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Tribalism Is the Enemy Within, Says Shuttleworth

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-we-all-just-get-along dept.

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."

3 of 655 comments (clear)

  1. You keep using that word by overshoot · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

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    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  2. Re:Funny, I've just been discussing with a friend by Stratoukos · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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

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    It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
  3. Re:Public expectations... by the_womble · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.