: they completely fucked up everything by having "close" as the third button!

Apple's order actually makes sense, and it's even color-coded: [red X] [yellow -] [green +]. Or, respectively: close, minimize, expand. By order of "seriousness" of the result of clicking it. By the way, the "classic" Mac OS made even more sense: the close button was on the left, and the others on the right. So you would never close a window by accident when you just meant to expand it. If you're going to copy Apple anyway, why not copy that instead?

Re:Why left?

[VGPowerlord]

But I can think of some reasons that might apply: "as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done, therefore putting elements there minimizes gratuitous movement of those elements" could easily be a factor in a reasonable decision along these lines. Or "as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense".

And, of course, there are counter-arguments:
""as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left. Closing and resizing are the least common tasks to do to a window, therefore they should not be in the top left corner."
additionally, for non-OSX users:
"close/resize should be far away from menus to minimize the chance of accidentally closing a window when clicking on the menu."

Re:Why left?

[OldeTimeGeek]

Because a non-trivial number of people are left-handed?

Look, the world has already chosen to support leftys. You can get left-handed scissors - and they cost more money to make - why is it a problem to ask that a user environment be adaptible?

Re:Why left?

[Looshi]

From what I understand the buttons were moved to the left so that notifications will no longer cover the buttons. At least that's the most reasonable explanation I've heard.

Re:Why left?

[RAMMS EIN]

Just to throw in my two cents, I think that if you are concerned about where the mouse cursor is supposed to be, the scroll bars and the most often used buttons should go on the _left_.

The reason for that is that most of the content that will be in the windows is going to be on the left, including most things you are going to want to interact with.

NeXTSTEP had scrollbars on the left and icons on the edges of the screen, and they decided to do it that way after quite a lot of research and thinking about it.

In practice, of course, people are going to expect things like scroll bars and close buttons to be on the right, so they will balk if you don't put them there. But that doesn't say anything about what would have been the best place to put them if people didn't have preconceived expectations.

Re:Why left?

[DdJ]

There are certainly counter-arguments.

Laymen have no real place in them. If you have design experts, trust them or fire them.

If you are not a design expert, resist the urge to micromanage design experts. That way crappy blink-laden web page design lies (for example).

A relevant link: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Another relevant link: http://clientsfromhell.tumblr.com/

Re:Why left?

[Xyrus]

They open their eggs from the little end....

~X~

Re:Why left?

[R3d M3rcury]

While I agree that "Because the Mac does it that way" is not a good reason, Apple spent about $50 million in research (according to Bruce Tognazzini) to study some of these sorts of things. So one can probably assume that Apple actually might have a good reason.

Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?

There's a little thing called Fitts' Law which has two elements:

1. Things that are closer to the mouse are quicker to access than things far away from the mouse
2. Bigger things are quicker to access than smaller things

From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left. A scrollbar could be placed on the left, but it would have to be larger in order to be as efficient as one on the right which would mean less space for data.

It is also good for scrollbars to be in a consistent place (either left or right) for motor-memory and that fact that if you have multiple scrollbars, it will be confusing as to which controls what.

That said, since most mice sold nowadays have a scroll-wheel, perhaps it's time to rethink the need for scrollbars in the first place.

Re:Why left?

[FreudianNightmare]

The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed. Thus, the scrollbar is on the right side, and an idle mouse cursor is on the right side.

This doesn't actually follow like this you know. Think about it. The scroll bar needn't be on the right just because your mouse is because the control device and the display are divorced. Your statement would make more sense for a touch screen, maybe... but I think the 'scroll bar right' convention came about long before these were generally available. Just saying 'thus' doesn't automatically make something true.

Re:Why left?

[gwjgwj]

The mouse cursor points up-left. If you want to hide it, you move it right or down.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of users are right handed, and mouse right handed.

They also read left to right.

and an idle mouse cursor is on the right side.

Center.

Give me your mod points. Thanks, please play again.

Re:Why left?

[EvanED]

Being right-handed has nothing to do with it. There is no handedness in a mouse-driven GUI; you operate everything with your only hand, the mouse pointer. Regardless of whether you're right- or left-handed. Your mouse pointer does not stay on the right side of the screen, nor is it easier to leave it there.

Just be careful if you carry this too far; keep at least in the back of your mind that you may not be able to predict the contexts in which your program will be used. It might be used on a touch screen. I use a convertible tablet for taking notes in class; having the scroll bar on the right means that my hand (I'm a leftie) covers the screen when I'm trying to scroll, and I very much appreciate programs that let you flip the scroll bars to the left side. (All the Office 2007 programs do I think; OneNote definitely does. Firefox definitely does.)

Re:Why left?

[Dhalka226]

I certainly agree that "because Mac does it" is not a good reason. But that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason

Well, that's fair enough. The funny part, however, is that they actually didn't do what Mac does. Oh, sure, superficially they moved the buttons to be on the same side and that's what Mac does, but they actually reversed the button positions.

And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much.

I suppose nobody HAS to do explain anything to anybody, but sometimes it is appropriate. For starters, when users are consistently telling you they don't like what you're doing, that sounds like a pretty good time. A lot of times it's nothing more than a general distaste for change. On the other hand, change for the sake of change is disruptive and destructive. Articulating why they should go through the short-term pain of learning a new layout may not be required, but it should be proffered.

The reason I brought up the Mac difference before is the second reason I think their decisions should be explained. I'm 99.99% sure that Apple has some seriously professional UI people working for them who weighed into the decision of where to place their buttons and in what order. I'm 95% sure that Microsoft does as well, and they reached a completely different conclusion. Apparently, Ubuntu has people who they consider to be experts working for them (in a paid capacity or not) and they have arrived at yet a third conclusion, which they apparently only defend by claiming that their users haven't proven themselves expert enough to weigh into the decision.

Two out of three sets of professionals are against their approach, and in fact they specifically altered their approach from agreeing* with Microsoft's approach to inventing one of their own. As the newest entrant into this particular battlefield, they have the advantage of time to study and evaluate the previous two approaches and they rejected them. Why? If their approach is superior to the ones that come before, let's hear it. It will be educational for everybody. Many of their users are against them, two other sets of professionals are against them -- what's wrong with asking them to articulate their reasoning? Hell, for that matter why does anybody even need to ask?

* They most likely did this just to help Windows users in the transition, but that is not my point.

Re:Why left?

[dangitman]

That said, since most mice sold nowadays have a scroll-wheel, perhaps it's time to rethink the need for scrollbars in the first place.

Scrollbars aren't just for scrolling - they also give visual feedback on the relative position and length of a page.

Re:Why left?

[Myopic]

That's an interesting argument for putting the buttons on the right -- one I've never heard.

Do you also think that the taskbar should be on the right side of the screen? or that the Start button in Windows is difficult for users to move the cursor to? (Seriously, I'm curious what else you might think is placed poorly.)

The only reason I can think of that the right is better than the left is that it's the place that people expect it to be for historical reasons. If I were to try to pick the most rational place, I would choose the left because the top left is where my culture starts things -- so, the buttons are where the window "starts", in the upper left. But I don't give a hoot, and in fact I've never even had a problem going between Win and Mac on a daily basis.

Re:Why left?

[swilver]

Innovative options, which will be used more often than the old buttons?

Re:Why left?

[Patch86]

It may seem like a weak argument, but "we've always done it this way" actually should hold a lot of wait- particularly when dealing with "experts" who want to tweak a hundred things in their specifica area.

There is no denying that what people are familiar with is a hugely important factor on their preferences. People like what they're used to. And there's no denying that the ever-popular Windows, as well as the vast majority of GNOME, KDE, XFCE and other Linux WMs all do it in the same way, while Apple have a long history of doing things their way.

When arguing that a very common feature should be changed, the arguments in favour have to be phenomenal- better than just "it's a bit better this way".

That said, I'm not sure I actually care about the issue that sparked all this. Left or right, seems like I'll get used to it.

Re:Why left?

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, they usually give feedback on the relatively position and length of a document. That said...

Consider the iPhone. While you have no scrollbars, when you scroll around in a document, you will see markers showing you about where you are. But they disappear once you stop scrolling.

One nice thing about doing something like that is the markers can be smaller because they don't have to act as controls.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm your correct a non trivial number of people are left handed, and I applaud them if they allow a change to make life easier for leftys. Why is the "lefty" setup default? Us rightys should all have to change our settings to make us feel at home? there is a VAST majority of rightys, so it would only make sense to go righty by default, and allow easy switch to lefty. needless to say, how to switch it isnt something that a newb could figure out on their own.. SOOOO its kinda stupid to switch them now

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

The design experts shouldn't be micro-managed by everyone else, no; but, they should still lay out their reasoning. No, "we want to make space for the future" doesn't count, unless they also lay out the plans for what should go there, even if still not clearly defined.

Without the reasoning, you can't have useful dialog; the designers don't need to do what everyone else says to, but they still need to be able to justify it. At the minimum, to some level of the new choice at least being no worse than the previous.

Such is life in the glass house.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you assume mouse side on the right determines that putting scroll bars on the right is the most effecient thing to do?

[...]From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen

What? How do you get from "physical mouse on the right of the physical keyboard" to "mouse pointer on the right hand side of the screen"? If the mouse pointer is mostly on the right side, why are the great majority of menus, icons and sidebars on the left?

Re:Why left?

[Tubal-Cain]

Just be careful if you carry this too far; keep at least in the back of your mind that you may not be able to predict the contexts in which your program will be used. It might be used on a touch screen.

True, but not very applicable to the current discussion. Control of the window manipulation buttons is (usually) in the hands of the window manager (Metacity, KWin, Windows Explorer, etc) and its themes, not the application itself.

Re:Why left?

[Risen888]

And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman

Bullshit. In a project which prides itself on its community, there is every reason.

as windows resize, the top left corner is the anchor from which all resizing is done

That's an interesting hypothesis. I hadn't thought of that.

as left-to-right/top-to-bottom readers, our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left, so putting critical controls there makes sense

I'd say that's a reason to put the most destructive controls (closing and minimizing) as far away from that corner as possible.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they couldn't wait until the new features were ready to put into place and instead decided it was a good idea to implement this radical change in a LTS release? If they had waited until they had something ready to take the place on the right, at least everyone would be able to see the point of this change.

Re:Why left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the mouse is on the dead center (area wise) of the screen, the pixel that does all the action is on the top left.

Scroll bars should indicate that there is more, which is only really necessary if you reached the end of the line. Distance wise, the end of the line is on the right for Latin & Greek influenced languages.

Reminds me of gaim/pidgin...

[Improv]

Some time back, gaim had a UI redesign where they replaced protocol-specific icons with generic ones, in the decision that hiding the protocol is the right thing to do. A lot of us thought that was boneheaded, and some people forked GAIM, others wrote plugins to undo the change, and a lot of us offered harsh criticism of the developers responsible. If it were a democracy, we probably would've voted it undone. Right decision? Wrong decision? We didn't like it, but most of us decided not to walk away from it (either to the forks or further away).

Opensource provides new possibilities for governance - the ability to fork is something we don't really have in nations (splitting into bits really isn't the same), and with the exception of protocol decisions we generally can reshape our environment as we like (local patches, greasemonkey, etc). By having so much local variance possible, we no longer have our elbows so close to our neighbours and so there's less hazard for technocratic or autocratic decision styles (provided they use licenses that sustain this type of environment - some developers like Tuomo Valkonen prove to be batshit insane and play license games to compound their boneheaded technical decisions).

With licensing messes out of the way and the ability to fork, the most precious thing for us is mostly time/attention. If we want to fork a project, we're balancing our time and attention versus how much we care over the relevant issue. It's the easiest thing in the world to follow a path paved by the actual developer, while maintaining patches of any size (or starting a parallel community for a true fork) is an ongoing burden. If it's for an important enough reason, we'll do it. If that reason turns out to be not important enough to be worth the bother, all we can do is complain and hope to convince whomever is already doing that work to pave our path.

Right, it's more of a perfected anarchy.

[HeckRuler]

Speaking of anarchy,
Two Forks Enter! One Fork Leaves!!!
Two Forks Enter! One Fork Leaves!!!

Re:Right, it's more of a perfected anarchy.

[LordOfTheNoobs]

This is no time to bring up the linux kernel response to out of memory situations.

But.... it's open....

[santax]

Just move the damn buttons yourself! I actually agree with camp that wants the buttons back in the old way, but I can't stop thinking... I have the source... I might just do that myself and place the .diff online. Problem solved. Unfortunately for all Ubuntu users, I use Debian so I'm fine.

Re:But.... it's open....

[QuantumRiff]

If i'm not mistaken, the newest version of UbuntTweak has this ability.

http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

Just an FYI

Re:But.... it's open....

[phayes]

It's not even in the code, it's a theme level modification unless I'm mistaken. Nothing is stopping people from adding a "lightright" theme which moves the buttons back & making it popular enough to figure on the first page of the theme addins to make it easy to find & install.

The difference between left & right scrollbars/window decorations is minimal in my opinion. I find that I need move the mouse less when the scrollbar is on the left because text I copy/paste/yank/move is more often on the left & having the scrollbar on the left means it is closer. My preferring the window decorations on the right is just due to habit as I have spent more time on X/Motif/fwcm/Windows than MacOS/OSX.

Re:But.... it's open....

[masterQba]

The changing of the location of the buttons isn't really as complicated a matter as that. You can move the buttons manually in a tool like Ubuntu Tweak. Or if that is too difficult you can change the window border of the theme to something else entirely.

Re:But.... it's open....

[DrXym]

Just move the damn buttons yourself! I actually agree with camp that wants the buttons back in the old way, but I can't stop thinking... I have the source... I might just do that myself and place the .diff online. Problem solved. Unfortunately for all Ubuntu users, I use Debian so I'm fine.

The ability to move the buttons doesn't excuse a stupid default layout. By moving the buttons to the left edge they've screwed up the predictability of finding the close button. The order of the close button changes depending on the window / dialog being resizable. If they're going to insist on using the left hand side at least make the button order predictable. It's a basic usability issue and I'm surprised its gotten so far without being corrected.

Re:But.... it's open....

[santax]

Well like he said, there is nothing to correct. They have done this to experiment with a 'innovative' new something (didn't write what precisely) that will make use of the now available space on the right. Nothing wrong with that. Then again I still believe that everybody who can write a single line of code should be kept away from GUI's as far as is possible! Preferable by moving us to another planet where we can't do much harm.

Re:But.... it's open....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a combination of two things that makes this a very bad decision:

1) Muscle Memory.
As someone who has been using Ubuntu for 4 years as my primary work OS (2 boxen) and my only home OS (4 boxen), I'm really rather used to it. The quick wrist flick to the close button is a natural motion. In fact the outside flick is a more natural 'quick' gesture than the inside flick.

2) Guidance
The 'x' is the most used button on a window (this is not proven, but I am nearly certain). So designers can talk about 'most destructive action not being first in LTR reading language modes' until they're blue in the face, but fact is, you want the most visual guidance for the 'x' and that means aligning with the right edge of the relevant window is an extremely useful UX hint.

Sure I can fix these with a script on my own box, but should I really have to based on the fact the design team are clearly Jobsian in their inclinations? Poor choice, and not too pleased to see Shuttles take a dictatorial approach without a clear UX-centric explanation offered for the move.

Re:But.... it's open....

[DrXym]

Well like he said, there is nothing to correct. They have done this to experiment with a 'innovative' new something (didn't write what precisely) that will make use of the now available space on the right. Nothing wrong with that. Then again I still believe that everybody who can write a single line of code should be kept away from GUI's as far as is possible! Preferable by moving us to another planet where we can't do much harm.

I don't have an issue with shifting the buttons over to the left. Sure it might be a little strange at first but it's not a big deal. What is a big deal is not having the close button first in order. Virtually every UI since the invention of UIs has put the close button in either the top left or top right corner of the window. It's sensible, users expect it and it doesn't need changing. Moving the close button to the right of the minimize / maximize buttons means the button changes position depending on a window being resizable or not.

Ubuntu devs claim it is subjective but to me it is a usability regression. They've taken a simple 20 year old UI convention and messed it up for no good reason.

Re:But.... it's open....

[santax]

Really, I do agree. It would not have been my choice to change a gui thousands of users already know and use and especially not in this way. I don't understand it either. But, I have no clue what the innovation is that he is thinking about to add in the next version. Maybe then it will all make sense?

Re:But.... it's open....

[makomk]

Nope, global modification to the settings that applies to all themes, apparently. It's just that the setting update is packaged together with the default theme.

Re:But.... it's open....

[phayes]

So when they deploy this, all the existing themes will end up with the window decorations on the left too? Seems pretty surprising to me...

Re:But.... it's open....

[makomk]

It would seem so. Quite a few of the comments on the bug report were complaining about this - the existing themes are not designed to have buttons on the left.

Re:But.... it's open....

[phayes]

Ah, then place me in the complainers camp. Before making such an important change they needed to make sure that it didn't break the existing themes. Thanks for the info.

You dont even know what democracy means do you ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you dont understand what democracy is.

The English came here to start their own 'source tree' - with different features and functionality. That is not because England was a democracy - that is because England was a monarchy.

Starting a source tree every time you want to upend a bad decision is what causes forks - and leads to multiple products doing similar things with none of them having a critical mass - (that is like each island in the Florida keys having its own government). Administrative costs increase, marketing costs increase, and users decrease - and the number of developers supporting each fork decreases. This is a vicious cycle - fewer features leads to fewer adoptees, lower interest and then abandonment of the fork.

Open Source is not Ubuntu

[TheRaven64]

Okay, Ubuntu is popular. I get it. But it is not the totality of open source. Neither is Linux, for that matter. This example is specifically about Ubuntu, not about open source. Ubuntu is a dictatorship obeying the golden rule; Shuttlewood has the gold so he makes the rules. If you don't like it, fork it or use something different.

Most open source projects are democracies, although not all votes are equal. Their constituents are people who who contribute something to the project, and the greater the contribution the more say they have in the direction of the project. Contributions come in the form of code, documentation, artwork, bug reports, and money. If you've never contributed any of these things to a project, then you don't get a vote.

If you have, you get some say, although the person who wrote 90% of the code gets a lot more say than someone who only filed one bug report. People contribute to open source projects because they expect to get something back. In my experience, most developers will put some extra effort into feature requests from people who have contributed something that they consider valuable.

Ubuntu isn't actually unusual in this respect at all. Shuttlewood contributes the developers' salaries, and they give priority to his feature requests.

Re:Open Source is not Ubuntu

[DoofusOfDeath]

Okay, Ubuntu is popular. I get it. But it is not the totality of open source.

Your words look sort of like English or German, but I can't understand what you're saying.

Re:Open Source is not Ubuntu

[nine-times]

Most open source projects are democracies, although not all votes are equal.

Ultimately the question is, who controls checking code in for the official release? Whoever has the power to do that is running things. They may choose to honor the votes of the community (or some subset of the community), but you could argue that it's still not a democracy. If a king decides to go along with a popular vote for a particular decision, is that a democracy?

Re:Open Source is not Ubuntu

[DominicFalcon]

... Their constituents are people who who contribute something to the project, and the greater the contribution the more say they have in the direction of the project. Contributions come in the form of code, documentation, artwork, bug reports, and money. If you've never contributed any of these things to a project, then you don't get a vote.

OK, I can kind of understand that. However, I firmly believe that you have to add users to that list of contributors. Users are the whole reason a project the size of Ubuntu exists, and without their support the project might as well not exist. Not letting your users vote because you can't measure their contributions is not a good idea; they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for Ubuntu's success (or failure), not Shuttlewood.

Re:Open Source is not Ubuntu

[dangitman]

Shuttlewood has the gold so he makes the rules.

Shuttleworth must be pissed that this Shuttlewood impostor stole his money and his project.

Re:Open Source is not Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

This example is specifically about Ubuntu, not about open source.

Thank you. Thought I was the only one here who'd noticed.

Other than health care...

[stakovahflow]

I've been a fan of Communism/Socialism for years. How is this much different?

--Stak

UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck on making _everyone_ agree on a layout.
Not that's impossible but unless people make some concession, it will never work out.

Also, from a random user point of view, I don't care that much if buttons are in a specific order than an other or in some other place to reach, as long as it doesn't change every time and not in a remote and hidden place.

My 2 cents.

Re:UI

[makomk]

Also, from a random user point of view, I don't care that much if buttons are in a specific order than an other or in some other place to reach, as long as it doesn't change every time and not in a remote and hidden place.

It doesn't... so long as Ubuntu is the only operating system you use, you don't use any of the Ubuntu derivatives like Kubuntu, and none of the applications you use render their own custom titlebars. (If you use, for example, Chrome it'll have the buttons on the opposite side to all the other applications.)

Re:UI

[h4rr4r]

Which means Chrome is broken, it should act like the rest of the apps.

Re:UI

[EvanED]

Chrome being "broken" in the sense it doesn't agree with the other apps should be obvious the first time you see it and see it feels that the titlebar is useless.

A Pirate Analogy ...

[perpenso]

As a geek who loves history I can't help but think about the organizational strategy of american (as in region not nationality) colonial era pirates. In general they were not democratic in their decision making, they understood the inefficiency and impracticality of that path, but they were democratic in choosing a captain. Once a captain was chosen he had command. A wise captain did exercise his authority justly though. It seems to have been a quite reasonable self organizational strategy and it may also work for open source organizations. There are some parallels: the populations are mobile and independent minded, share a meritocracy based organizational philosophy, ...

Re:A Pirate Analogy ...

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, yeah, but what happens when some open source project comes along that's organized along the lines of ninjas?

Re:A Pirate Analogy ...

[perpenso]

Well, yeah, but what happens when some open source project comes along that's organized along the lines of ninjas?

It goes unnoticed and is largely ignored.

Re:A Pirate Analogy ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yeah, but what happens when some open source project comes along that's organized along the lines of ninjas?

They lose to the project organized along the lines of hastily trained with a .45 auto.

More of the Same

[hduff]

This kind of bickering is the ugly dark side of an otherwise decent philosophy. The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity, is both useful and unpleasant and will always be a locus of justifiable criticism of the FOSS community in general.

Move along. Nothing new to see here.

Re:More of the Same

[vlm]

The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity

Too broad of a brush. At Ubuntu, the dude who pays the paychecks and owns the servers has said, make it so. And it is done. Hope you like it! If not, tough cookies!

In Debian, its a bit different. Any developer can take that source package, fix it, and upload an new package named "whatever-better-ui" or something. Eventually one side will get tired of the game and there will be some renaming.

Re:More of the Same

[hduff]

Two side of the same coin. The only difference is a single enforcer versus a "community" of enforcers.

My point was that, ugly as it may be, it's part of what defines FOSS. It just a shame that it provides an excellent source of fodder for those who wish to disparage FOSS. Because one can form their own "community" of one or many, choice does exist. It's messy, it's wasteful, it can be awkward, but it is far better overall than whatever else there is.

Re:More of the Same

[bit01]

The cult of personality and hubris,

And this is different from closed source software how? Fact is that closed source software projects are also run by humans with hangups and have similar problems. It's just that open source projects are more visible to the general community. That's what open source is.

and will always be a locus of justifiable criticism of the FOSS community in general.

Only when people like you acknowledge that these problems apply equally to any large project involving people. Until then you're being bigoted.

Move along. Nothing new to see here.

I get very tired of people making claims about open or closed source software that apply equally to all software. Makes me wonder if they've got an agenda.

---

Don't waste your life on marketing drivel/nonsense

Re:More of the Same

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so all I have to do to get my samba-with-super-sekret-backdoor and cups-rm-rf-filesystem in the official repository is to be really really persistent about it? Linux Rules!!!

Open source is a republic

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a bunch of sovereigns come together voluntarily under nothing more than the banner of their various constitutions embodied in the open source licenses.

There is little to no strong central government to stand in the way of the flowers of federalism of blooming. No one can impose development techniques or standards from the top down beyond the standards specified in the open source constitutions.

A natural variety of standards and results will appear in the sovereign states and resources will be naturally directed to those with the best results by moving to them or emulating them. Not through force imposed from the top.

We should organize a government like this one day. We should only dream.

I don't see any difference at all...

[Rainefan]

Interesting if you compare to a democratic government and the critical decisions they make without any popular consensus...The people voted for that government and many time, their decision aren't orthogonal to people's desire, and unlike opensource,if you don't like it you can emigrate to other country. Yep..this is really hard to accomplish unlike opensource since you can fork the country and govern it the way you want or even you can change to another country or in opensource terms, to another project. The Ubuntu governors are taking some critical(design) decisions based on their know-how expecting the hole community to adopt it as a good decision.

Full quote

[Meltir]

As it often happens the summary is rather sensationalist, as I would not dare accuse anyone of actually RTFA, here's Shuttleworth's full response (with which I could not agree more):

Mark Shuttleworth wrote on 2010-03-17: Re: [Bug 532633] Re: [light-theme] please revert the order of the window controls back to "menu:minimize, maximize, close" #167

On 15/03/10 23:42, Pablo Quirós wrote:
> It'd have been nice if this comment had been made some time ago,
> together with a deep reasoning on the concrete changes that are in mind.
>
> We are supposed to be a community, we all use Ubuntu and contribute to
> it, and we deserve some respect regarding these kind of decisions. We
> all make Ubuntu together, or is it a big lie?

We all make Ubuntu, but we do not all make all of it. In other words, we
delegate well. We have a kernel team, and they make kernel decisions.
You don't get to make kernel decisions unless you're in that kernel
team. You can file bugs and comment, and engage, but you don't get to
second-guess their decisions. We have a security team. They get to make
decisions about security. You don't get to see a lot of what they see
unless you're on that team. We have processes to help make sure we're
doing a good job of delegation, but being an open community is not the
same as saying everybody has a say in everything.

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community
distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic,
and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making
any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the
best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that
competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard
decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without
warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that
no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this.

> If you want to tell us
> that we are all part of it, we want information, and we want our opinion
> to be decisive.
>

No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But
we are not voting on design decisions.

Mark

Re:Full quote

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of arrogance is why I don't contribuite to most FOSS projects. I would love to participate (both with funds and code/documentation), but as long as participation is reserved for the arrogant few who "know best," then I have no place in the community. :(

Re:Full quote

[hansamurai]

What does he mean by this?

We have a security team. They get to make
decisions about security. You don't get to see a lot of what they see
unless you're on that team.

Re:Full quote

[moonbender]

I'm pretty sure he's referring to software vulnerabilities being disclosed to the security team. As an outsider, you don't get to see those until they're fixed (or made public by somebody else).

Re:Full quote

[ichthus]

Expertise != arrogance.

Re:Full quote

[Anonymous Coward]

And for every one competent person, there are 100 more incompetents who think themselves experts.

And if you need this explained, you probably belong to the latter group, and likewise attribute skill assessment to arrogance.

Re:Full quote

[Anonymous Coward]

expertise = arrogance when expertise is not explained. If you're as good as you think you are, you should have no trouble explaining your architecture (commenting your code) or working with a team (listening to inputs of ALL stakeholders, not just your chosen few). Any unilateral changes should be fully explained and documented, so that any desired "undos" can be EASILY implemented by the end user(s).

If I wanted to deal with the "just trust me, I know better" attitude, I'd use MS.

Re:Full quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, that'd be the Dunning-Kruger effect at work.

Re:Full quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's a meritocracy. On what merits (other than $$$) did Mr Shuttleworth come to be a dictator?

the unix way...

[gandhi_2]

Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.

See Also: Transparency, expressiveness, and configurability.

As per part 3 of above, why not have the button locations configurable?

Re:the unix way...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu has a policy of choosing what is best for you, and giving you the least amount of control possible over how your system is configured. You know, to make it more simple.

I don't see the problem with a simple interface, but these newbies they want to draw in aren't going to go hunting through configuration options. They just want to use the computer. Still, they don't want to "confuse" them.

Re:the unix way...

[dancingmilk]

Best part, as j1976 above pointed out. They are configurable, you just have to dig for a couple minutes:

It's easy to change even within the current distribution. Steps to fix:

* Start gconf-editor
* expand in this order: apps, metacity, general
* Find entry "button_layout"
* change it to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

The colon separates left side and right side.

Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triagers

[arose]

It seems that just about anyone with enough free time can elect themselves to close bugs, request more irrelevant information, request you to re-reproduce the bug every time anything changes, no matter how unrelated and generally make reporting bugs against Ubuntu a pointless activity.

Bah.

[bmo]

This fight over window controls would not exist if Gnome had an easy way to rearrange the buttons. But no, Gnome hides it in a dark corner. KDE allows you to arrange the buttons any way you like by simply clicking and dragging.

Oh yeah and to "troll" further, there is only one way to lay out the window control buttons that makes any sense: Close on left, minimize and maximize on right.

--
BMO

Re:Bah.

[Rutulian]

Oh yeah and to "troll" further, there is only one way to lay out the window control buttons that makes any sense: Close on left, minimize and maximize on right.

That certainly is a troll. Where do you get that idea? There are plenty of themes with that configuration.

Democracy in Open Source

[ardor]

An earlier posting already hit the big misunderstanding with democracy in open source projects:

• Democracy INSIDE a project is doomed to fail. There must be one leader who does the final decisions, otherwise you get design by committee.
• Democracy ACROSS projects (more exactly, project versions, e.g. forks) is likely to succeed. If said leader does very unpopular and/or plain stupid decisions, the project gets forked. The majority thus "voted" against the decision. Case in point: Xfree vs. Xorg.

News for nerds?

[gmuslera]

Everyone knows that Linus is a benevolent dictator.

No recompile needed

[j1976]

It's easy to change even within the current distribution. Steps to fix:

* Start gconf-editor
* expand in this order: apps, metacity, general
* Find entry "button_layout"
* change it to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

The colon separates left side and right side.

Re:No recompile needed

[santax]

Yeah but I've read a bit further that this solution would make the symmetry wrong? I have no way of testing it.

Re:No recompile needed

[Professional Slacker]

You're both some what correct. I'm running Lucid with the buttons on the right side. The order you want for the artwork to look correct is:

"menu:maximize,minimize,close"

Re:No recompile needed

[Akral]

Even simpler (quote from the bug description):
To revert to old layout, enter in terminal:
$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

--OR--

Use this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~stownsend42/+archive/light-themes
This option will also fix the graphical appearance of the buttons.

Re:No recompile needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

In kde you can just drag the buttons to where you want them.

Re:No recompile needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, no kidding. It took me a while to figure out people are confusing Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop paradigm. Xfce is another windows manager that permits complete choice in button placement and selection. Firefox an app that does same. What kind if dickhead insists a distro needs to set aside design criteria for a default button placement? Sheesh.

In a democracy members submit ...

[perpenso]

Open source is utterly a democracy. Each of us may have our own source tree. If we can convince others to come join us in it

That is a description of anarchy, not democracy. In a democracy the minority members submit to the will of the majority. They limit voicing their disagreement to persuasive dialog, they don't storm off in a hissy fit.

Re:In a democracy members submit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In a democracy the minority members submit to the will of the majority. They limit voicing their disagreement to persuasive dialog, they don't storm off in a hissy fit.

Either you aren't from the US, or you haven't been watching the news lately. Throwing a hissy fit is exactly what the minority has been doing, for quite a while now. :-(

Re:In a democracy members submit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In a democracy the minority members submit to the will of the majority. They limit voicing their disagreement to persuasive dialog, they don't storm off in a hissy fit.

Either you aren't from the US, or you haven't been watching the news lately. Throwing a hissy fit is exactly what the minority has been doing, for quite a while now. :-(

Actually I am from the US and I have been paying attention to the news lately. I'm even a product of the US public school system and I paid attention in government class in high school so I know that the US is not a democracy, it is a representative republic. Pretty much because the founding fathers feared the hissy fit prone mob. They gave us a House of Representatives for the mob to vent and a Senate to provide adult supervision. ;-)

Re:In a democracy members submit ...

[Kumiorava]

Actually I am from the US and I have been paying attention to the news lately. I'm even a product of the US public school system and I paid attention in government class in high school so I know that the US is not a democracy, it is a representative republic. Pretty much because the founding fathers feared the hissy fit prone mob. They gave us a House of Representatives for the mob to vent and a Senate to provide adult supervision. ;-)

How is that working for you?

Re:In a democracy members submit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I am from the US and I have been paying attention to the news lately. I'm even a product of the US public school system and I paid attention in government class in high school so I know that the US is not a democracy, it is a representative republic. Pretty much because the founding fathers feared the hissy fit prone mob. They gave us a House of Representatives for the mob to vent and a Senate to provide adult supervision. ;-)

How is that working for you?

Fairly well. The children in the House went a little wild and reached for everything on the shelf in the toy store but the adults in the Senate moderated things. The children cried and screamed for a little while but then accepted what the adults said is all they can have.

Demoracy isn't for the lazy

[Shivetya]

so yeah, while anyone can do X my bet is on they won't.

It is far easier to sit on the side line and bitch.

Making a choice that no one cares about; ie making your own tree; isn't truly democracy, unless you count the loons who stand on the fringes screaming about how they have made a choice even though no one is listening.

So, yeah, you can fork it, but who will care? Is a moral victory of any import if no one knows who you are let alone what you did?

Meritocracy

[diegocg]

I always thought that the best word that describes opensource is meritocracy. The best people makes the decisions. You are free to fork the tree, but other people is not forced to listen you if they think you are stupid. I agree with Shuttleworth, they can (and must) listen users...but allowing users to have a veto on decisions? Hell, no.

Re:Meritocracy

[hduff]

I always thought that the best word that describes opensource is meritocracy. The best people makes the decisions.

A goal rarely, if ever, achieved.

The people with the most power, control and influence make the decisions. Merit may help get them there, but usually doesn't keep them there. then the games begin . . .

Democracy vs. Choose Your Own Adventure

[sanche]

Most developers know that you have to make independent decisions to keep a project moving forward. That takes the "democracy feel" out a little, especially when it's publicized like this.

However, the nature of open source gives any of us the ability to choose a different path. Don't want to use their button placement? You have the option to modify it on your own time, choose a different theme, or choose a completely different window manager.

It's not really accurate to say open source as a whole is non-democratic when we're talking about a single theme.

It *is* like a democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the democracy my dad always described in my family. I got one vote, my sibling got one vote, my mom got 2 votes, and he got 5.

Complaint with structure is data.

[itomato]

Complaints in a pile is just a bunch of bitching. Draw connections between the points voiced therein, and you can call it data.

Validity is another thing altogether. One man's wheat is another's chaff.

Re:Complaint with structure is data.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Complaints in a pile is just a bunch of bitching. Draw connections between the points voiced therein, and you can call it data. That's analysis.

Users do vote...

[eyepeepackets]

Every time a user chooses what distro to use, they vote.

Don't like the way a distribution does things? Use a different one.

Re:Users do vote...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if we could only get people to understand that about other choices in life.

Re:Users do vote...

[Shimbo]

Every time a user chooses what distro to use, they vote.

I think emigration is a better metaphor for that though; if your government sucks sufficiently, you can go find another one.

Re:Users do vote...

[hduff]

Every time a user chooses what distro to use, they vote.

Don't like the way a distribution does things? Use a different one.

You should file bug reports first because that's how you provide direct feedback.Sometimes the user learns as well and becomes a better member of the community. But if the maintainers get their collective assess on their "not a bug" shoulders, vote with your feet.

Make an effort to make it better, but don't make yourself crazy over it.

Re:Users do vote...

[pcmacpc]

So what happens when I moved to Slackware because KDE 4.x sucks, and I still hate GNOME even more, and even Slackware has gone KDE 4.x? And no, I'm not going to settle for out-of-date features because I absolutely agree that KDE 3.x had a long way to go, and it was merely the only GUI that I found acceptable. If open source is still a democracy, then my vote's not being counted.

Re:Users do vote...

[eyepeepackets]

Same thing applies to window managers and DEs (Desktop Environments.) I'm a Slackware with Window Maker person myself, but there are a great many options in terms of window managers. DEs, not so much.

This reminds me of a 31 Flavors ice cream flavor called Lemon Meringue that I really, really (I mean REALLY) liked. For whatever reason, they stopped making it for a long time and when they brought it back, it just didn't taste the same. Did my tastes change over the years? Did the ice cream chef screw up the recipe? Didn't matter, it no longer did the trick. But then I found Hot Cocoa with the little marshmellows and the world was again ice cream heaven. The point of all this? There is no point, go eat some ice cream.

Re:Users do vote...

[Myopic]

I don't think "vote" means what you imply that it means. I don't "vote" for President by moving to Australia.

Democracy is a means, not an end

[MikeRT]

There is too much fetishism about democracy in the West today and not enough honest questioning of what we really have. Are we freer than we were at any point the past? Are we safer? Are we more prosperous? Do our laws and courts secure justice better or worse than they used to?

One of the major problems with democracy is that every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to have his say without having to put his money where his mouth is. The moment a democracy lets people vote without paying any taxes is the moment it begins its death spiral. For a FOSS project, the moment it starts weighing the input of every two-bit commenter as much as the core community (barring them having a genuine insight) is the moment it becomes consigned to ad hoc, designed-by-committee hell.

The way I see it, FOSS projects are like republican city states except with an infinite supply of land. Don't like someone's decision? Fork the code and move on. That stops contrarians pretty quickly. People want the democratic input because they don't want to have to do the leg work like, for example, supporting multiple L&F packages on ubuntu.

How are people voting?

[Midnight Thunder]

How the 'democracy' works depends on the given project. Some projects are very top-down, while others are more cooperative. In other cases its only a democracy if you know how to code.

As as user you get to have input, but in the end it is put up or change allegiances. This is no different that a buying a product from a private company. The difference is that most users don't pay a dime for their open source solutions and won't pay a dime to encourage the development of a given feature. If you want something for free, then accept it for what it is. If you don't want to vote with a contribution (fiscal or otherwise), then don't expect the Earth.

Vote with your source code.

[Tei]

Maybe all these FOSS projects are a democracy, but one where to vote, you need to use a keyboard and write code.
You want to create a fork? you need people that know how to write code, or you need yourself to do that.
You want feature X to be implemented? implement it yourself and send the patch. If the owners of the project don't like the patch, but you still need X, make a fork. forks are fun, forks are horrible, forks are lotsa work, but forks is freedom to do anything you want.

This ain't UNIX

[itomato]

People who want do to things the "UNIX" way sure as hell aren't running Ubuntu.

Who thought it was?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought open source was meritocratic anarchy. Since when has open source as a concept ever involved voting or any form of representation?

You've never heard of the man who went in for a si

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never heard of the man who went in for a simple operation and came out with an arm for a leg and a leg for an arm? Boy! was he surprised.

Show me software that's a democracy....

[HerculesMO]

I'll show you an unshipped product.

No, its Anarchism

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's rather close to Anarchism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism)

People are getting sick of Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of whether it's a "democracy" or not, people are starting to get fed up with Ubuntu.

We are sick of the shitty quality as of late. The last few releases have been utter crap. Obvious bugs are present in the final release, even after they're logged during the alpha and beta releases, and sometimes even after a fix has been submitted before the release.

We're also getting tired of GNOME. It's an old, outdated desktop environment these days. It has stagnated badly for a couple of years now. All of the real innovation is happening within the KDE and XFCE projects. Like this incident shows, the only thing about GNOME that's changing is its fucking themes, and even then they're shitty changes.

For lots of people, those have been two major strikes. The third strike, whatever it may be, will be what puts Ubuntu down for us. We'll jump to OpenSUSE, Debian or even FreeBSD if we have to.

Re:People are getting sick of Ubuntu.

[oneiros27]

We'll jump to OpenSUSE, Debian or even FreeBSD if we have to

Then do it -- vote with your feet, that's the only way that it's really democratic.

Fork!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fork!

OS/2 was a democracy. Just look what happened to i

[fluor2]

There was a reason Microsoft withdrawed from OS/2. IBM let everybody in the company come with their ideas and meaning. In the end the load time ended loading so much stuff that Microsoft just shook their head and withdrawed.

Not the point

[Anonymous Coward]

The point here is not that Open Source is not a democracy, it's that Design should not be a democracy. Stop design in any kind of a project requires someone with a strong vision calling the shots.

Mass confusion

[vlm]

Then there's the Debian model, where project policy and other project wide decisions are pure democracy, yet individual package maintainers have a dictatorship over their individual package within the wide limitations of policy.

Actually its even more complicated in that the individual whom ran an individual package as a dictator is completely free to decide to operate as a triumvirate or whatever they please, and many do operate as anarchic teams, but the initial state is a dictatorship.

If a dictator is a miserable failure, thats OK too, since its all open source it just works.

It seems to be a much more reasonable balance of power than the Ubuntu community.

Re:Mass confusion

[Martin Soto]

If a dictator is a miserable failure, thats OK too, since its all open source it just works.

This doesn't sound like my actual experience with Debian (yes, back in the days, I used to be a Debian maintainer). Doing anything that requires several packages to be modified in a consistent fashion was always very hard, because a single maintainer who didn't like the idea or who simply wasn't responsive enough was able to stop the whole effort on its tracks. As a government model, Debian looks a lot more like a feudal system, with a myriad of lords who are absolute rulers in their tiny feuds, and who only owe some symbolic allegiance to a distant, and often not very powerful king. Making any significant changes in such a country is of course very difficult, and even traveling there could become a real problem.

I once wanted to help Debian become a serious desktop distribution, but for the reasons I mentioned above, this proved to be an exercise in frustration. I ended up becoming inactive as a maintainer and finally moved to Ubuntu as soon as it became available. I haven't looked back ever since.

Free software versus open source

[FoolishOwl]

I may have been getting lazy: I get tired of the FSF's polemics, and it was easy to believe that the split between free software and open source software was more noise than light. But, this sort of thing reminds me that there really is a fundamental issue at stake.

I want software with open source code, adhering to public standards decided by democratic committees. I want the structure of an operating system to reflect the principle that users make the decisions, not the distributors, and not the principle of control by a benevolent dictator, whether it's Gates, Jobs, Shuttleworth, Torvalds, or even Stallman.

I keep wondering whether to switch from Ubuntu to some other distribution. But on the one hand, I'm still struggling to get my family to accept Linux at all, and on the other, I don't get the impression that the other distributions are that much better. Even gNewsense is transparently a fork of Ubuntu.

Re:Free software versus open source

[hduff]

I keep wondering whether to switch from Ubuntu to some other distribution. But on the one hand, I'm still struggling to get my family to accept Linux at all, and on the other, I don't get the impression that the other distributions are that much better.

Try Mandriva. Good default choices. Devs that appreciate feedback and help. Wide range of packages and hardware support. Good set of admin tools. Finally, decent themes and graphics.

Ubuntu != Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have to put up with demented idiots who think that Ubuntu equals Linux, and now we get a Slashdot headline saying that Ubuntu equals Open Source. Fuck you. Open Source isn't even a democracy, it's an anarchy. You don't have to vote on anything. Just start your own distribution using whatever kernel and packages you want, and if it's good it'll prosper. In the meantime, quit being so reductionist and stop spreading this fucktarded FUD around.

Not really

[Vahokif]

Open source isn't a democracy any more than Planet Earth is. Different countries have different methods of administration. The only difference is that in the world of open source you can fork a country and run it any way you like, the worst case scenario being that no one moves there. Open source is more like a regulated anarchy in that sense, like the Internet.

THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE

[kgo]

That argument doesn't make sense. It's not a touch-screen. It doesn't matter where the physical location of your mouse is. That doesn't map to the pointer location. If I move my mouse to the left side of the keyboard, nothing changes. If I use my left hand instead of my right, the pointer doesn't automatically jump to the left side.

Also, considering that I can move my mouse all the way from one side of the screen to the other by simply bending my wrist, while my arm remains stationary, I don't see how it's adding any more work. My muscles didn't exactly start getting sore after the switch.

Re:THAT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right?

Uh, why not?

[Concern]

We have these stories about lots of vendors, from Oracle to Lotus, but Bill has more than his share.

Logically

[Anonymous Coward]

(Open) Source code is printed on paper.
Paper is made of wood.
Wood floats
Ducks also float.
A witch weighs the same as a duck.

Therefore Open Source is a witch
BURN IT!!!

It's Ubuntu!! Deal with it!

[Xeleema]

I applaud the efforts of the Ubuntu community. They seem to have whole-heartedly gathered up a Linux distro under the "Year of the Linux Desktop!!1!" flag and stood in front of the tanks that are Windows-users-looking-for-something-better. Truely a noble cause. But one that I will stay away from.

Windows users learned bad habits (not their fault), then apply flawed logic based on those habits to a wholly different environment (definitely their fault). If you have a problem with a Gnome theme, CHANGE THE DAMN THEME!
Seriously, it's not that difficult.
Hell, it's in the Gnome documentation.

And those guys (sysadmins?) shouting about their userbase taking up pitchforks and screamin about "lost productivity"; The site sysadmin's should have tested things before they pushed out the LTS update to their "Enterprise". It's not hard to roll a fix and push it out, it just takes a wee bit of time.

Note: This doesn't apply if you're wielding an MCSE, need a mouse to delete files, and dumped Ubuntu onto 500 Ph.Ds in the past year because you/they/everyone wanted to "Stick it to the Man". For that, you deserve to be lynched over something as trivial as Title bar buttons.

Just use KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

if you require choice. KDE has had the ability to reorder window buttons for ages, right there on the settings manager (it's even drag-and-drop). If you use Ubuntu and GNOME, don't expect to be able to tweak nontrivial stuff without using regedit^Wgconf-editor (at best) or recompiling (at worst).

I don't get the GNOME people's excuses to remove user choice. If you think choice is too confusing for users, then just hide the "confusing" options behind "Advanced settings" buttons. It looks to me like they just can't be arsed to make things configurable (or write UIs for their gconf properties).

FOSS

[^_^x]

There are a lot of assumptions tying FOSS to various ideals and greater concepts where it's not really deserving. It's already been proven that even with the Internet, opening your source code doesn't mean "someone knowledgeable will fix it" or that more contributors means fewer bugs and exploits, or that they will be seen to in a timely way.

That doesn't mean it's the wrong way for everything either, but... it is what it is in each case, and no more than that. Also, on a big project, making everything a democracy would just stall it indefinitely.

It's so simple

[Dunbal]

This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.'"

      This is where you fork. End of story. kthxbai

Re:It's so simple

[VGPowerlord]

I think what you meant to say is

"Stick a fork in it, it's done!"

Re:It's so simple

[Anonymous Coward]

And then we have Linux Mint http://www.linuxmint.com/.

Re:It's so simple

[deafdaemon]

Couldn't agree more. Since it's not a democracy - leave and create/join project that is.

Re:It's so simple

[Shimbo]

This is where you fork. End of story. kthxbai

The probability that someone from the peanut gallery who gets upset about some bikeshed GUI problem will actually do anything constructive: vanishingly small.

Re:It's so simple

[bky1701]

Ubuntu has already been forked (and outdone) many times. Linux Mint, which I just installed for a non-technical person, is far easier to use and install than Ubuntu ever was. Hell, Debian is more stable and usable than Ubuntu these days, and I've used both for long periods of time.

All that Ubuntu has is money. They obviously have little security sense, as their answer to all security problems was to make su difficult to use; somehow, sudu magically fixes all security problems, by conditioning users to blindly type their password for any dialog box that asks. They have no UI sense, given this decision (among many, many others). Their package repos are basically a 1:1 copy of Debian, so no innovation there. They've shown they don't really care about stability; using Kubuntu, I had my system utterly screwed beyond all repair just because I upgraded to their KDE4 travesty (who releases a production distro based around a beta desktop environment?)

Shuttleworth is buying a nice little cult, where his word is gospel, and he can screw with whatever he wants to screw with; nobody can say otherwise. Ubuntu is really not something to care much about because among Linux distros it is neither groundbreaking nor particularly good. Use better distros, suggest better distros, and let Shuttleworth play Civilization Linux from his ivory tower.

Re:It's so simple

[bky1701]

I think you'd be surprised. Great things have come from smaller complaints than making a very central part of the UI a certain way because the project leader says it should be that way.

Re:It's so simple

[yuhong]

They obviously have little security sense, as their answer to all security problems was to make su difficult to use; somehow, sudu magically fixes all security problems, by conditioning users to blindly type their password for any dialog box that asks.

People complained vocally about this with UAC in Vista, even though it is a copy of sudo. Yet very little complaints like this has been delivered to sudo. Why?

using Kubuntu, I had my system utterly screwed beyond all repair just because I upgraded to their KDE4 travesty (who releases a production distro based around a beta desktop environment?)

I know, but Kubuntu is different from mainline Ubuntu. Just because Kubuntu is of poor quality doesn't mean mainline Ubuntu is.

Re:It's so simple

[bky1701]

People complained vocally about this with UAC in Vista, even though it is a copy of sudo. Yet very little complaints like this has been delivered to sudo. Why?

Because Ubuntu is abusing sudo, which was a perfectly fine command for what it was intended, and because no other distro has followed suit in any serious fashion (for good reason.) When it comes down to it, Ubuntu is really just one tile in the Linux mosaic; one that many of the more experienced users stay away from. There should be more criticism of their idea of "security," but I as well as many others simply do not care what Ubuntu does.

I know, but Kubuntu is different from mainline Ubuntu. Just because Kubuntu is of poor quality doesn't mean mainline Ubuntu is.

Not different enough to get a pass. There is also the fact that I can list many more bad experiences, many of which were directly the cause of mainstream. I've had the Ubuntu package tree explode 3 times, requiring almost full reinstalls, and I only used it for about a year. I know well that this is fairly common in highly used Linux installs, but the fact remains that neither Ubuntu nor Fedora have given me anywhere near the number of package database problems as Ubuntu has. There are also a number of other complaints, though I forgot my specific ones. It has been about a year since I used Ubuntu seriously.

Re:It's so simple

[yuhong]

but the fact remains that neither Ubuntu nor Fedora have given me anywhere near the number of package database problems as Ubuntu has.

Looks contradictory. Personally I have so such problems

Re:It's so simple

[yuhong]

Personally I have so such problems

Oops, a spelling error. I mean, personally I have no such problems with Ubuntu, and I have used it for about 9 months now. I started with 9.04 and remember eagerly awaiting 9.10 to fix the kernel video problems and get kernel modesetting.

Open Source, not Open Design

[Anomalyx]

He's correct. Open source is not a democracy. No software is a democracy. There are really only 2 things open source says: 1) here's how we did it, and 2) if you want it designed differently, go right ahead and make your own, here's the code. You don't dictate the design of a product someone else built. If they want to put it to a vote, that's fine, but if they don't then that's fine too.

In the end, there are 3 options: 1) just deal with it, 2) put some custom code in there to make it to your liking, 3) go find another software solution, or just buy something. There's not much you have a right to complain about when it's free...

Re:Open Source, not Open Design

[hduff]

There's not much you have a right to complain about when it's free...

That implies that the software has no value and that your involvement in it has no value. Neither is true.

If somebody offers me something to use, it stands to reason that they want to know if I enjoy using it (or don't) and may even appreciate some suggestion from me.

I don't have the right to demand any change however and that's where I believe all these misunderstandings occur. Both users and devs overestimate their own value and underestimate the value of the other party, then hilarity ensues.

Democracy and Open Source

[Owlyn]

Democracy is one kind of freedom; Open Source is another kind of freedom.

Any country is a republic...

[Jonathan]

Except those with monarchs. Even North Korea is a republic even though the Kim dynasty basically is a royal line. Being a republic and being a democracy are orthogonal. The UK is a good example of a monarchy that is also a democracy, just like the US is a republic that is also a democracy, and North Korea is a republic that is also a dictatorship. Yes, neither the US nor the UK are *direct* democracies like in ancient Athens.

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Myopic]

Good point. And even Athens wasn't a direct democracy, because only a minority of residents got to vote. Direct democracy is reasonable for groups of people numbering in the order of hundreds; and best suited for groups of people numbering in the tens.

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Risen888]

even Athens wasn't a direct democracy, because only a minority of residents got to vote.

You are correct, but that is irrelevant when discussing whether it was a direct democracy. "Direct democracy" doesn't have anything to do with what percentage of people can vote, but with what those people get to vote on. In Athens, the people would vote directly on things like taxation and conscription and whether or not to go to war. (Kinda like California, except less insipid.) Which is indeed "direct democracy."

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Anonymous Coward]

A republic is a type of government where the citizens choose their leaders of their country and the people (or at least a part of its people) have an impact on its government. The word "republic" is derived from the Latin phrase res publica, which can be translated as "a public affair".

North Korea is a republic that's also a dictatorship.

+1 informative, I never knew that Kim Jong Il was actually elected, or that North Korean citizens had an impact on their government!

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Myopic]

Really? You think irrelevant? I think it goes straight to the definition of democracy. Surely you agree that a dictatorship could not be fairly called a "democracy with one voter". How few voters do you (you personally, Risen) require before you allow something to be called a democracy? Obviously, different people and different countries at different periods of history have different experiences with the notion of self-rule.

But you are right that the directness of direct democracy refers to the voters voting on end-product legislation itself, instead of voting for an intermediary, such as a representative.

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Risen888]

I'm not trying to have an argument with you here. Obviously more people voting is better. I'm just saying that it's not in the definition of "democracy." Democracy just means "people vote." Direct democracy means "people vote on issues, not candidates." That's what the words mean.

When black people couldn't vote, we still had a democracy. When women couldn't vote, we still had a democracy. Today, teenagers and (in some states) felons can't vote, and we still have a democracy.

My personal feelings are not at issue here. I'm talking about the definitions of words.

Re:Any country is a republic...

[Myopic]

Fair enough. I don't disagree. Be well.

Start your own country

[mwvdlee]

What can be more democratic than being allowed to start your own country with your own laws if you don't like your current one?

Open Source is democratic because, if you care enough about it, your vote will always count.

Re:Start your own country

[O('_')O_Bush]

"What can be more democratic than being allowed to start your own country with your own laws if you don't like your current one?"

Giving your opinion and accepting the outcome regardless of whether you like it or not.

Like posters above have said, don't confuse Democracy with Anarchy.

Anarchy:
"Act[ing] without waiting for instructions or official permission... The root of anarchism is the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this."

Thank goodness it isn't a democracy

[mukund]

The Slashdot title is very general, considering this is just about the theme. Lots of scientific decisions go into free software design (take any flamewar on LKML for instance). In many cases, the majority of the public may not even have the skills to understand the best solution for a problem.

Roger Penrose said it well in his book Road to Reality.. something like democratic vote makes sense for popular government but not for scientific acceptability.

Majority opinion is opinion alone and it doesn't reflect on scientific truth, which has always existed and is correct regardless.

Republic

[Belial6]

It is more of a Representative Republic. Everybody gets to vote for the person who will ultimately make the decision. In the case of Ubuntu, many of us have voted for Shuttleworth to represent us in our Linux distribution. He makes ultimate decisions in Ubuntu. If we don't like it, we can all go vote for some other distribution, and have someone else be our representative.

Open Source is not any kind of "cracy"

[John Hasler]

And it isn't an "archy" either.

Re:Open Source is not any kind of "cracy"

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Arch Linux?

Spot on - RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly what Mark said:

This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic, and most importantly it means ...

This should get +5 Informative, people please RTFA.

it isn't a democracy, it's better

[greencpu]

in a democracy, the majority rules, and the rest have to live with it.

in open source, if a group makes a decision and you don't like it, you can take all of their work, fork it, and do what you want. even make your own democracy.

And to respond to some of the comments here, no you would not need to be a programmer. You could for example start a blog, and recruit programmers who feel like you to do the work.

however, just because you disagree with the direction of one open source project don't expect sympathy from me if you don't get your way and start casting dispersions on the model. it is the best one going...

New button layout is stupid

[DrXym]

When I want to close a window, I expect the close button to be in a predictable position. The new 10.04 beta doesn't do this because the minimize / maximize buttons are to the left of it. Some windows don't show minimize & maximize so the close button could be the first button, the second or the third meaning the user must consciously hunt for it. Additionally in Windows and in OS X, the close button is coloured (typically red) as another visual clue.

I don't know what motivated the change, whether it was a desire to ape OS X or what, but the current implementation is pretty stupid. If Ubuntu absolutely must move the buttons to the left, at least make sure the close button is the leftmost one in all circumstances.

User Interface Design

[donscarletti]

The old metaphor is: if someone builds a nuclear reactor, it is left to the most qualified engineers. But if you build a bike shed everyone wants to have their opinion heard. I.e. if you want to change the way an IO scheduler or a pagefault handler works, only experienced kernel hackers will bother discussing it, but if you move around two buttons, everyone understand what you've done and wants to weigh in.

But honestly if you are an specialist in building bikesheds, you can never expect to be taken as seriously as those who build nuclear reactors. Someone just reconfigured Metacity to switch some buttons because they thought it was better that way, surely this feat proves that they are the experts here and their judgement should be deferred to.

Back when I regularly contributed to Gnome they switched the button order on dialog boxes, I actually liked the new layout but it was just personal taste, their was no objective improvement to be worth the enormous amount of bitching from the community. And in the end this will be the same, I will get used to this new layout, all that will change is a few indignant people will stop using Ubuntu and it will mainly serve to piss off anyone who borrows my computer.

In a way, the new button order makes more sense, maximise is the opposite of close and should be on the opposite side, but ultimately, it's just not all that important but it serves to attract a lot of attention and impact a lot of people's habits. Surely a software developer who has nothing better to change than this is hardly worth taking seriously.

Re:User Interface Design

[harmonise]

Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?

The best part: "Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change."

Re:User Interface Design

[iris-n]

This is not a good example. See:

In a way, the new button order makes more sense, maximise is the opposite of close and should be on the opposite side

"Makes sense", "opposite", blah blah. You're just demonstrating that there can't be objectivity on this issue. Nuclear reactors, OTOH, can be quite fatal if you change the order of the buttons.

The design team did not explain their decision because there's no explanation. It makes no sense, it's not better or worse. In the end, Mark was sincere: he put them on the left 'cos he wanted to toy with the right, that's it.

Re:User Interface Design

[donscarletti]

Um, I think we're saying the same thing. There is no point to this change, it is all just subjective twiddling with no real benefit, it's a waste of time that only serves to distract attention from real issues.

Maybe you missed the sarcasm in my second paragraph. To be honest, I don't have a huge amount of respect for UI specialists who do this kind of things, I think they mainly sprout opinions like every other pundit on the sidelines with not much justification. If you have to argue with the actual users about a UI decision it means it is probably not a good one anyway.

Anyway, any conceivable benefit to the usibility is overshadowed by the political shitstorm this stuff causes. I refuse to believe that the Ubuntu desktop experience is at such a point where there is nothing left to tweak apart from this kind of thing. If someone wants to contribute to Ubuntu there are plenty of better improvements they can make.

Re:User Interface Design

[iris-n]

Yes, I agree with you.

My point was that the main thing wasn't the triviality of the change (which I think is the heart of the bikeshed tale), but the impossibility of deciding if the change was good or bad; hence the endless arguments.

Of course not!

[alex67500]

The GPL license is what is closest to communism. Ever seen a communist regime that was a democracy ? (I need to leave now, the Party is looking for me)

The difference (vs closed code) is you can change

[BBird]

If you don't like it -- change it yourself --
if you have the skills to do it.

This is something you can not do with closed source
and is the big difference btw the two.

Linux and the Church

[HikingStick]

The Linux community is starting to come to terms with something the Church has been learning to deal with for years: the more you fork (denominationalize), the less commonality you have in the pursuit of your broader purpose or goal. In time, different branches end up competing with each other for support. Because of the way things are in the FOSS community, if enough people felt strongly enough about the issue (the placement of menu items/controls), they could fork and start their own project. [I'm not saying it will happen over this issue, but it stirred the thought in my mind.]

You can't have true democracy in any project, because you need someone (project manager) or something (project plan) making sure that all changes align with the ultimate project plan. True democracy in a software build suggests that the software can be changed any time and any way desired by a simple majority. That would not lend to stability (another lesson the Church seems only marginally able to understand).

Missing the point.

[supersloshy]

Everyone fine with the button change, including Mark and the all-knowing design team, is missing a huge point: the change wasn't transparent and brought around right when the User Interface Freeze for Ubuntu 10.04 happened.

Think of it this way: each operating system is its own country. Linux-based OSes are a lot like the United States of America in that there's lots of different parts that make one huge country. Ubuntu is huge, and in this way it's like the state of Texas. Ubuntu changing the button order and location is like this: Lets say Texas decided to do things differently than everyone else in the country. They changed state law to say that everyone not only drove on the left side of the road instead of the right side, but they used a totally different layout than what everyone in the entire world was used to for the gas, break, steering wheel, etc. They also made this change out of nowhere without asking people in the state about it. How would you feel as a citizen of Texas once you heard this? Would you not question the ability of those running your state? Of course, you could always just "get used to it", but driving from one state to another would be horribly inconsistent. The state later said that they wanted to "use the left side for some innovative things later on" (like how Mark said he wanted to use the right side for things) regardless of the fact that the other side was completely empty before they switched!

Because they changed everything, citizens are complaining over and over about how things should be what's considered the standard for consistency's sake. Others are yelling at the complainers to "just live with it or move out". Then there's people also saying "they know what they're doing, they're professionals! How dare you ever question the opinions of those whose profession is making our laws"!

I love Linux, I really do, but if you don't do things transparently then you'll have a lot of people opposing the change, a lot more than usual. I would be perfectly fine with this change if they told us about it and asked our opinion before it actually happened (10.04 comes out in one month; people writing documentation for Ubuntu will have to re-write a few things and take new screenshots if these decisions are ever reversed). The whole "don't argue with them because they know what they're doing" approach is not only ignorant, but it assumes that everyone in a profession does their job perfectly. Have you ever been able to trust every doctor you've visited? Every dentist? Every polititian? Every president? If you answered yes to those then I suggest waking up: that's now how things work in the real world.

I've since switched to Linux Mint from Ubuntu and I am loving it! =)

I'm not even sure

[obarthelemy]

what a democracy is.

how do we define the "demos": developpers ? users ? admins ? companies too ? stakeholders ? anyone who wants to ?

does representative democracy count as democracy ? When I see the huge disconnect between the election campaign and the happenings during a congress session, I sometimes think not.

who controls the agenda ? being free to vote is fine, being free to decide on what to vote on is better.

is there any need for non-democratic basic "stuff" ?

Oh, and I'm not even sure what Linux is: the bare kernel ? one distro ? all the distros ?

My take right now is that Linux is not a democracy.

Why should it be? Why would it need to be?

[Lemming Mark]

If you take democracy to mean something along the lines of "majority rule" then, no, open source isn't that. It's something that's more flexible, made possible by the almost total lack of resource scarcity in the production and copying of computer software. It's basically anarchist, in a positive sense. Everyone can be completely independent if they want, or they can work together according to shared goals or ideals - but it's all self-organized without top-down control except for where it accepted by consent as being expedient. The "raw materials" - software and ideas - can flow freely because it's practically free to produce and copy them. There doesn't need to be a democratic decision over where to commit resources because for practical purposes there's no limit on resources and no way of centrally controlling them anyhow. Readers of Iain M Bank's Culture books will see similarities with that civilisation, made possible by near-infinite resources.

Also, all the issue at hand really seems to demonstrate is that Ubuntu isn't a democracy. It can be run as a completely top-down regime but as long as the components are basically open source people have the freedom to come and go as they please according to whether that regime serves their needs, so it's up to Ubuntu to decide whether that approach is reasonable. That said, if they're sensible, they should realise that they're fortunate to have a large community of users and that it's worth responding to their needs. But that doesn't mean they are wrong have someone make tough or unpopular judgement calls if they believe that's the best approach overall.

Fuxed

[rshol]

ATL-f2 gconf-editor /apps/metacity/general/button_layout edit text to put : in front of string should read :minimize,maximize,close One more thing to add to the list of things I fix every time I Install Ubuntu

Autocracy?

[headkase]

Since you obviously cannot fork it on your own perhaps you need to convince your peers that it needs forking and gather the required skills and resources to do so? If that is what it takes isn't that a form of democracy? You got together with your peers and made it happen. Freedom in the system allows you to organize like that unlike Closed software where you don't even have the basic Freedom.. So, it is democracy if you can coerce the resources through language for such a large project. However just going it alone yourself is just replacing one autocracy with another one. That's not much of an improvement. Then what are you going to do when someone makes demands of your project? I'd say: let them fork it!

Re:Autocracy?

[jim_v2000]

I think the important difference is that Ubuntu is huge and Canonical has gone to great lengths to attract users, often talking about community involvement. (Even the word "ubuntu" has a community/group participation meaning.) Now that those users are there, they get shat on quite often.

Re:Autocracy?

[headkase]

I think Canonical is fulfilling it's core mission which is to make Linux friendly. Some decisions such as having Metacity widgets on the left are debatable (I know the first thing I'll be doing is moving them to the right once I install Lucid) but regardless of that decision the majority of decisions are based on merit. It is easy to customize, you can fix up pretty well any deficiency from your point of view. The only logical reason for keeping Metacity buttons on the right is that people who don't know how to change it will be annoyed until they get used to it. Does that mean that people who don't know how to change anything should become the driving force behind Ubuntu? This particular issue is driving me, I can't believe that everyone is joining such a whinefest over something that is trivial to change. It's still a whinefest - change what you don't like - if you are incapable of changing it then I really don't want you "voting" on the defaults anyway.

Open Source is a Meritocracy

[Sortova]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and open source is definitely not a democracy. Democracies have the potential to devolve into rule by the mob. In the open source projects I am involved with, influence is based on merit. Those people who do the most work get to, ultimately, make the most decisions.

This doesn't mean that the casual user should have no input. But eventually someone has to make a decision: left vs. right, red vs. blue, etc. The beauty of open source is that if you don't like it, you can change it.

I wonder what this mystery feature is...

[GameboyRMH]

I really wonder what killer feature he has in mind for the right side of the window that could justify breaking decades of good GUI design convention, pissing off the vast majority of the existing users, and confusing newbies. In his posts he says he understands this and still thinks it's a good idea to move the window controls to the left to make way for this mystery feature which is worth keeping secret.

I've probably seen more unusual GUI concepts than most geeks and I can't imagine what he's got up his sleeve. Either it's something groundbreaking or he's just making a huge mistake.

Re:I wonder what this mystery feature is...

[Volante3192]

We need a reason for a GUI change? Heck, we should be used to pointless GUI changes by now. Half the changes between major Windows releases is GUI...and a non-trivial amount of those is just renaming shit.

(It is, and always will be, the SYSTEM TRAY you wankers! You can take your "notification area" and shove it up the deepest, darkest crevice of your gastro-intestinal tract.)

And, really, is this so much of a gamebreaker that it can't be changed by a plugin? (I'm actually legitimatly curious on this part...)

Re:I wonder what this mystery feature is...

[GameboyRMH]

It can be changed in the gconf database, a 3 minute fix. But that's another, totally unnecessary 3 minutes of work for experienced users, and a "ZOMG TEH WINDOE CONTROLZ R ALL MESD UP IM GOING BACK 2 WINDOZE" for the newbies.

Re:I wonder what this mystery feature is...

[jack2000]

What the hell is all the commotion about anyway. It's DAMN GUI! FIX IT YOURSELF!

"This" == Ubuntu

[Sloppy]

This is not a democracy.

Shuttleworth's "this" refers to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not a democracy.

Dunno how that got twisted into meaning "Open Source is not a democracy" because Free Software marketshare is a democracy, and Ubuntu happens to have received a lot of votes. Saying it's not a democracy is like saying your country is not a democracy when you elect a president and then he doesn't take a poll before making every single decision.

System, Preferences, Appearance

[cfriedt]

This is utterly ridiculous... do people really find it that difficult to change the theme if they don't like it?

I promise, that it will not be torturous, nor will it inflict physical or psychological pain on anyone to simply go to System, Preferences, and Appearance to change the theme to what they've grown accustomed to.

It is Shuttleworth's distribution, and he can do with it what he wants. If he believes that these slight aesthetic changes will make him more money, then he has the freedom to make those changes.

Similarly, anyone else has the freedom to modify the default installation ISO to use the classic theme, if they prefer.

Duh! No software program is a democracy

[DontBlameCanada]

Could you imagine?

Sprint item #1: Nominate alphanumeric names to assign to for-loop index in procedure named last week. Due: Monday - noon
Sprint item #2: Vote on nominated for loop index names - top 5 continue to run-off. Due: Monday 6pm
Sprint item #3: Run off vote simple majority. In event of tie, Sprint Master will cast deciding vote. Due: Tuesday noon
Sprint item #4: Marvel at the code dev efficiency and speed of the archaic waterfall model ensconced in the Mil-Spec 498. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498

cmd line method

[Macka]

Or you can do it this way:

$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string ":minimize,maximize,close"

No matttar what the design decision says...

[Anonymous Coward]

left side buttons are still ghey...

Why not let the user just choose?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it... Why not let the user just choose? Implement left AND right.... and put some nice panel somewhere so the USER can tell you what should be were.
And don't forget: if changed, send a call home, so we know how many like it left, and right. /me personally LEFT /my GF: RIGHT /my sysadmin (Anonymous Coward): what the heck: why have buttons when when we have shortcuts.

What is democracy in software?

[kandresen]

First. In a democracy, do you think that the winning party be it republican or democrats AFTER being elected will ask the people what the majority think before doing what they believe in?
Ubuntu in this case represent an elected distribution just like democrats or republicans, you are free to choose a different party if you don't believe in the decisions made by the one you currently use, and this works much better in this case as you have close to endless alternatives to choose from.
And this is only about the layout. I would be surprised if no windows like theme(s) were included as alternative in the base system - choose it if you want.

And then - who votes in a democracy? As far as for most countries, it is not the people but their representatives - thus if people already voted Ubuntu to be the leading party, they are in power to vote on your behalf until you change party - is that not so? I for one cannot say I see many places where any true democracy exists, only the quasi forms created where representatives votes on our behalf.

Thanks for the slashvert

[Bearhouse]

1. Select some uninteresting Ubuntu-related stuff 'news'
2. Sensationalize
3. Get Taco to put on /.
4. Watch your admoney roll in
5. Proffitt!!!

If Linux was democracy I'd likely not be using it.

[PottedMeat]

Because I haven't the technical knowledge that the long time LInux users have.

If the majority was always voting for what they wanted, Linux could very well have remained rather obscure. Thankfully, some people decided to make Linux more available to users like myself.

It seems to me that Linux is far bigger nowadays due to a few people opening the door wider. I'm thankful for that.

Isn't Linux Mint open source democracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using it recently and I love it. I was told it is a fork of Ubuntu.

I can vote if I want to, and you can't stop me ;)

[fox171171]

This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But we are not voting on design decisions.

Hate to break it to you, but I am voting... by not using it. If I wanted an Apple, I'd get an Apple. Maybe it's a minor thing, but I don't like it, and I don't have to use it any more.

Too many preferences

[tepples]

As per part 3 of above, why not have the button locations configurable?

It is configurable. As for why this is not exposed with a checkbox, usability tests show that users quickly become lost in a bewildering array of checkboxes, and testing all combinations of exposed preferences quickly becomes intractable. See The Question of Preferences.

Re:Too many preferences

[jack2000]

How about having all options search-able via some sort of search engine built into the system?

Re:Too many preferences

[gandhi_2]

grep -H -r "button_layout" /

lol!

Re:Too many preferences

[jack2000]

not just for button_layout, all options/configs. Maybe the search engine can list options by relevancy (this would need the options to have descriptions etc). Basically a google-esque MAN search engine.

Frodo is no better than Wormtongue

[Culture20]

From http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/10/03/02/186206/Matt-Asay-Answers-Your-Questions-About-Ubuntu-and-Canonical?from=rss

Adoption stories and influences
by eldavojohn (898314)"Every so often I see an adoption story about so-and-so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think 'Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time.' And then I wait. And wait. Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people. Do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?"
Matt: No, we have no plans to turn Wormtongue. We do, however, have aspirations to play Frodo. :-)

In the end, Frodo proved just as corruptible as Gollum, Wormtongue, the Ringwraiths, etc. I would rather have Canonical have aspirations to play Samwise. In today's story, Shuttleworth seems to be closer to Ilsildur.

Iain Bank's Culture

[tylersoze]

If we are trying to make analogies to political systems, I posit that Open Source is more akin to The Culture, which is a post-scarcity, anarchist, socialist, and utopian society. Any part of The Culture can "fork off" at any time to form their own Culture and can also merge back in at any time. The Culture is nominally democratic but, in practice, controlled by super intelligent Minds. That's sounds pretty close to me. :)

Re:Iain Bank's Culture

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we see the results of democratic action in The Culture in "Look to Windward". A large portion of the Culture were involved in the debate over whether to build the pointless cable car system. The builders sort-of won, but then lost interest, and the result is a decaying wreck. That sounds pretty familiar.

Also, the Minds don't control everything except in the sense that they're better placed to conspire than most humans. We see such conspiracies in each Culture novel (e.g. the conspiracy to start a war in Excession is defeated by another older conspiracy)

Re:Iain Bank's Culture

[pongo000]

Links, please...this sounds interesting!

Don't only take part of why Mac does it

[Quila]

Mac also has a different order of buttons, with the close window button on the left, just as Windows has the close button on the right. Both are at the outside of the window, a good place. This puts the Windows order of buttons on the left -- doesn't work.

Mac also doesn't have a menu right underneath the buttons to accidentlly hit.

Mac has a complete user interface thought of to work together. Taking one element from it is a risky proposition, because unless you did your homework you don't know what other elements you also need to bring over in order for the first element to work right.

This is total BS

[LS]

Asking "is open source a democracy" is like asking "is music a dictatorship". It's a flawed question. Democracy refers to a system of management and control. Open source refers to software with available source code. Anyone can take the source code and manage it anyway they want. It makes more sense to say "Are groups that release instances of open source projects democracies?"

LS

Re:This is total BS

[Linzer]

Parent has it exactly right. The title is the answer to a non-question - instead, a possible title would have been "Ubuntu is not a democracy".

So let's say again for everyone out there who has not yet noticed: Open Source != Ubuntu

It's just a deal!

[MarkvW]

Open source is NOT a democracy. It is a form of contract that people can choose to agree to or decline. It's a DEAL. If you don't like the terms, it's a friendly deal. You can walk away without penalty, you can retain your right to use and modify the code, and you can even sell the code to others (pursuant to a liberal license)!

But it's not a political system; it's just a deal.

Debian with taste.

[spinkham]

Linus Torvalds famously called himself "cvs with taste".
Ubuntu is pretty much "Debian with taste." If you don't like their taste, go to Debian, who IS a democracy.

Why does anyone care?

[OptimusPaul]

Who even clicks on those controls anyway, aren't there shortcuts for all those? Really though, is it any surprise that someone suggested that OSS isn't a democracy? Of course it's not, it's barely organized. It's more like a theocracy. You've got some doofus who thinks he/she is god and makes all kinds of crazy decisions for the software that make no sense. Much of the time there are actual moments that we feel blessed that "god" has provided for us. But then there are the days that are the day of rest, which often go on for weeks or months. I don't blame them, they are for the most part doing this for free. And in many cases it is there creation and they have a lot invested in it. You can try petitioning the commiter with prayer but good luck with that.

BSD's never been democratic...

[ducomputergeek]

...and it's still open source. Last time I checked, it's design was by invite only.

OS/2 was a double-cross by Bill

[SgtChaireBourne]

There was a reason Microsoft withdrawed from OS/2

Yeah, it was so they could stab IBM in the back by saying they were going to help with OS/2, but then secretly using resources for W95 instead. That left IBM with a few weeks to launch of OS/2 but with none of the applications Microsoft had promised to deliver. It also left IBM with a bunch of code that was mixed thoroughly with code copyrighted by Microsoft, which had no intention of doing other than further damage to OS/2.

Clever, unethical, and dishonest as hell. MS DOS was meant to be replaced by OS/2. Bill Gates said in 1998, "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs." He even went as far as signing an agreement to provide applications for OS/2. When he reneged, OS/2 was obviously without apps, and who would know better than Microsofters about that?

Being friends with Microsofters is worse than pointless because they smile in your face and then stab you in the back. There is no way any Microsoft apologist can be a beneficial business partner or employee.

Re:OS/2 was a double-cross by Bill

[fluor2]

I do not agree. You blame Microsoft for OS/2's failure. The project failed on it self. You refer back to 19*88* which was a long way before Windows 95. The competitor those days was Windows 3.0 which was much lighter and much easier to manage than a VERY heavyweight OS like OS/2. 5 minutes boot-up times and a long wait for every program startup. There were no appliactions available in 32-bit and it was simply a system 5 years ahead of any home computer. Microsoft did not use this as a lesson, instead, they withdrawed from the project instead of just waiting for itself to fail.

Re:OS/2 was a double-cross by Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

I sense that you are not a native English speaker, so please take this in stride; the past tense of "withdraw" is "withdrew".

Re:OS/2 was a double-cross by Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, it was only in 1988 that the Windows 3.0 project was created after a way was discovered to run Win in protected mode, and it was only after release that MS learned that it was more popular than OS/2.

There were no appliactions available in 32-bit and it was simply a system 5 years ahead of any home computer.

The break-up was back before 32-bit OS/2 2.0 was released. MS had a SDK for it with a prerelease version for 32-bit app development, but the released versions back then was the 1.x versions that ran in 16-bit protected mode.

Move along, nothing to see here

[puddles]

1. It's a theme. If you don't like it, use a different theme, or edit it to do what you want it to do.

2. I agree with Shuttleworth. If everybody is allowed input into the process, the result will be like this one,

"What if a corporation created the STOP sign", linked to at various places, like this one

http://www.directcreative.com/blog/stop-sign

Torvalds Said It Best

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of open source being a democracy has long ago been laid to rest with the remark made by Linus Torvalds that the Linux project is a "benevolent dictatorship."

No reason to move them to the right, either!

[danielsfca2]

It was Windows NT or 95 that decided randomly to move the close box to the right side (3.1 had only the window menu for closing, and you had to double-click it or drop it down and click "close"). The only reason I can imagine why they did that was a juvenile attempt to differentiate vs. classic Mac OS. See also:

- Icons lined up by default on the left of the desktop instead of right.
- White mouse arrow (stupid!) instead of black
- global "bar" (taskbar vs mac menu bar) at the bottom of the screen by default instead of the top

All these changes were so obviously made to be "the opposite of whatever Apple does" in order to give Windows a veneer of different-ness so that the inexperienced user (or judge) would say "Wow, this is definitely NOT a knock-off of Mac OS! In fact, it's the opposite!

Therefore, since the original justification for moving it to the right was nonexistent, none is needed to move it back where it belongs.

Re:No reason to move them to the right, either!

[fox171171]

Here's an idea... let's swap the brake pedal and gas pedal in the next model year...

Fact is, most users are Windows users. Linux has more potential to grow from Windows users than it does from anywhere else IMHO. Only makes sense to make it easier for them to jump ship. If Linux is too much like Apple, given the choice, they'd probably switch to Apple.

Re:No reason to move them to the right, either!

[danielsfca2]

I think your argument is a rational one. Is the theme in question the default one?

You can always switch to something else...

[kdekorte]

So you don't like where the buttons are by default in Ubuntu. So you have a few options.

1. Learn to like the new button positions

2. Switch to a different theme and move the buttons around, I do understand that the bug quotes is about how the theme locks in the button positions
        which appears to be a limitation of the theme specification, which probably should be fixed.

3. Switch to a version of Linux that doesn't come this way

Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss

[toadlife]

I modded you informative, but couldn't help but chime in, because I'm not sure if you realize why you are sick of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is what Mandrake was in the early 2000s. It's the flavor of the day. The problem with Ubuntu is not a drop off in quality - it's a lack of improvement in quality. Ubuntu is little or no better right now than Mandrake was back in 2001. As users realize that it is not the answer to what they are seeking - a desktop system for the masses, another distro (based on Debian/Slackware/CentOS/etc.) will surface with a similar polish that Ubuntu has, and a mass migration will occur. Like Ubuntu recently and Mandrake before it, it will be hailed by many as the precursor to the "year of Linux of the Desktop". After a few years, with still no adoption of Linux by the masses, the Linux community will grow weary and the cycle will repeat itself.

Benevolent Dictator vs. Consensus-Based Democracy

[__roo]

Reading through a lot of the replies, I think it would help a lot of people to understand the two most prevalent kinds of political and social infrastructure for open source projects: benevolent dictator and consensus-based democracy. Karl Fogel, in his excellent book, Producing Open Source Software (O'Reilly) -- which itself is open source and available for free download -- summarizes them extremely well. Reading TFA and replies, it seems to me that this is a really good case study in how an open source project is managed. I highly recommend reading Karl's section on Political and Social Infrastructure. I'll include two relevant excerpts, because I think they shine light on exactly this situation.

From his section on benevolent dictators:

The benevolent dictator model is exactly what it sounds like: final decision-making authority rests with one person, who, by virtue of personality and experience, is expected to use it wisely.

Although "benevolent dictator" (or BD)is the standard term for this role, it would be better to think of it as "community-approved arbitrator" or "judge". Generally, benevolent dictators do not actually make all the decisions, or even most of the decisions. It's unlikely that one person could have enough expertise to make consistently good decisions across all areas of the project, and anyway, quality developers won't stay around unless they have some influence on the project's direction. Therefore, benevolent dictators commonly do not dictate much. Instead, they let things work themselves out through discussion and experimentation whenever possible. They participate in those discussions themselves, but as regular developers, often deferring to an area maintainer who has more expertise. Only when it is clear that no consensus can be reached, and that most of the group wants someone to guide the decision so that development can move on, do they put their foot down and say "This is the way it's going to be." Reluctance to make decisions by fiat is a trait shared by virtually all successful benevolent dictators; it is one of the reasons they manage to keep the role.

and on consensus-based democracy:

As projects get older, they tend to move away from the benevolent dictatorship model and toward more openly democratic systems. This is not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with a particular BD. It's simply that group-based governance is more "evolutionarily stable", to borrow a biological metaphor. Whenever a benevolent dictator steps down, or attempts to spread decision-making responsibility more evenly, it is an opportunity for the group to settle on a new, non-dictatorial system—establish a constitution, as it were. The group may not take this opportunity the first time, or the second, but eventually they will; once they do, the decision is unlikely ever to be reversed. Common sense explains why: if a group of N people were to vest one person with special power, it would mean that N - 1 people were each agreeing to decrease their individual influence. People usually don't want to do that. Even if they did, the resulting dictatorship would still be conditional: the group anointed the BD, clearly the group could depose the BD. Therefore, once a project has moved from leadership by a charismatic individual to a more formal, group-based system, it rarely moves back.

The details of how these systems work vary widely, but there are two common elements: one, the group works by consensus most of the time; two, there is a formal voting mechanism to fall back on when consensus cannot be reached.

It has to be said

[jamrock]

1) Submit inflammatory article

2) Watch the hit count spike

3) ???

4) Proffitt!

Sorry; I couldn't resist. I'll let myself out now...

You're fooling yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we were an autonomous collective!

North Korea is democracy. FLOSS is a free market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except of course when it relies on government force (and I was banned from UbuntuForums.org, forums.freebsd.org, etc for pointing this out - not to mention my endless -1 Troll ratings here on Slashdot)... Fortunately most governments haven't jumped in front of the open source parade just yet (wait for GPL v4), so I can still use it as an example of voluntary action.

Take away all the government / public university funding and restrictive licenses (ex. GPL), and what you end up with is a perfect model of free market capitalism in action. Remember that the "capital" in "capitalism" isn't just about money, it covers all aspects of individual self-ownership: your body, your time, your skills, your reputation, your self-esteem, etc, etc, etc.

People who donate their capital to free software usually do so voluntarily, whether they're paid for it or not. (And I've seen plenty of open source jobs on Freelancer.com type sites - someone needs a new feature and they pay for it, and then share.)

(Signed: Alex Libman's sock-puppet.)

Rough Consensus

[Anonymous Coward]

Never have i seen a more appropriate time for this quite from David Clark, one of our forefathers:

We reject: kings, presidents and voting.

We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Clark
• http://xys.ccert.edu.cn/reference/future_ietf_92.pdf

Then what is the AUR?

[DeadRat4life]

to say that ubuntu is not a democracy is not to say that the entirety of open source is not. Though i think tdg described it best saying open source is anarchism and not democracy.

Re:If Linux was democracy I'd likely not be using

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok let's out it this way.

ubuntu comes with 5 themes. How about selecting a different one. It's 4 clicks... If you cant figure that out, then please stop using computers as they are way too complex for your base IQ and education.

Before you threw in your 0.32 cents worth, did you even look at the article or the hard to use google to see what it was all about and how dumb the whole argument was? Or did you simply echo the other lemmings around you as you ran towards the cliff?

OMG! OMG! OMG!!! The sky is falling because other people said so! OMG! OMG!

A Failure of Understanding

[tbannist]

There's a failure of understanding demonstrated by the post.

Open Source is a democracy, everyone can vote by choosing which project to use and anyone can create a new project based on an older one or a new idea.

However, not every open source project is a democracy. Many of the projects themselves may be run as despotisms or constitutional monarchies, or even democracies.

It is important to understand that any particular open source project is not "Open Source". No single project encapsulates the entire philosophy and community of Open Source.

Who cares where the buttons are?

[cawdad]

Last time I used buttons to close a window or access a menu was circa Windows 3.1. Keyboard shortcuts, people!

Not a democracy, just stupidity.

[Requiem18th]

Sure Mark can do anything he wants with "his ubuntu". But it isn't intelligent to change something against the wishes of the community, for no good reason. And no, "we will put something there later" is not a good reason because whatever he plans to put on the right can go in the left.

The fanbois and the dev team itself have answered with childish "get used to it", "it's not a big deal", "have you tried it yet?"

Look, before you did shut down the poll, 75% said they hated it and 20% didn't care, about 5% like it and I bet none of those -safe for the dev team itself- actually asked for it.

Personally I think it is a tragedy that it is so easy to fix...

$ gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string menu:minimize,maximize,close

... because Mark and the dev team will think they made a great choice when the truth is that they are only going to make ubuntu less appealing and the only reason people aren't going to vote with their feet is because we are ubuntu geeks and know how to change this.

Problem is, all signs point Mark isn't interested in geek users, but *mac* users instead, which explains why he hired a bunch of Apple rejects to change the direction of development.

Linux Mint here I go...

Laugh or Cry ?

[Zoxed]

I am not sure whether to laugh or cry when someone describes moving window buttons from one side to the other a "big change" !!

Why is this **** hardcoded?

[argent]

If they know it's going to be controversial, why not have this **** in a configuration file? Would it add as much as 0.001% to startup time for the window manager?

Re:Why is this **** hardcoded?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is in a config file

"Benevolent Dictator For Life "

[da5idnetlimit.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_For_Life

Here, I corrected that for you...

Thank you

[shis-ka-bob]

Fogel has presented some clear ideas. Many open source projects begin as benevolent dictatorships: Linus/Linux. van Rossum/Python. Theo/OpenBSD. Pollak/Liftweb. At least in this list, the operating systems went to group-based solutions. I would assume that this is due to the sheer effort of maintaining systems > 100 KLOC becomes overwhelming and leads to burn out.

Mouse or mouse POINTER?

[Chris Burke]

1. Things that are closer to the mouse are quicker to access than things far away from the mouse

From this, assuming that the mouse is on the right hand side of the screen, accessing a same-sized scrollbar would be quicker if it is on the right than if it were on the left.

Why would you assume the mouse pointer is on the right-hand side of the screen? Because the mouse itself is on the right-hand side of the keyboard (for right-handed folks)? The mouse is always on the right side, regardless of where the pointer is!

Fitt's law says that minimizing total distance traveled is good. This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. Why does that matter? It looks like an argument for clustering UI elements together, not an argument that scroll bars belong on the right side of the window to account for right-handedness.

In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.

Re:Mouse or mouse POINTER?

[R3d M3rcury]

I did mean mouse pointer, actually. And you're right that the assumption that the mouse pointer is on the right hand part of the screen may or may not be accurate (which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side...")

That said, it's a fair cop. Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?

This means moving the mouse minimally, which means moving the mouse pointer minimally, irrespective of the absolute position of your hand relative to the screen. In fact, since most active UI elements in a window (menu items, tool bar icons) are on the left side, it sounds to me that Fitt's Law is an argument for having the scroll bars and window controls on the left.

Not necessarily.

Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.

There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse. So a small but quick movement may move the mouse from the middle of the screen to the top of the screen. But the accuracy usually suffers when you do this.

Re:Mouse or mouse POINTER?

[Chris Burke]

which is why I started by saying, "assuming the mouse is on the right hand side..."

Which is why I said "Why would you assume that?" :)

Why would the mouse tend to be towards the right-hand side of the screen? Is it because a control that gets used alot--like, say, a scrollbar--is over there? If all the controls for a window were on the left hand side, would the mouse tend to live over there?

The point is -- there's no natural reason, at least not suggested by Fitt's Law, for the scrollbar (or any other UI element) to be on the right. There's no relationship between right-handedness and having UI elements on the right -- which is actually what the OP was suggesting.

In that context the Fitt's Law argument is circular. The scrollbar is on the right because that's where the mouse is, and the mouse is on the right because that's where the scrollbar is.

Remember that close things are easier to hit than far away things and bigger things are easier to hit than small things. Scroll bars down the side of the window are pretty big things. The scrollbar on this window that I'm typing into is probably about 1400 pixels high.

Sure. But the argument would still be that it would be faster to access if it were on the left, and just as importantly moving from the large scroll bar to the smaller elements -- assuming the other UI elements I mentioned stayed where they are. There is a natural argument for that though, and it's our top-down left-right reading convention.

I remember when the Mozilla 'help' menu was on the right... Barely, because it was only after someone asked aloud (er atype?) why it was over there that I ever noticed it in the first place.

There's also a question of the algorithm used to control the mouse. Most systems do not use a 1:1 ratio (ie, move the mouse 1 inch to move the pointer 1 inch). It usually depends on the acceleration of the mouse.

Which WP mentions Fitt's Law doesn't take into account. At least in the equation. The principles behind it make sense in broader circumstances, just the calculation gets more complicated.

It seems like part of the problem is that unless you're starting from scratch, you're going to need more data to figure out what Fitt's suggests. Assume you can't move either the scrollbar from it's traditional right side, or the menu/toolbar elements from the left side. Where should the window controls be? You'd need actual usage data to figure out what people interact with most often just prior to using said controls, and vice versa. My intuition says people are more likely to hit the 'save' key and then minimize or close a window than they are to scroll a bit then minimize. But "programmer's intuition" has led to a lot of shitty UIs so who am I to say?

P.S. Forgot to mention this before, but I do not think the mouse scroll wheel, or as I call it "The Carpal-Tunnelator", are good reasons to get rid of scroll bars. :P

Re:Fix Is Pretty Easy

[rshol]

Its in gconf. To change it do the following: ATL-f2 gconf-editor to open gconf-editor Navigate to: /apps/metacity/general/button_layout edit text to put : in front of string (instead of at end) if you just want the tools moved to the right. if you want the tools to be rearranged like they used to be the string should read :minimize,maximize,close Pretty easy fix, but annoying. You also will have to do this each time the themes package is updated. Changing themes will not solve this problem, but this gconf edit will.

Re:Fix Is Pretty Easy

[argent]

*sigh*

Tempest in a teabag.

If (!Democracy)

[Anonymous Coward]

If open source is not a democracy, Mr. Shuttleworth, Then I vote for Debian!

As it should be...

[Bert64]

Your not forced to use Ubuntu, even if you do use Ubuntu you aren't forced to use the default theme.. Far too much time gets wasted arguing over how the default themes etc will look, much better to have someone simply dictate the defaults. If you don't like it, you can change the settings or choose a different distro.

Re:Fix Is Pretty Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

teacup i believe you mean, i saw tea bag and thought that someone was about to start blaming democrats and/or republicans for the buttons moving

FORK it

[kentsin]

Fork it when it is needed.

More choice is always better

Three easy solutions:

[QuaveringGrape]

1) Enter command in terminal: gconftool-2 --set “/apps/metacity/general/button_layout” --type string “:minimize,maximize,close”
Buttons are now how they have been as long as I can remember, as far back as Ubuntu 7.04. (Incidentally, they also match the Windows layout.)

2) Use Ubuntu tweak to customise to your heart's content.

3) Show the Ubuntu devs that you've had enough of their authoritarian tendencies and switch distributions.

I've been a loyal Ubuntu user for almost three years now, but this type of attitude is slowly disillusioning me.

Re:Three easy solutions:

[DadLeopard]

Thanks for No.2, somehow I overlooked the Easy fix!

The Order of the Window Controls

[formfeed]

the order of the window controls within the Light

WTF?

The Order of the Window Controls within the Light

-that sounds like a secret society to me.

Just move the buttons yourself???

[Bryan3000000]

It's freakishly easy to move the buttons. A single config file in gnome. People have been doing this to make Ubuntu look more like OS X for a long time. Of course, what would be really nice is if they would put this option in the GUI.

Ubuntu is not a democracy.. but.. devel Vs users

[nikanth]

Ubuntu is not democracy.. but open-source is In open-source any group who contribute software engineering can fork the project.. so it is perfect democracy. But ubuntu needs money from shuttleworth.. so he has an upper-hand Also ubuntu users cannot demand something from ubuntu developers... Only developers can vote in open-source

Re:Fix Is Pretty Easy

[argent]

No, I meant teabag. It's all Sarah Palin's fault.

Open Source vs Ubuntu

[pomerane]

Open Source is not Ubuntu just like trapezoids are not triangles. There are about a trillion Open-sourced operating systems out there an just to prove the point search for Distrowatch. If you don't like the defaults that are given there are several options: 1) learn the program, many things are either in C or Python. 2) wait for someone to come out with the Gui app for you. 3) Decide that you are too lazy and live with it (in which case you have no right to complain just like you have no right to complain of someone in office when YOU CHOSE not to vote). Or 4)Search for another distribution, Ubuntu speaks the loudest but they are just like any other Linux distribution these days, again search up distrowatch or better yet Youtube and see what they can do. No democracy? I think it is flooded with democracy,you just have to know where to look and what to look for.

Open Source is a "Do-Ocracy" not a DEMocracy

[obscuro]

The people who do it first and do it most have the most say. If someone has enough going to fork and succeed at getting adoption and support then they had enough doers. Requirements requests and bug fixes are information for doers, not votes. Doers respond because they care about the quality of what they do and they trust that there is a relationship between delivering quality and satisfying those requests. The reason Open Source has flourished instead of getting mired in bs is precisely because it avoids direct enslavement to the dollar and the vote. Political bs in open source either kills a thing pretty fast or results in a new creation often superior to the one that got bogged down. Amen.

as a Linux user & community contributor

[recharged95]

I have never voted for anything in the Linux community (decisions are made for me I guess).
I have been given what is available (ffmpeg for instance), suck it up for the worst, and no choice in sight but making up ones for myself.
I have built my own utilities out of need.
I have never been told what and what not to do.
And at the company I work for that uses Linux/F/OSS, we pay for support occasionally.

Doesn't sound like democracy or communism, sounds more like capitalism.

Here, fixed that for you!

[DadLeopard]

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/ Yada, Yada, Blah, Blah, Blah! Get over it! this is Ubuntu we are talking about, if you don't like something you can change it!

Re:Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triager

[Thundersnatch]

Regarding your signature, can't any system, including *NIX systems which use ACLs can also suffer the exact same issue? Having permission to write a file does not imply permission to change its ACLs. So the whole "write temp file and atomically rename" paradigm causes trouble. My reading of the article makes me think I may have been dealing this problem while editing the configuration files on a Linux-based storage appliance.

Re:Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triager

[arose]

It certainly can be an issue on any system. My signature refers to the often claimed advantage of tight and seamless integration if you get your whole stack from Microsoft as opposed to a cobbled together GNU/Linux distro.

Re:Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triager

[Thundersnatch]

Well, it is an edge case to be sure. Files with permissions different than their parent directory, but also include permissions which the file editor cannot sensibly set themselves, are definitely a rarity. We have about 1M office documents on Windows servers here, and have never encountered the isse in over 12 years.

Re:Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triager

[arose]

I hit it while trying to prevent users from deleting a specific file without breaking everyones links.

An edge case is when Excel drops some rows from a drop down filter in a huge file or writes two megabytes of junk in the middle of a table and the computer grinds to a halt while scrolling over that place (never found a solution for the first one, second one required resaving with Openoffice...) This one, on the other hand, is hit by enough people for Microsoft to have a support article and a suggested workaround.

In the end, edge case or not, Microsoft controls the whole stack, but the only solution they have after several years is to add yet another Microsoft product into the stack.

Re:Yet launchpad is plagued by incompetent triager

[Thundersnatch]

But there is no solution to the exact same issue on Linux, is there? It's not a preventable issue with traditional file-system semantics, which is why you need something like a document management system to address it.