Tribalism Is the Enemy Within, Says Shuttleworth

climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote, "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."

Comments

You keep using that word

[overshoot]

And this is what makes socialism 100% unworkable,

So what are you doing to privatize your municipal streets, water, fire, and police?

(Yes, this is OT. Yes, abuse of the language is a personal pet peeve. Mod me down, by all means -- my karma can stand it.)

Re:You keep using that word

[ceoyoyo]

Sorry. You seem to be mistaking socialism for the economic side of communism. Socialism is simply the idea that the public, either in the form of the government or directly in the form of a group of citizens, should own things, provide services, etc. Publicly owned transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure are all examples of socialism. Not "solid principles of government" whatever that is.

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

I use Debian, but I'm grateful to Mr. Shuttleworth

[FridayBob]

For a year I used Kubuntu, as well as the Linux Mint version based on it, for my workstation. I switched because KDE on Debian, of which I'm a big fan, had become so unstable in the spring of 2009 as KDE4 was being introduced. I'm grateful to Mr. Shuttleworth that I had this option. I was forced to move back to Debian because there are currently too many bugs in the Ubuntu packages that I need to support a distributed file system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS. This all works with Debian (lenny or squeeze), so I figure Ubuntu is just too focused on the desktop to care about it.

That's a pity for two reasons. First, I definitely had it easy for a while as far as the desktop is concerned. I've been back with Debian for a month now and there are still a number of rough edges to my desktop experience: I've spent far too much time adding missing functionality and trying to get it all to behave properly. It's such a waste of effort when you know that it doesn't have to be like that anymore. Linux Mint is so easy, even a relative noob can install it and have all kinds of basic desktop functionality running and configured in just a few hours.

The second reason is because Linux workstations deserve better file server support than just NFS and SMB/CIFS. Imagine an office building that will soon house 2.000 employees and being offered the opportunity to set it up with workstations and servers using only open source software. Would you feel comfortable doing that with NFS or Samba? I wouldn't. OpenAFS, on the other hand -- now that's a capable file system. I know that I would be able to rely on Debian and OpenAFS for the file servers, but I would also prefer a distro for the workstations that would likely result in the lowest number of help desk calls. I doubt that would be Debian, but it would be great if it could be something based on Debian. With OpenAFS and distros like Ubuntu, I figure we're almost there.

From this perspective, I find it really strange that so many long-time Debian users can be so hostile towards Ubuntu. It's not like anyone is forcing them to use it. IMHO, if it's so easy to use that it not only gives normal users the necessary confidence to make the switch from Windows, but also to fix (most of) their own problems afterwards, how can that be a bad thing? Furthermore, if the Ubuntu project continues to succeed where the Debian project has not, perhaps the latter should look to the former for a little inspiration every once in a while.

Re:Funny, I've just been discussing with a friend

[Stratoukos]

Unless your friend was Cracked's David Wong the Monkeysphere was not his idea.

Here's the unbelievably insightful original, adorable monkey pictures included.

Re:What a hypocrite

[Bruce Perens]

I have been offered the online-perception-management services I'm talking about while managing at HP and Sourcelabs. If you are not aware of companys concern for their online perception and what they do about it, and won't take my word for it, there isn't much point in arguing about it with you.

Mark's hypocracy doesn't have so much to do with his character as it has to do with the fact that his company's goals and those of the free software community are simply not compatible. If you consider how different they are, I shouldn't have to argue this one. What made his statement hypocritical is that he was asking the Free Software community to all line up and pull in one direction, with the effect that Ubuntu would be able to harvest more of our software for its own purposes. It's not really anything for the community's own good - we need our differences.

Re:Public expectations...

[the_womble]

Shuttleworth's point is to:

1) make a subtle reply to recent blog posts on how little Canonical contributes to Linux development

2) without giving further publicity to the criticism.

I had some doubts about the numbers (largely because the percentage of Gnome code contributions goes back to well before canonical existed). I had hoped for a refutation with numbers (i.e.g we have x Gnome devs working for us, who have made y commits and z loc).

Gnome is important because Canonical's excuse for not contributing to the kernel was that they were contributing to the front end.

Mark Shuttleworth is spinning like a politician (with calls to emotion rather than facts).

His actual defence is on Greg DeKoenigsberg's next blog post. So far, IMHO, Greg is winning the argument.