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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."
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.'"
This is 90% of what makes the American government unworkable.
My other sig is clever.
If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner then promoting free and open software will end up being small potatoes, you've probably got a nobel prize waiting for you.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism. There is (or should be) a middle ground between a "mono-culture" and the inability to accept new ideas from a member of an opposing group.
My other sig is clever.
Strange how he speaks of "lifting Free Software to the forefront", whilst all he's _really_ doing is trying to lift Ubuntu to the forefront.
Mr. Shuttleworth apparently knows that "the internet doesn't forget", yet he (I assume it was him who heralded the changes made) chose to tone down the role of Free (as in freedom) Software in the "Ubuntu Promise" over the years in a very silent yet continuous manner, and led Ubuntu to act against some of the principles of the early (think 2004 to 2006 or so) days of the project; principles that I happen to value. Getting into bed with vendors of proprietary software in a way that doesn't benefit others in the Free Software eco-system is something I despise, for example: Canonical is actually getting proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers before anyone else gets them, probably under NDA or whatnot. I also don't like their "partner"-repository that contains nothing but proprietary software, and is advertised and presented as a Really Great Thing(tm), not as a sometimes (probably) necessary evil. I don't like how Ubuntu's more and more about doing "their thing" without contributing back to the upstream projects they base their product on, and how they actually try to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making technically bad decisions in the wake of all this (think client-side window decorations, and putting window controls to the left because of that - just doesn't make any sense to me). There were many other occasions on which Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu chose to somehow, somewhat upset parts of the Free Software community, either by what they stated or what they did. I just don't think Mr. Shuttleworth is entitled to put Ubuntu under the banner of Free Software, at least not as it stands today. If someone on identi.ca, or whereever else, is arguing against Ubuntu, it's just that: someone arguing against Ubuntu. It's certainly not an attack on Free Software.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Mark doesn't like it that we don't just all cooperate in making him even more wealthy. We're not his unpaid employees, even if that's the way he treats us.
Bruce Perens.
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Only 52 comments in and it seems there is already a disproportionate number of posts moderated Offtopic, Troll, or Flamebait than a typical /. thread. All this and we're just talking about the possibility of tribalism being a problem in the free software community. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is on to something.
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
That's easy to explain. Much like how the grass is always greener on the other side, criticism is louder when it's against your side.
How appropriate considering the topic at hand of Tribalism.
I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims. And Libertarians. And Greens. If the stranglehold of the two corrupt powerhouses were to be shaken with some decent 3rd party action without the populace mourning "wasting" votes within my lifetime, I can die a happy man that that the country I love will be on it's way to rediscovering her path.
More Twoson than Cupertino
This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low - he lost his conservative base. Conservatives were quite outspoken about this. That being said, the fiscal bailout was quite different from the "stimulus" package. The fiscal bailout was almost completely a set of loans and the large majority of those loans have been repaid. The "stimulus" package, on the other hand was mostly a giant boatload of pork-barrel spending.
Yeah except that whole part about making Linux easier to use, and accessable to average users. Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it.
It may not be the distro for you, but to dismiss it as adding very little to the OSS community is intellecutally dishonest. Ubuntu was very helpful to many people for getting started on Linux. I myself started using it a year ago, and recently switched to Arch Linux because I was ready to learn more about how the sytem works. Ubuntu opened the door, and I'm very greatful for that.
Ubuntu is bringing free software to the masses as noone else has done before. Nobody forces you to install proprietary software from the partner repository or anywhere else and when Ubuntu detects that a proprietary driver, for instance, is available for your hardware it tells you that it's not free software and you can choose to ignore and keep using the free one.
Scientia est Potentia
Well you heard at least one voice - Mine.
I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans. And then I joined a Tea Party in December of '08. It's not my fault you chose not to hear my voice. You also chose not to hear my voice in 9/12 when I said going to war was a dumbass decision, but was passed near-unanimously by the Congress (both D's and R's).
Oh and by the way the Tea Parties date back to December 2007 when Bush was still in office. It was originally started by libertarian Ron Paul, who then stepped aside after his campaign was finished, but the momentum continued without him.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
That's because all generalizations are false.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Are you really advocating a Salvation Army model of free software? "Come have this hot meal, and all you have to do in return is listen to our sermon"?
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Redhat didn't enter the ring with Canonical over their contributions, that's entirely the wrong way to look at the situation. Canonical just can't seem to figure out why it's them verses everyone else. Canonical's all keen to wax philosophical about tribes, while the "tribes of old" so to speak have more or less met in the middle, broken bread and made up.
/. conversations. Now Canonical needs to decide if it wants a future with the community, or not.
You see, what Canonical is now realizing is that they're in a tribe all by themselves. And they can't handle this revelation becoming public, because it really shows just how little they've contributed back to the community over the past few years. This recent GNOME survey just shows how little they've done for GNOME. The Linux Kernel survey showed much the same numbers. And if we ran around to the rest of the big free software communities, I'm certain we'd see much the same numbers, yet again.
Canonical, with its Secret Invite-only Design Team e.g., has built a nice big brick wall around themselves, doing lots of work within, but very little escaping at the border. They try to say they're doing "Upstream Desktop Software" work with things like Notify-OSD and their indicator mess, but both are so incredibly bad that no other operating system is using them, and their patches have been entirely rejected likewise. (Namely due to the absolute poor quality of the patches. I've reviewed a number of them myself, and in almost every case they break some of the software's functionality so that they can integrate their junk, which absolutely won't work outside of Ubuntu's environment. That shit wouldn't fly anywhere else, but they're Canonical, so we should merge their patch anyways, right?)
Furthermore, they knew this was going to happen from the outlay; their upstreams set out visions, had meetings, and collectively decided as a community "We're going this way". Canonical then chooses to go an entirely different direction, and are pissed that nobody followed them.
So yeah, they can whine until the cows come home about how people "fight with them", but until they prove themselves to be members of the community at broad and not members of their own kingdom, nobody is going to take them seriously. The big wars are over; GNOME and KDE have reconciled their differences and are working together. Vi vs Emacs is a funny anecdote for