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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."
I, TrisexualPuppy, have had two FPs today. At my limit for binge FPing!
The public expectations of software are not particularly rigorous -- it shouldn't crash too often, it should look moderately pretty, and it should get them on the web. Done, done, and done. Can we go back to arguing and tribalism now?
Palm trees and 8
It's one of the great strengths of open source. Or would you rather a mono-culture (and we can guess who you want at the top).
I talked with Mr. Shuttleworth. My impression is that he is not ready for the huge social challenges of running an extraordinarily complex software development effort.
"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.
use my distro.. It's way better than those other pieces of crap.
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
Ignore him.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Just the sort of intellectual whining I'd expect from an Ubunt-dude.
Tsk tsk.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
What do you expect? He uses Ubuntu.
Would you mind expanding on this comment please my dearest sir/madam?
Thats fine as Ubuntu doesn't actually contribute much source code anyhow. It takes and takes, but returns very little.
Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world.
I guess I hadn't noticed. What's he going on about?
...or, rather, people who design and perpetrate software like:
- networkmanager ...
- dbus
- gconf & gnome
- pulseaudio
- mono
-
we discovered a new way to think.
The Tribalism is blocking me from world domination. Kill him.
ST vs. Amiga
Mac vs. Amiga
Mac vs. IBM PC
Windows vs. Linux
Republicans vs. Democrats
Racists (R) vs. Racists (D)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's called Open Source. Get it right!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i.e. ain't going to happen. And funnily enough, assuming evolution is a universal where life is concerned (alabama excepted), any aliens we come across are almost certainly going to behave in a similar fashion.
Deleted
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!
I cannot bring myself to even try Ubuntu due to the names of its releases.
-Feisty Fanboy
People who think people from another group are 'wrong by default' are wrong!
If this was Startrek the androids head would now explode.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
And apes are tribal.
No fix for this, other than editing the DNA. (Warning: may involve large changes in to the Y chromosome).
Thats why I got an Apple.
This is all a bunch of pretty words. Sure, we should avoid "tribalism" arguments. There's some disturbing logical flaws -- tribalism based on nationality is surely more dangerous than tribalism based on preference of sports teams -- but the main issue is that no one accusing Canonical based on that. It's all a big strawman. I'd love to love Canonical.
But forget all that. The important thing is:
What's up with the "Our company is like a successful woman and you're saying we slept our way to the top!" analogy? Where does that even come from? Space madness?
First off, learn with the fuck racism is and how it is different from prejudice you ignorant fuck.
Next, the very thing you are bitching about is what drove OSS to where it is today. People being 'fanboys' for their favorite OS or software is what ends up making OSS projects any good. Its one of the biggest motivating factors there is.
Popularity and praise for your effort, getting people to follow you and your awesome project ... that DRIVES most OSS developers, regardless of how many of them admit to it.
You shouldn't bitch to much about the very thing that got OSS to where it is today. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be better if everyone would work together for the common good, but thats just some BS cover thats thrown out with OSS as a battlecry and has little to do with actual motivation to do the work.
Pride makes OSS what it is, knowing that others will respect and admire you for your work on an OSS project. Clout. Publicity ... all the things that go into the very problem your complaining about are what gave you the OS you now stand on top of Mr Shuttleworth.
Competition is what makes people put effort into progress. My team being better than your team is why I work together with my team to kick your teams ass.
Do you REALLY think Linux would be what it is today if pretty much the entire OSS world (Linux fans or not) didn't have the some of the strongest hate, disgust and prejudice against Microsoft that they do? That 'tribalism' helps unite BSD fanboys (of which I'm a proud card carrying member) and Linux fanboys together to do things to beat MS.
I suggest you be really careful what you wish for.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
And laugh at everyone posting about how Shuttleworth is wrong by default, and how Ubuntu sucks by default.
Hell, the packaging and bandwidth is more than most, and they also do contribute a fairly large amount of code and infrastructure.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
Ubuntu provides a package that many people have found they prefer - how does that not fit the definition of value-added?
Considering the amount of effort I have had to expend to get Ubuntu 10.04 to work with Exchange server, just because they can't be bothered to include Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning/Pidgin into their repositories properly AND integrated into their notifier applet
All I can say is "ubuntu is more guilty of this than most"
If ever you want to cause an uproar, hold forth as follows.
Tribalism is what we call the pack instinct in humans. It has served important survival functions in the great apes, canines and probably most pack hunting species. It can be trained out to some degree but it is part of the default social priority structure we are all born with. In humans it is only slightly based on blood relations: the main cues for identifying tribe members are cultural. Most of tribalism is really culturism. If you act the same and look the same and smell the same, you are likely to be accepted.
It protects against disease: if you kill the interloper promptly there is less chance of contagion. It is the framework for competition for resources: if your tribe can defeat another tribe you can commandeer their land, women, etc. That is the evolutionary basis of tribalism and in fact society in general.
Racism, properly viewed, is just tribalism where the tribes happen to have different skin colors. When the colors match, e.g., Tutsis vs. Hutus we call it tribalism or culturism.
Racism tribalism culturism
Unfortunately, he's essentially killed the Debian project, and the rest of Free Software is not far behind as we realize the futility of making ourselves his unpaid employees. I have a large product I'm working on, originally intended to be Open Source licensed. I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
Bruce Perens.
I think I can safely say it's bad, as it was the worst labour civic in Civ4.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
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.
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.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Mr. Shuttleworth was not prepared to deal with the occasional anger of the software contributors, for example. Running a complicated technological business requires an understanding of not only the technology, but also the immense social complications.
Shuttleworth is deeply embroiled in the constant in-fighting between Canonical and Debian, so it's not a big surprise that he sees fragmentation.
And now, it sounds like Redhat has entered the ring against Canonical, too... over contributions to GNOME of all things.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Right now me just howling naked savage. What are my options? The various tribes and their benefits. Me no run'um Oobuntoo, so me not one of them.
This is what advertisers want. It is what anyone in charge wants. Or indeed anyone who wants to be in charge wants.
something an Ubuntard would say. No sane person would listen to him or use Ubuntu :P.
To be honest, though, I don't like Ubuntu and I prefer SUSE.
It doesn't because Canonical's patch tribalism forces upstream developers to waste time on adding the value all over again from scratch.
The problem is things like this: Talk to a Os X or Windows (I know they aren't OSS but the concept is the same) user about the other. The arguments they make are so far exaggerated and removed from present reality that it's mind blowingly obvious that they have literally never used the thing they're complaining about.
And this isn't just a few extremists this is the PREVAILING attitude among Windows/Os X users and I'll bet it's the same in the OSS world.
There's this thing called "Other Distributions" that you may want to look at. They have repos too.
Where else would you find people deeply committed as people in free software community? I think this type of tribalism comes with territory, and one of consequential driving forces behind free software movement. We are talking about at least the sweat equity, and the investment of identity -- which are both valuable human assets. Just look at small, infrequent punches that Linux throws at others. We forgive him because he's been a part of significant history, but it becomes harder and louder as you deal with those who may not be as talented or fortunate.
yup, shuttleworth & ubuntu is an interloper
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Redhat and Canonical serve two entirely different groups of people, so it's pretty pointless to bitch about what each have or haven't done for their respective groups.
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.
They seem to provide source and comply with the GPL, what else did you want?
Mark is telling an old story again, but it is obviously necessary to repeat this very insight especially when it is done so well. In the end it is still the idea that you should use reason and not some prejudgment to classify things. You may read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment to understand the stuff behind it. It find it particular interesting that the Wikipedia article states that the Age of Enlightenment has ended. I strongly recommend to start it all over again (without the mistakes of course that would not be very enlightened).
Killed Debian? Sounds like hyperbole to me...
emacs vs vi
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
Especially as Ubuntu is rotting from the core. I run Ubuntu, but don't use its bootloader, drivers, bootscrips, or kernel after getting burnt once too often.
I'm not entirely qualified to make a fluid dynamics analogy, but bear with me here..
Tribes are eddys.
If a current within a fluid encourages inter-eddy interaction (dispersal, conjoinment) - no matter how temporary or permanent, yet the tendency is for eddys to exist outside a flow or current system.
How can tribes not also persist outside those social currents not strong enough to induce diffusion?
There are still 'Kolmogrov microscales' when there appear to be no eddys..
I think poor Marky (insert underlying vocal connotations of tribalism) is just upset that people think they don't contribute anything. Here is a quote from an article Mark linked to:
Likewise, I don't think it is fair to undermine Canonical's contributions just because many of them exist outside of GNOME.
I personally think that this IS fair. If they are going off on their own implementing features outside the mainline GNOME project and those associated development routes then that is there prerogative but we absolutely can undermine their work. Any extra work they do just for the whims of their project is going to be by reality less useful to others. The argument can be made that GNOME could be more accepting of the work and interest of others - which in the end they do try to move their additions upstream... Also the definition and application of the word "contribution" is made vague since these contributions are to their community and not to GNOME. As a related side note: this issue of upstream changes and doing what they want to on their own is the VERY reason why I like using Fedora.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
...also a tribe. And there assertion that our tribalism is wrong by default, is also wrong.
Long live FREEBSD! DIE MS, DIE LINUX.... ok MacOS can live as long as my BSD commands are availible in Terminal.app. :)
Ok linux can live too as long as they keep making games
I have no idea what Mark is thinking decrying our saphic allies.
Unfortunately, at this stage, changing civics would cause civil unrest, and we're only three turns away from finishing the Oracle, and five turns away from the Pyramids.....
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Well, completely destroyed any significance of Debian other than as unpaid employees of Ubuntu.
Bruce Perens.
A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:
It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.
One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.
Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarket
checkouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.
We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.
Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the
*same* person.
Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.
The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.
How is this any different than any Linux distro? It sounds to me like you're arguing against the basic concept of free software...
I'm part of the tribe that thinks tribalism is for idiots.
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify. Unfortunately when we wrote it, we weren't thinking that we would have gate-keepers who would essentially negate why we wrote it.
Bruce Perens.
R vs. D is Reddit vs. Digg.
This is the entire reason why Linux and the rest of the Open Sores movement hasn't gone anywhere for more than a decade. If you alienate one another and the people you have every reason to be reaching out to, of course you're not going to make any headway - and nobody alienates prospective new users quite like the Linux community. Deliberately, openly, unabashedly, over the past ten years the pimply oil-soaked face of the Linux community did just about everything it could to appear alien and elite to people that use operating systems that actually work. Nobody is going to want to use your arcane, archaic operating system and the equally nuck-futs backward software that comes with it if you're not even willing to help them try. The complete inattention to usability is a side effect of this, along with their downright pathological inability to relate to the needs of other people with a less advanced grasp of the product than they have. (A symptom of the autism which supposedly pervades most of geekdom, though I suspect largely in imagination only.) Those fags sure got told, didn't they hacker kiddies? Now the only people who give half a rat's last turd about your freetard garbageware are the people who are too cheap to afford anything else - oh yeah, and the companies with corporate sponsors that completely deviate from your Utopian free-software model. Thanks a lot, you fucking tools.
Tribalism is a cancer, and with nobody left to push away, the freetards are attacking each other. Good riddance, and enjoy your decline to (further) obscurity.
Really? HigherEducationQuestionmark.com I think their web developer should be kicked out. That is too long URL.
P.S. I hate long urls. Really.
But let me guess. It would be really swell if everyone joined Shuttelworth's side and redirected their tribalism energies towards all thing not *buntu.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
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 think that there is inevitably a conflict between the goal of software freedom and the existence of a financially powerful gate-keeper who stands between the financially un-powerful free software developers and the vast majority of users. The goals of the gate-keeper will never align with those of the folks making the software.
Maybe it is time for something beyond the Four Freedoms and the Open Source Definition that deals with this problem while building a viable developer and user community.
Bruce Perens.
Glock vs. 1911, AK vs. AR platform. All are excellent guns, but don't tell that to any of the "purists" on either side!
"He"'s killed Debian? Sorry, but he didn't point guns at anybody to get users and developers. Build a better Debian, don't give us the "it's all Shuttleworth's fault, waaaa!" crap.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
No. Actually RMS did that with the Gnu Free Documentation License.
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
Bruce Perens.
They don't force you to use proprietary software, but they do include proprietary drivers as well as Ubuntu One by default now.
He pointed tons of money at them. Hey, I even gave away Ubuntu CDs once or twice. I won't again.
Bruce Perens.
The guy is barely making a buck on the distro he chose to roll (from support etc.), and people are up in arms about getting paid because he uses software which people themselves chose to license under the GPL? You can make as much money supporting Ubuntu as Mark Shuttlesworth can, he doesn't have a proprietary edge over you apart from employing the people who rolled the distro (which can hardly be called an unfair advantage, I don't bitch at programmers for their apparent advantage at altering the program they wrote, when they alter my favorite program in a way I find silly).
And keep the friggin' republican/democrat-bitchfight out.
Love each other, you silly geese ^^.
I know it's far from perfect and I think it's beyond me trying to argue with you but I rather see free software being largely distributed this way that not at all.
Scientia est Potentia
The Debian project is alive and doing fine. It's true that it's no longer what comes to mind first or second when you think of a desktop Linux distribution, but declaring it killed is just plain wrong. Really. Calm down.
Hello Bruce, love ElectricFence !
In what way has he killed the DP ? By making its collective brainchild the most popular Linux distribution ? Sounds like it killed it with love, no ?
than being related to the granddaddy of racism and sexism.
Sure, but unfortunately Free Software doesn't work unless people have a motivation to make it. And over time the only people left with that motivation, when there are gate-keepers, are going to be the folks working for the gate-keepers and people who have some financial reason to get stuff into distributions, like hardware manufacturers.
Bruce Perens.
Hang on,
I don't see any of what you describe happening with Ubuntu. On the contrary, Ubuntu is very eloquent about why Linux is free and why people should use it.
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default'."
This seems to be an appropriate description for the immediate rejection by the slashdot clan of all technology, standards, and business models from Microsoft.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
By essentially making all past and present Debian developers his unpaid employees. Everything we did was for Ubuntu, not Debian, we just didn't know it. I really wish now that I'd let the project die when Ian Murdock quit. I was a freetard - just like Dan Lyons called them when he did that "Fake Steve Jobs" blog. What an idiot I was.
Bruce Perens.
Wouldn't 'Free' include enough liberty to elect to use proprietary software?
That's nonsense. It's free software. If Canonical screws up, people will just go elsewhere. Debian is not far away. Having lots of people on Ubuntu makes a million times better campaigning platform than having them on Mac OS X or Windows.
good job, Eve.
rewriting history since 2109
Fedora for me is a very good option. In reality whenever I get a new computer I try both and usually the one that I end up going with was the one released more recently. If Ubuntu slips too much there is competition just waiting to gobble up the market share.
Mr. Shuttleworth seems to using a rather narrow definition of tribalism to illustrate his point. The tribal nations of the past and present were based around a common culture, family and economic interest rather than a simple minded view of other groups being "wrong by default".
Don't ask what I'd change if I were in Mark's shoes, ask how to avoid having more people in his position. I would rather see non-profits in charge of building Free Software distributions and getting them to the people. The Mozilla Foundation is doing this reasonably well, although they have their problems and challenges. Debian as a first pass was pretty good, its main foundering point was that they often carried libertarianism to the point of absurdity and well beyond goals of Free Software. There were arguments about slippery slopes every time something offensive was pulled from the distribution.
Bruce Perens.
What many people don't realize is that this is true for advanced users as well. I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.
It's the same thing with programming languages. I have programmed in C for over 25 years, but I use Python for many jobs. Having a simpler language to program makes my work more productive for day to day tasks, although I can resort to C whenever Python isn't powerful enough.
The dogmatism of the entire OSS crowd is what makes me love to bash those fucks.
The world hasn't seen bigger goosesteppers since 1945.
So the developers left the project for better money and it's his fault for offering them jobs? Fascinating!
You're not helping your case. Is it so hard to point out what the evil was in offering money for jobs? Was the SABDFL all evil like and cackling when he said "Help me DOOM Debian and you'll get 30 silver coins each! BWAHAAHAHA"?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Isn't it sad that, in an article about the perils of tribalism, the comments to the article quickly devolved to tribalism?
Unfortunately, when making selections out of several possible choices reputations of associated groups and thus stereotyping will come in to play.
If you are associated with a group that has a history of releasing poor software, your reputation will suffer if I want reliable software.
Just because something is easier to use and works right without having to FK with it, doesn't mean it sucks for the advanced user.
I thought Aaron Siego's reply to this furore to be about the best I've read:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/07/having-made-our-beds-we-now-lie-in-them.html
I doubt that very many Debian developers are actually working at Ubuntu. It's not that big a company. They're working in lots of places. It wasn't throwing money at developers, mostly at users through marketing, PR and publicity.
Bruce Perens.
The masses are never going to care who wrote whatever software, or why, or what the philosophical underpinnings are. They aren't going to care if it's modifiable, since darn few people have the ability to modify it. They aren't going to notice if it's free to redistribute, because lots of them act as if all software and music was, and most of the rest won't notice that the Free Software is legal to redistribute. They may notice the lack of DRM problems. They may notice that there's neat stuff on Ubuntu's Software Center that they don't have to pay for.
If you want the respect of your peers, then it doesn't matter what Shuttleworth does. If you want the respect of most of the people who use your software, then write software that's hard to use.
Personally, I want to see more Linux adoption, to force hardware and software vendors to be friendlier to Linux. This means I want the masses to use some version of Linux. This means I applaud Shuttleworth's success in pushing Ubuntu.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So Ubuntu can't promote OSS if it includes even a single proprietary piece of software?
Every "partner" package that Ubuntu includes is a testament of the FOSS movement's failure to create a suitable alternative. In particular, the ATI drivers you mention is included in Ubuntu, because the alternative OSS radeon driver is incapable of even preforming basic 3D acceleration on video cards that were created in the last 2-3 years. If Ubuntu doesn't provide a driver for it, you would be forced to manually download and install the driver. And means a Windows-style "installation wizard" that makes a mess out of a otherwise well organized file system.
after reading some of this summary, I have decided to release the Tribal linux distribution.
Tribalism - and people clinging to beliefs etc are rife.
There is a powerful exercise you can do to show this.... divide people up into groups and give them the task to design their own treasure island. They can put anything on it (library, pool, gym, vinyard)
Then people should present their ideas and try to persuade the other groups to be marooned on their island rather than the one they designed.
What is interesting is - how committed people will be to THEIR island - even though its a theoretical construct they will never exist and they will forget about in a few days and they have only invested about 15 minutes thought in. Most people will not shift - even to far superior designs even with added incentives.
NOW - this concept was shown to me in a work context but I immediately thought about FOSS and OS's. People invest far more into those concepts.
They are incredibly powerful concepts in peoples lives !!
Everyone, please go read Lord Of The Flies. I'll wait whilst you do that.
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting
Now do you understand the original post? Thanks.
Ubuntu doesn't actually contribute much source code anyhow. It takes and takes, but returns very little.
I'd like to back up your statement with some facts, since you're not getting much love from the mods.
Around 22:30 in this video you see which companies give back to the Linux kernel
Spoiler: Canonical is not in the top 10. Not by a long shot.
+1 Funny Signature
Well to be honest, Shuttleworth decided to take something that was sorta good, and then involve private corporations just like how Microsoft does it. I love Ubuntu! I used to use Debian but they were so slow to update their software, and were not focused on the desktop end user. Their main focus was stability - the server users. Open source folks have to get used to the idea not everything in a popular OS / distribution needs to be open for it be usable for the masses. The use of software is not really idealogical struggle, and personally I wish people would really stop framing it in that fashion. At the end of the day some people would / will want to be paid for their effort for creating software for your use. Other people believe that everything should open and free for everyone which very awesome, but looking at the material history of the world has never really occurred as everything created has some intrinsic value. All that free software is worth something and someone, somewhere is going to capitalize on it - i.e. Apple for example. IMO the only way that Linux or another open source OS will get big is when they accept that for somethings, you have to pay to have someone create them. Sure there will be some good hearted souls out there that will give stuff away, but you shouldn't really rely on that if you want better software variety and wide adoption. This is one of the driving reason IMO there is no AAA games for Linux, as well as other popular niche applications that are huge industries. On that tangent, if Linux is truly going to take significant market share from other OS's the ability to use other OS's programs flawless or nearly flawlessly will be key in that, as being able to run a vast library of almost anything for costing nothing is a huge advantage. I have been saying this years, if Microsoft was really wise, they would dump whatever OS they are making and like apple, and take some Linux distro and wine and make it work and then slowly phase out the old while embracing Linux as the future.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him, but for perspective, contrast with with Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and "Beyond Civilization":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#New_Tribalist_Movement
http://books.google.com/books?id=bHP9ztHuWmwC
"With the publication of his trilogy of novels (Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael), Quinn became something of a cult figure in visionary fiction. In those books, Quinn explored the self-sustaining nature of tribal societies and his belief that the current worldwide ecological and economic crises are due to the agriculture-based organization of civilized societies. He now turns his hand to nonfiction, with an appeal for universal renewal through a "New Tribal Revolution." Acknowledging that it would be impossible for most civilized humans to return to the hunting and gathering typical of tribes, Quinn argues that modern men and women need to invent a completely different mode of existence. To do this, they must question a basic assumption of all civilized societies: "Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances." Quinn, borrowing from Richard Dawkins, calls this assumption a "meme," the cultural equivalent of a gene. Quinn's main examples are peoples like the Maya and Anasazi, who returned to tribalism after unsuccessful attempts at other types of social organization, and the communal structure of traditional circuses. The author has a knack for stating the obvious with tremendous personal conviction. His articulation of a simpler way of life will appeal to those made frantic by globalization and all the forces conspiring to make people dance as fast as they can. (Oct.) "
As well as someone else's related point:
"New Tribalism" By Royce Carlson
http://www.zenzibar.com/articles/newtribalism.asp
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.
No. This statement displays a complete lack of understanding of what racism and sexism are. They are not about differences. They are about power. They are about one group of privileged people wielding power over another in order to keep their privilege. They are not about individual thoughts, opinions or actions. They are about systemic and institutional bias. This lack of understanding in U.S. culture is why we're still dealing with these problems and why many people don't acknowledge they exists ("well I'm not a racist...").
NEWSFLASH FROM THE MINISTERY OF TRUTH
Tribalism considered a major problem by the Great Guru Mark; Hence all current Ubuntu users are shall immediately switch to Mandriva, Gnome users shall convert to KDE by the end of the week, and EMACS users are advised to switch to VIM by the end of the month, by order of the The Great Guru. Inspections will start shortly.
END OF COMMUNICATION
It's easy for a hardware vendor to be friendly to Linux: just release a proprietary driver, and you're done. Unfortunately, this isn't of much value, closed drivers have lots of problems: they aren't available for all architectures and kernel versions, eventually the vendor stops compiling new versions, and you can't fix their bugs.
It's a lot harder for a hardware vendor to be friendly to Open Source / Free Software and to either document their hardware fully or make an open driver. That's what we really want.
Bruce Perens.
I've used both, and other distros, and other Unixes. I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.
Not wasting a weekend configuring shit because it already works is a freedom.
Not finding fanbois ready to discuss that "apt is better than rpm, therefore your not debian distro sucks" for hours is a freedom.
Downloading an iso with easy instructions from a polished website, or actually having a CD come to my address for free is a freedom.
Having the system work with most of what I need in a usable configuration in half an hour is a freedom.
Do you need any more freedoms that explain why do I use Ubuntu over Debian?
Apparently, to promote your own distro with your money is a grave misdeed. Fuck me, no, it is not. Sorry you feel suckered into having been their PR, but hey, at least someone started using Linux.
Oh, and responding with 'but all Ubuntu adds over Debian is polish' will get an eye roll. Yes, it might be 'all' it adds. It's still something that Debian hasn't managed to add in years. And it's quite a lot.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
I was only on the periphery during the Woody era, but I definitely recall the libertarian slippery slopers whom I read with terrible dismay and a sense of impending doom.
I was using Debian to get stuff done in a startup company setting. There's an equation in book publishing: your readership drops by half with every equation included. Well, the value of the distribution dropped by half for every backport I found myself forced to install. Since I was using the LAMP stack among other things, and the 2002 LAMP stack wasn't working great for me in 2005, I jumped ship, not even knowing Ubuntu existed (first it was Fedora).
But here I am, running Ubuntu today, since I ultimately preferred the Debian infrastructure. Not proud of it on some level, but at least I escaped the orbit of yammering libertarians driving three year release cycles. At the time I felt like I was being negotiated over like a hostage in a hostage drama.
I've always regarded developing for the desktop to be a bit of an Alice in Wonderland proposition. User adoption seems to be inversely correlated with good engineering practice. Maybe you should be grateful that Canonical snarfed the EAT ME biscuit.
In the case of Perl, as least I get what Perl 6 was trying to accomplish. The Woody experience left me shaking my head.
What you haven't explained is why I would have the slightest desire to write software for you to use, and not charge for it. You don't share my goals, and neither does the vendor who gives you my software. That's why I, and many like me, feel that we've been used as unpaid employees of Ubuntu.
Bruce Perens.
There are several followups on PlanetKDE too. Aaron Seigo (former president of the KDE e.V. board) has made some remarks here.
> Yeah except that whole part about making Linux easier to use, and accessable to average users.
And what did Ubuntu do in this regard exactly?
Stole someone else's package manager?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Silly me, I thought people released software so that people could use it... I had no idea it was to change the world.
Well, enjoy it while it lasts. I'm never giving Ubuntu another line of code, and I doubt I'm alone.
Bruce Perens.
Basically what you're saying is that Stallman was right and you were wrong all along?
I really wish I understood WTF you're talking about, because good ol' Debian is still there and still installs. Now I find out that my new server is running code written by unpaid Ubuntu employees, when I thought I was running code by unpaid Debian volunteers? D'oh! I wish you told me that sooner, and I would have installed Ubuntu instead of Debian.
(Yes, there's some sarcasm here, but it's all based on not understanding you, Bruce. How is Debian in any way lessened? Everything it ever was, still exists. No? No, really: no?)
Ubuntu shouldn't be on a top list of kernel contributors.
It should be on a top list of GNOME contributors though.
That is the sort of distribution it is. IOW: it isn't Redhat or SLES.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why should someone be "embarrassed' because they prefer emacs over vi or KDE over gnome, any more than someone should be "embarrassed" that they prefer the Mets over the Yankees?
Ok to clarify that statement again without maybe so much joke potential - Shuttleworth seems to imply that you will regret making your allegiance public, that it will somehow harm you down the line in te career world. I don't see how or on what basis he makes that justification.
Rain is wet. No kidding, people dislike/fear that which is different from them or what they like. Anyone recall the the violence over the Twilight books/movies? If you liked the one guy instead of the other guy, people (mostly girls) would get into fights. Sadly, I can also envision slap-fights about differing Linux distros. Repubs and Demos are especially funny when they argue- they both just want to spend money. just on THEIR terms.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Marvelous example. My 50-year-ole encyclopedias, my 60-year-old Oxford English Dictionary, shelves full of books on history, sociology, political science, various online dictionaries, WikiPedia (and all of its cited sources) etc. notwithstanding ...
We are to conclude that all the world uses the word wrongly and only you know its true meaning. You are, indeed, a master.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You should perhaps get the textbooks, dictionaries, encyclopediae, etc. corrected before blaming others for not using your definition.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Fedora, Opensuse and Mandriva users are so different? Before installing the CD they get an education about Free Software?
I didn't know that, probably because I use the evil Ubuntu I think the software dropped from the sky.
Back when I was in school in the mid-late '90s I tried out dozens and dozens of distros and spent time learning all I could about the nitty gritty aspects of the OS. Back then I had the spare time to devote to these projects of learning. Nowadays I still try to keep up and learn what I can but I just don't have the time to sit down for hours on end configuring and compiling everything by hand and going through the process of trial and error only to have to do it again when another major software release or patch comes up. I've been using Ubuntu for the past few years now and love it, it just works out of the box and is hassle free. If I still want to compile my own software or configure something by hand I can that's the beauty of it. I could still run Slackware or Linux from Scratch if I really wanted to but alas I find it harder to have the time to really sit down with it.
He killed it by forking it, and ending up more popular than the original? Isn't that what people are *supposed* to do with free software when they want to improve it and their changes aren't wanted upstream? I guess you could say Linus Torvalds was an unpaid employee of the Debian Project as well.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You are doing what many people do. You are trying to reduce a complex social phenomenon to one word.
Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify.
Because they don't care about that stuff, and that's why Ubuntu's so popular. Maybe me or you might use it as leverage in picking Debian or Fedora or Ubuntu as our distro, but for someone who needs software working despite the legal and religious ramifications of the choice? They could care less, and it's a lost cause trying to convince them otherwise.
Who said that changes weren't wanted upstream?
Bruce Perens.
As far as my understanding of the founding of Ubuntu goes, Shuttleworth initially started releasing six-monthly snapshots of Debian in order to provide an alternative to Debian's notably conservative release timeframe.
As people wanted more recent versions of software that weren't available even on the six-month snapshot, Ubuntu added them, and eventually became incompatible with Debian.
I don't follow the ins-and-outs of the Debian Project, but it seems to me that Shuttleworth wanted a rapid release cycle, but the Debian Project didn't. So he did it himself, and it eventually evolved into Ubuntu. If the Debian Project had moved to a more rapid release cycle themselves, then Ubuntu may have never been forked.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The whole argument going on is just plain stupid. But of course, the lower the stakes, the nastier the politics. In the commercial world you don't see this stuff much, because a company can just come right out and say plainly "they are our competitors, they do things differently than we do, we think we have a better product than they do."
What's the whole point of the argument - amount of code going upstream? That's a completely meaningless metric to the actual users. The different companies have different goals; apparently to Red Hat contributing upstream is what they feel is important. There's nothing at all wrong with another company not contributing as much upstream as someone else, or to even not contribute at all. An argument of "take and take and give nothing back" is stupid because open source is not about requiring giving something back, or giving back in only a few narrow ways.
So apparently this "upstream contribution" issue is just a proxy for a deeper issue. What I think we have is the underlying politics poking up - who is a "true" open source contributor and who is not, who is staying true to principles and who is a sellout, and so forth. So it really is tribalism, the us versus them argument. Possibly there's jealousy there too; hard working company sets the standard for how distributions should do things, then an upstart becomes incredibly successful while doing things differently.
If open source people want to have arguments, then they should argue about stuff that's important.
Sorry, no Lexuses or SUVs here...we have a single Toyota Matrix.
As for expensive health costs, a knee replacement is about $18K, or the cost of my car. Hip resurfacing and ankle replacement is about the same.
As a worst-case scenario, the drug Elaprase (used to treat Hunter syndrome) costs about $657,000 per year for a patient massing 35kg.
I have run Debian "unstable" for 12 years and only had one downtime day because of it. Its quality is pretty close to that of a released distribution. And it is updated daily. Perhaps the failure was that Debian didn't market it.
Bruce Perens.
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.
The alternative is to let you go without healthcare.
If we do that, you, and most people like you, will almost certainly still be yowling at the head of the queue when your appendix suddenly bursts, or you find a malignant lymphoma in your armpit, or Diabetes rears its head and you find out that the only decent med (Byetta) costs more per month than you have to spare in four months. You'd get care you can't afford, run up medical bills you can't pay, declare bankruptcy (or just game the collection agencies and creditors), and the rest of us will then pay higher insurance rates because YOU figured you could game mother nature using your only playing card, relatively good health at the moment, as the key trick.
But you know what? Mother nature's gonna get you anyway. So people a great deal smarter than you are are trying to come up with a way to keep you as healthy as possible without screwing up everyone else. Which is to say, get you to contribute small amounts as long as you can, so that if and when the time comes to spend a lot on you, it can be justified. Or perhaps that money will be spent on your lady's breast cancer (or your fella's testicular cancer... or your child's crossed eyes. Etc. Ad fucking infinitum. Mother nature is a bitch.) In any case, spread the money out, focus the care. It's simple; it's sensible; and it is as pro-society as enforced education and sanitation are.
Is the current bill optimum? Not by a long shot. Too many idiots fighting against what we actually need. But it's a step in the right direction. Be much obliged if you'd use that melon on your neck to think ahead further than your nose.
The Tea Party's got a few good points here and there, but arguing against the healthcare bill... that's definitely not one of them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In other words, Ubuntu delivers the software but not the politics.
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
I don't keep on using Ubuntu just because their leaflets and CDs are shinier. I keep using it because it has less hassles, less fanbois and is more usable.
You're funny.
Oh and btw, pretty much no major linux distro takes a weekend to install, or get things working on. Here's a trick though - follow these steps:
apt-get install postfix
apt-get remove postfix
rm -rf /etc/postfix
apt-get install postfix
Tell me how that turns out for ya. Oh, and when anything at all goes amiss, and stupid farking Upstart just...hangs...when attempting to do something. Why is it that when I do a ctrl-C when "start mysql" hangs, Upstart thinks mysql is now running? That's a fun question. And if apparmor was necessary because selinux was just so gosh darn hard, why is it that it randomly stops working and causes upstart jobs to hang?
When I build a machine from scratch, or use anything other than Ubuntu, I don't have these problems. Then there's the minor detail that Ubuntu doesn't submit upstream patches to things; they just change stuff, and put the source on their own tree. Oh, I could go on...but point is, Shuttleworth spent a lot of money to get to do things *his* way, to hell with what was working better already. He disrespects the OSS culture, and now comes whining about people turning on him. Well waaah, maybe he should have actually attempted to become part of the OSS community, instead of making his own. I gave away Ubuntu CDs at public LUG meetings years ago, it's not like I didn't give him a shot.
They deliver their own politics.
Bruce Perens.
No one forces you to release free software - some people purport that it an idealogical struggle so by releasing software they are fighting against a future owned by corporations that create for profit software. Others do it just because the see a niche need for software they would like so they create and give it away. How you decide to release software is mostly a personal decision, but in some rare cases some business decide it would better to release the source code to some product so they no longer have to actively maintain it. So in your 'unpaid employee' example, nobody is forcing you to make updates, or commit to churning out new code. If you feel taken advantage of, the by all means don't bother really. It's not hard to do. But if your feeling moody because someone else took your work that you freely gave away and made it popular, well maybe you shouldn't have gave it away in the first place, no?
Also I would like to add the purpose behind free software is that you can freely modify, change and update the code as you see fit, the fact you didn't get paid to create the software is another issue that is separate.
Have anyone been forced to work in a field cutting sugar cane or picking cotton because of the Linux distribution they prefer?
Perhaps it's not really a "great-granddaddy of racism".
Exactly. The problem is that Canonical / Ubuntu are just the kind of corporation I was trying to fight. If Open Source / Free Software won't fight them, I need something else that will.
Bruce Perens.
And he's pretty much wrong all around, so ....
So? I'd hazard to say most of what Ubuntu touches isn't the kernel.
That's not a valid metric. It's only a piece of the larger picture.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify. Unfortunately when we wrote it, we weren't thinking that we would have gate-keepers who would essentially negate why we wrote it.
Yes, but you also have developers who clearly haven't read and understood the GPL, for example. People who get pissed at commercial redistribution despite the fact that it is explicitly permitted. People who claim that RedHat is a proprietary distribution because you have to pay for binaries, even though the srpms are available and easily compiled and many free software projects are only made available as source.
Not long ago it was hard to find a bank in my country whose website worked with free software. Now most do work. I'm pretty sure that the volume of users who brought about that change was not 100% free software advocates but also had a significant portion of people who just liked firefox or another browser than IE. Now the business I started working in a few months ago has firefox as the default browser on their desktops, I haven't questioned why. I doubt they understand much about the licence or free software.
Not everyone that read one of the new printed books would have understood the significance of the printing press to society. If books had only been read by those that did understand, there would probably not have been an industrial revolution. Software freedom requires that free software can be used in everyday life, which requires a certain amount of interoperability (such as being able to use banking websites), which requires a user base large enough to make that interoperability a priority to businesses and developers who may not have free software interoperability as a goal at all but will prioritise it to gain access to the free software users. At that point, the reason people are using the software is less relevant than the fact that they are using it at all. The people who do know what it is all about have their software freedom.
The majority of people don't think or care much about freedom at all, much less software freedom. I think it's unlikely to ever happen to get them to understand and desire it. If you want software freedom, it has to be compatible with that majorities apathy and ignorance. Ignorant users are the battleground, not the troops.
Thanks for all the work you've done. Since you post under your real name, I'm Rohan Walsh. Not the investment manager, if you look me up I don't have much online presence, but I will check back to see if you reply.
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
This statement really piqued my interest. Don't think I've ever agreed with "something I read on Slashdot" more wholeheartedly. Are you (or is anyone you know of) trying to work the out real-world parameters of such a system? What might it look like? How can we help?
Well yeah that's pretty obvious ... what's your issue? You want Gub'mnt power to force one tribes value_production into another ? Oh ... you must be a scuz_slut Obama.nation DemoRat !
To fix this:
and
then
Obviously, replace all instances of YOURCOUNTRYTLD in the first command with your country's TLD (so if American, use "us", if British, use "gb", if Canadian, use "ca", if Australian, use "au", if New Zealand, use "nz", etc).
This configures apt to prefer to use stable repositories, but to use unstable or testing repositories when necessary. Also, you can force testing or unstable repositories by "sudo apt-get -t testing install blahpackage" or "sudo apt-get -t unstable install blahpackage".
If you think about the problem for more than a half-second, you'll realize that sexual division necessarily preceded "tribalism", and that sexual conflict is at the root of all social conflict.
I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
The goals of the user should be paramount, not the developer; once you release the code under a suitable GPL, you relinquish a level of control over how that software moves through the ecosystem (keeping only what the license allows you).
Mark Shuttleworth is a w*nker. Ubuntu = usurpation of Linux. Canonical seeks to break away from the soul of Linux, probably through an ingenious method of contorting the meaning of Gnu and open-source, and through the acquirement of the new (converted) masses, monopolize. Sound silly? Wait a while. I compare them to google, with their "don't be evil" doublespeak, all whilst they spill their guts to the NSA and any other "authority" who so much as winks at them. Google became very popular, and thus a source of power. Ubuntu I really think, is similar. People just seem unable to handle being big. I would not be surprised to see Canonical partner with the new Cyber-Command. I'll bet Mark Shuttleworth owns a pomeranian, just so he can control it.
Bruce Perens.
Alright, who else read that as "tribadism" and was disappointed...
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
The problem with the user being paramount is that there is often no quid-pro-quo whatsoever with the user. Of course they don't pay us. They don't contribute to the project. They don't help us when we ask for political lobbying against things that hurt us.
This was tolerable when we had a direct relationship with the users, because we could at least sometimes get them to help. When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
Bruce Perens.
"unstable" was and is a gamble, most of the time it will work fine, but every now and then it will stop your machine from booting and that is something that is just unacceptable for a normal user, especially when it can basically happen any day at random, not just at the big upgrading to a new distro day.
Ubuntu is simply what Debian stable should have been, but never managed to be. Tough luck for Debian, but they had more then enough time to get their release cycle under control, but failed to do so.
What would you change, if you were in Shuttleworth's shoes ?
Get rid of UbuntuOne and their other adventures into non-free land. Having proprietary software with the name of Ubuntu that once claimed to be an all Free Software distribution is just a little to weird.
The Gnome census report says Redhat represents 16% of all Gnome upstream contributions while Ubuntu contributes 1%.
http://www.neary-consulting.com/index.php/2010/07/29/gnome-census-report-now-available-as-free-download/
This was NOT a rhetorical question.
I am myself an Ubuntu user but I also realize that most of Ubuntu's niftiness comes from Debian. A good bit is also inherited from the kernel in general as well as GNOME.
Being a former Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake and Debian user, I have a little perspective.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If we as developers and contributors don't wish to withhold our work for a fee, what incentive can we offer users to care about the ecosystem?
They just want to use the stuff we've built. We have to somehow use that to bring them into the fold, develop them into supporters, awaken a sense of responsibility to the ideals that allow them to benefit from our work, groom contributors, etc.
Right now, we're offering the incentive of being able to help improve and shape our projects. Most consumers don't care. They WANT a gatekeeper to say "Here is what is new and awesome. It is what you need, and it costs $199."
We are plumbers who work for free, for reasons we can't seem to articulate effectively to the majority of the public, who don't care anyway. Our perceived value is low to them, because "really quality stuff costs money."
How do we cut the "distance" between us and the users you mention without appearing to be desperate and clingy? If developer goals are to be paramount, what happens when users want something different despite our best efforts to convince them they don't actually want that?
I'm off on a tangent or three. Sorry. I keep thinking a "serve the ideal to gain the benefit of our work" kind of thing might work. Exclusivity can be a powerful attractor to users. Unfortunately, this would seem to require a gatekeeper with sweeping powers.
Need to go off and organize my thoughts more, evidently.
Here's a thought though - is the problem really that there are gatekeepers, or that the current gatekeepers are simply *branded aggregators* at their core?
How can application developers keep aggregators from presenting their work as part of a branded, monolithic whole - without destroying the distribution network?
All he did was take a rant about religon and swap words to make himself seem better.
honestly, just what I would expect from someone who thinks they are the spokesperson for linux because they have a popular distro amoungst the masses.
Be seeing you...
The problem with the user being paramount is that there is often no quid-pro-quo whatsoever with the user. Of course they don't pay us. They don't contribute to the project. They don't help us when we ask for political lobbying against things that hurt us.
If you want quid pro quo, then I do think you're restricted to either making commercial software or just hiring out your services. You're asking users to pay a price that would actually be higher in many cases than commercial software. They should not be required to sign onto your political agenda, if that was not in the license. I think you are, no offense (and I really am not trying to offend you here) letting self-aggrandizement get the better of you. Just because you write useful software doesn't mean you have the right to command the loyalty of the people who use it.
"By essentially making all past and present Debian developers his unpaid employees. Everything we did was for Ubuntu, not Debian, we just didn't know it."
Mr. Perens, I must admit I respect your opinions quite a lot. But this time, please, talk for yourself. As a general matter, the work at Debian is much more than unpaid work for Ubuntu; much more for lightyears. Regarding specifically Ubuntu, "We" just didn't know it??? That was absolutly obvious from day zero to anyone wanting to look at Ubuntu with open eyes.
It was obvious (and it is obvious) that the major "problem" for corporations regarding Debian is brand recognition, that the "Debian Entity" cannot be tied to any "Debian Corp." (remember Ian Murdock more or less tried that path with Progeny) and thus, no one can take monetary advantage from the Debian brand saying "See? I'm the corporation that brings Debian to you". So Mr. Shuttleworth confronted with the consideration of trying to build a "Linux for humans" or a (hopefully) profitable corporation took the second option and started (quite successfully) a new brand recognition program called "Ubuntu".
That's all the hint needed.
Heck, for a fraction of the money expended on the Ubuntu project now he (or a figurehead) could be Debian Project Leader *and* being in a position of leading Debian, for as far as true meritochracy allows, towards his stated goal of a "Linux for Humans".
Today it could be Debian, not Ubuntu, the one supported on HP, IBM or Dell hardware; heck again, since bussiness is bussiness after all, Debian could be an Oracle certified platform, not Ubuntu; it would be Debian, not Red Hat through Fedora, the one pushing very interesting "enterprisey" projects like Colbber, 389 Directory Server or Spacewalk. He would have pushed Canonical as the best and major "enterprise supporter" for Debian and considered that "control" to be enough instead of inventing Ubuntu out of thin air in the very intent to a) having total control of it and b) reaping benefits from Debian for as long as he could without bad press (by the day Ubuntu started, producing a completly anew distribution bringing new fresh air to the very "distribution" concept after ten years from the first ones shouldn't have been discarded though probably this would have meant talking "real big money" instead of just "big money").
"I really wish now that I'd let the [Debian?] project die when Ian Murdock quit."
I regret disenting to you and now I'll do it twice in the same post. If the above was indeed about Debian, I must say: Bullshit! Ubuntu is at most a lost chance but Debian is still living and on fairly decent health. Don't throu away the suit because that little spot, just clean it.
See, that's why so many people don't use Debian. :-)
I understand what you are getting at in a glance because I used Debian for years. But would the average person understand it? Let alone be able to do that right. Even knowing stuff, it sometimes would take a day to get a machine settled again after doing an upgrade (all sorts of little things would go wrong with fonts or audio or multi-screen support or whatever). Which is why we use Macs now. My wife switched first. Then I did about a year later. Am I happy about that? Not really. I'd rather use all free software. I do use free software mostly on top of Mac OS X. And I use GNU/Linux in embedded hardware. I guess we could have tried switching to Ubuntu instead of Mac OS X, but Ubuntu has its own issues. At some point, I think I'll try running it on my Mac Pro (although the couple times I tried in the past from a bootable DVD, it did not work).
Anyway, the big issue with any typical GNU/Linux system is that changes like you outline are textual at the command line or editor and not in terms of objects and transactions. It's a fundamental problem with the whole model. I never wanted to use GNU/Linux in the sense that I had used UNIX decades before and thought that much better software was possible (such as based on Smalltalk or Lisp or even Forth ideas).
But I jumped on the GNU/Linux bandwagon eventually because of the community. But, at the core, UNIX systems are still messed up compared to what might be possible. Sure, a very knowledgeable user can fix things like you outlined (assuming it works, I just glanced at it), or a less knowledgeable but determined one can solve the problem in an hour or so, but the typical user can not approach the problem oftentimes. And really, what is the point of learning a lot of esoteric stuff you mainly use once and never again? Are you really in control of your machine if you are overwhelmed by complexity and brittleness, even if in theory you can do whatever you want with it? And if something keeps breaking with every upgrade?
Granted we used Debian years ago, and went through major revisions to the X server, to the USB support, to the sound system, and other things, so maybe by now that basic stuff is all settled down?
We need a better underlying architecture for a free OS. And a monolithic kernel just contributes to the problem IMHO. QNX was a much better system way back when in that sense.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well, obviously not command. But I think in general things will work better if they get Free Software from Free Software developers, even if these are non-profit agregators like Debian. It's about lobbying our own users.
Bruce Perens.
Yes. That is exactly what I mean. Thank you.
I'm going to have to hop in on this as well and add to the noise.
I've been using Debian since pretty much the very beginning (not quite - but REALLY close, just a bit after Bruce Perens left, but before woody), and it was my favorite Linux distro up until squeeze.
No linux distro has ever done more to turn linux from a serious piece of crap fit only for hobbyists and OS geeks than Debian, and no distro has ever had a larger fall. When Debian chose to pull that stupid stunt over Firefox/IceWeasel and then pile drive into the toilet with Squeeze (which literally fails on every computer I own, unlike Lenny), they proved that Debian's day had finally passed.
Ubuntu works. It works on laptops, it works on desktops, it works on netbooks and tablets.
RedHat has a completely solid place in the enterprise - hell, I'm converting 90 AIX boxes to RHEL 5 as we speak, on a project with timeframes more extreme than I can stand. But it *works*, and it's *solid*.
Is this a victory for OpenSource? Yes, just like the rise of "Open Systems" that pushed mainframes into the shadows and forced a radical re-thinking of the entire concept of IT. People used to pay for computing cycles, you know - before the days of Open Systems.
Android, RHEL, and Ubuntu are the result of the insanely hard work of the open source devs. But the devs have *always* sucked at dealing with users. Users want a phone. They don't give a crap who wrote it. Users want farmville. They don't give a crap why it works.
The age of the OS as a primary interface is coming to a close, just like the age of the teletype and the blinking lights was ended by the monitor. The Web Browser is the future interface (warts and all), and in this world where the OS is nothing but the chrome around a browser, Linux is far ahead. Users don't try to install software any more, they check to make sure their sites work and their WiFi is up.
Sorry for the rant. The point is - yes, Debian and Slackware and the rest are doomed to fade into the shadows to be replaced just like the systems and projects they replaced. I don't see you all weeping for CPM, or MVS, or IRIX despite the amazing things they contributed. The X11 project was dropped like a bad habit in favor of Xorg, and I can't even remember the last time I had to use CDE.
Time goes on. Simplicity reigns supreme, and if you're not leading the way on "just works" you'll get run over by someone who is. Debian still doesn't get that, FreeBSD doesn't get that, Slackware doesn't get that.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Perhaps. But one can't deny that Ubuntu works, and works well, and is bringing the concept of open source software to a lot of people who would not otherwise have seen it.
I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
You can license any software you write as you like, but if the linux community is closed to the very concept of commercial proprietary software distributors - and there's quite a few of them on the professional side - then linux will die as a base-level operating system. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying. In any case I don't see that the Debian project is dead.
With all due respect to all the people that have made Debian work (and by extension, Ubuntu) perhaps they should figure out a way to work together. From my perspective all this infighting is accomplishing is making it harder and harder for low level people like me (doing home user tech support) to convince the Average User to adopt Linux and stick with it. I'm afraid that I have to agree with Mr. Shuttleworth. If we want open source operating systems to gain any ground in user acceptance, we have to have a cohesive front end on the consumer side.
I've been fixing computers for a long time, too, Bruce. In the last five or six years, the large majority of the work I've been doing is virus removal on windows systems. As I tell my customers, I'd love to be able to spend my time, and their money, just teaching them how to use their computers, rather than teaching them what not to do, and removing the malware. Linux can bring that back - but it's hard to recommend a particular distribution to anyone, other than Ubuntu, because there's no cohesive front end.
I know that you or someone else will say that the strength of Linux is it's diversity. I don't disagree with that - I run a lot of different distributions here. But for the Average Joe User, that's meaningless. They just want it to work. Shuttleworth and all the people who work on Ubuntu have brought that "just works" metric pretty close to being something that Average Joe will use. Personally I don't think he's sacrificed any of the ideology inherent in free/open source software in doing so. Nothing worth crying heretic over, anyway.
Cheers.
GSVEMR
Nonsense. Generalizations, also known as "rules", are a cornerstone of human thinking process. At the same time, as you should have known from grade school, rules have "exceptions". These do not invalidate the rule; just enumerate a relatively small number of cases when the rule does not apply.
I sincerely do not understand. What sort of things has Canonical done wrong? I use to use debian starting in 2000 and now use Ubuntu, mainly due to the 6 month release cycle. I prefer things to break once every six months rather than whenever with unstable or taking forever for things to be released with stable. Should I not use Ubuntu? Is there something really wrong with it? I respect you, the work you've done, the way you represent open source software in a professional manner, and your opinion a great deal. I do not understand why you seem to consider Canonical the enemy or what's wrong with them. Is it because they distribute non-free software? So does debian. (I try to avoid non-free especially drivers.) I really don't understand and I really want to.
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle. It's going to be the same, IMO, for any for-profit distribution - you have to consider that they are in this to operate a profitable company, not to do good for the world. We really should have done something about it before Red Hat became a Billion dollar company, and Ubuntu is no different given Mark's capitalization of Canonical.
I think it would be best for you to use, and assist when possible, a non-profit distribution. That doesn't mean Fedora, they are too thoroughly controlled by Red Hat. Hopefully Debian still has sufficient independence from Ubuntu. I don't know about the others.
Bruce Perens.
I think you should seriously consider that your home users would be better off running Microsoft or Apple systems. Microsoft and Apple do not pretend to be Open Source, they are very clear about being a for-profit company. They don't have a community of free contributors that they abuse. They pay the people who write their code.
Bruce Perens.
Why is it that when I do a ctrl-C when "start mysql" hangs, Upstart thinks mysql is now running?
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
Then there's the minor detail that Ubuntu doesn't submit upstream patches to things; they just change stuff, and put the source on their own tree.
Actually, it is currently standard policy for the BugSquad to report the bug upstream. A bug report can not be marked as "Triaged" until a bug report has been filed upstream or the bug has been identified as Ubuntu-specific.
Now, you may have a point that there are people who seem to spend time doing development work on projects downstream rather than upstream. But you would have to ask those individuals why they do so. Personally, I work both upstream and downstream (for both Ubuntu and Fedora). YMMV.
The aspect of how many Slashdotters treat Republicans and Conservatives.
I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims.
They did. They're called Republicans. You know, the same way that a clown and a clown carrying an umbrella are the same thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I agree with you in principle, but I just have to face the reality of the situation.
The worst thing I've ever seen come out of the open source world is the Ubuntu One Music Store. I can understand selling promotional T-Shirts and coffee mugs, but why is an "open source" organization is running a clone of the iTunes Store is beyond me.
Open source is not a monoculture, there are people who like point-and-click GNOME, big-and-shiny KDE, slim-and-flexible OpenBox, and the nuts who don't run X. This is not Windows or Mac where we're given the OS then held at gunpoint being told to like it. Open source is far more diverse. Bickering, elitism, and "tribalism" should be expected. We're coming from totally different perspectives, desiring totally different things from our software. Not everyone wants your idea of a system; get over it.
Why do we have to enable them at all? What good is market share for Linux on these terms?
Bruce Perens.
I think you could have a non-profit branded aggregator without a conflict of interest.
I don't think you have to prevent it. It's not the aggregation but the motives behind it.
Bruce Perens.
There really isn't much tribalism in the FOSS world. For starters only the OSS and the FS parts disagree and even then only in philosophy not methods. Other than that the general divide is between toolsets like VI vs EMACS, Qt vs GTK+ or Gecko vs KHTML, which everybody admits is about preferences and even they accept that the competitions is doing some things right.
If I had to reaaaaally close in on a controversial issue it would be Mono divide, but, and this is funny. the sides are formed by people who either want Mono for writing new software and people who ALSO want Mono but not for new software.
So this "tribalism" is really just something happening in Ubuntu as you say and even then it only really is happening because Shuttleworth is reading his textbook from Commander Tarkin. He united a lot of people by saying "here! let's work together!" and now he's all "Ubuntu is not a democracy." and now is acting surprised because the ragtag band of rebels he lead didn't like that attitude.
DUH!
But... the future refused to change.
Nice story. Thanks for explaining the circumstances and your qualifications for judging him, and the reasons behind your grand assertion.
I cannot BELIEVE Ubuntu put their window controls on the left side! What a shot over the bow of free software's existence!
Are you fucking KIDDING?
From the very beginning of FOSS, it's been all about the ability to go your own way and try new things and modify as you desire. Ubuntu does its own thing, makes SIGNIFICANT changes AVAILABLE UNDER GPL which upstream could use at their will, but often chooses not to. If GNOME liked what Ubuntu was doing ,they could incorporate it in mainline immediately.
Almost everything Ubuntu does is open source in process and in code. If you're Richard Stallman, that doesn't cut it. For most people, it does.
(P.S. I read RMS interview from reddit... that guy is a fanatic. Truly. I strongly disagree with him on several things, but it's always good to have a fringe group to keep the balance against the other extreme).
Yes, and the way that Ubuntu brings free software to the masses is unfortunate. Ubuntu brings Free Software to the masses without those masses knowing who really wrote it, why they wrote it, and why they had the strange idea to give it away for free in a way that you could use, redistribute, and modify.
How is debian any different? Apart from the fact that it doesn't have mass appeal?
Ubuntu has all the same tools as Debian to push liberty (apt-get source, etc.). The fact that Ubuntu gives your program wider potential user base should not be held against them.
Ubuntu is the brightest star on the free software landscape. If they eventually become succesful enough to actually sustain their work financially, all the better.
If debian lost all the developers, there are many places Ubuntu could move forward. As an example, they could join the rpm ecosystem and make a polished version of Fedora.
OTOH, I'd rather see Ubuntu embrace Qt and not dwell in the Gtk+ ecosystem that will probably die before 2013.
That's ok because your mom provides a lot of code and by code I mean blow jobs to anyone willing to accept one.
You're the one doing the trolling now, just because Mr. Perens and others like myself are clearly onto your, and your kind's, transparent and obvious multiple accounts for down mods of others and upmods of yourselves type of bullshit.
You PR shills, you really have gall and nerve, you know? You seem to think folks will fall for your outright horseshit like the rest of us are stupid or something.
I mean, lol, to have a "so-called job" in "PR" speaks worlds for who are the stupid ones (you and those LIKE you since that's the best you could manage for a career in your utterly wasted trollish so-called life. Your poor Dad, I feel sorry for him: He would have been better off shooting his sperm on a wall rather than having wasted the time producing the likes of YOU, scumbag).
People think for themselves and we realize your kind is truly the lowest of the low.
See, we don't listen to your type because you're nobody, whereas Bruce Perens IS a "somebody" in this field and he makes some sense in his words (because I have caught others here admitting they have multiple accounts for trolling others), and actually commands some respect, whereas you, a nobody? Does not. Not at all.
I.E. We're all sick of "your kind" (scumbag shills and trolls) here, in case you hadn't noticed, and we're not stupid. We're onto you.
I'm not sure I truly understand the concern here.
The community of developers or developers-to-be who would have been likely to contribute are still there, and still likely to pitch in. The geek-political zeitgeist around free software still exists. We educate others and advocate just like we always would. Mainstream knowledge and acceptance seems to grow daily. So where's the damage? The simple answers like Ubuntu may steal a handful of people who might have otherwise become core community, but let's face it--we're talking about losing a very small fraction at that point. We don't stumble across that many contributors by opportunity--they come to us.
The "gatekeepers" are largely responsible for distributing to users who would otherwise not benefit at all, and who would not otherwise even think of investigating the communities around their software. The key is that the distributors have a huge audience. So if even a small fraction of their audience becomes interested and migrates into contribution, works to understand the ideology, or is even the least bit grateful, I'm willing to bet it's a net win for the core OSS communities. But whatever the case, it's absolutely not a zero-sum game. I think this is a case where we can all have our cake and eat it too.
And you know, I also think having a non-participatory audience is actually kind of key. For one thing, techie folks are absolute crap at determining how software should actually behave. We put up with all kinds of byzantine, inefficient interfaces because we're capable of figuring them out and glossing past them with minimal practice. The mainstream is much better at telling us whether something is of a decent level of quality or not. But more than that, having mainstream impact--with the comparatively huge number of users that involves--ends up defining success for the projects in a way that is integral in building communities around them. Open-source projects have become significantly more ambitious as support has collected behind the successful ones. They've also provided significantly more value to the world as a whole, and isn't that the point?
I don't think we would have come this far without the users, and we should respect and value them for that. We should work to reach them as widely as possible. The distributors reach them better than most of us could alone. Let's not dismiss them so quickly.
You're the one doing the trolling now, just because Mr. Perens and others like myself are clearly onto your, and your kind's, transparent and obvious multiple accounts for down mods of others and upmods of yourselves type of bullshit.
You PR shills, and trolls also: You really have gall and nerve, you know?
You seem to think folks will fall for your outright multiple registered user accounts here to mod yourselves up with and others down with type horseshit, and you think you'll pull one over on us, just like the rest of us are stupid or something.
I mean, lol, to have a "so-called job" in "PR" speaks worlds for who are the stupid ones (you and those LIKE you since that's the best you could manage for a career in your utterly wasted trollish so-called life. Your poor Dad, I feel sorry for him: He would have been better off shooting his sperm on a wall rather than having wasted the time producing the likes of YOU, scumbag).
People think for themselves and we realize your kind is truly the lowest of the low.
See, we don't listen to your type because you're nobody, whereas Bruce Perens IS a "somebody" in this field and he makes some sense in his words (because I have caught others here admitting they have multiple accounts for trolling others), and actually commands some respect, whereas you, a nobody? Does not, you scumbag troll. Not at all.
I.E. We're all sick of "your kind" (scumbag shills and trolls) here, in case you hadn't noticed, and we're not stupid. We're onto you.
The Mozilla Foundation is doing this reasonably well,
The Mozilla Foundation has Google paying for it, Debian has Shuttleworth paying for it.
its main foundering point was that they often carried libertarianism to the point of absurdity
But Ubuntu has a much more pragmatic approach. I struggling to understand why you do not like Ubuntu. (Hence the reason for the two quotes). Debian is too fundamentalist, but Shuttleworth has too much influence over Ubuntu as her is paying for it. Where as Mozillia Foundation, is fairly pragmatic - yet Google pays for it. Do it follow that Google has too much influence over Mozilla ?
With respect, I see you above post as lost of thing that are wrong with others development models, without a clear vision on what is the "Best" solution.
P.S: If your post wasn't intended to inflame, exactly what was its intention? There's only one predictable outcome of the way you posted, and it's not to inform.
See subject-line above, and a couple of my other posts here to yourself and your other obviously alias account you are using troll. People aren't stupid like you trolls and pr shills seem to assume. We can see through your multiple registered account bullshit here, easily. We're onto your crap and Bruce Perens merely points out that online swine, like yourself, exist in the form of "online perception management services", which is of course, trolling those that don't agree with the party or corporate line paid for trolls and shills. It's quite obvious, and I am quite glad that Bruce Perens piped up about it, because I have also caught assholes like yourself doing that very thing and admitting they have multiple online accounts for doing so, and here on slashdot no less. What I find works for me? Using facts, vs. scumbag trolls and shills like yourself, versus your bullshit. It always makes "your kind" run like a whipped dog with his tail between his legs too. Funny part is when online shitheads like you try to put a "spin" on things in your favor, lol, and when you start really losing, you start ad hominem attacking the person, rather than his points (which YOU have clearly begun to do, and I am just shooting your "type/ilk's" down in my noting I noticed you are such a troll) while you try to attack Mr. Perens here. Well, new news: I am defending his sensible views and truths, vs. your obvious pr shill and trolling horsecrap, you fuckhead! I am sick of your type online, and I am certain I am not alone.
You made a trollish statement about Mark Shuttleworth, and then explained it by talking about a conspiracy theory about unpopular opinions (even though your opinion is quite popular around here). by dangitman on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM
Per my subject above, give us a break you fucking obvious troll. Is your favorite color "transparent" or what? Mr. Perens is popular here because his "opinions" aren't only that. He backs them with facts such as his statements here about "online perception management services" (which is a "politically correct" way of saying "paid for trolls and shills that make it seem like 'the party line' of a corporation or political party is 'in the majority' and 'right', which only leads to another well-known marketing ploy of getting idiots to 'jump on the bandwagon' since they believe anything they read without research). Your problem here was that YOU are a nobody, a non-entity, a nothing ne'er do well online versus a fairly well known online respected persona in Bruce Perens. Folks will lend his words credence versus an obviously exposed piece of worthless shit troll/shill like yourself. Especially scumbag ones like yourself that need to do their eventual "last resort" of ad hominem attacks in your puny and easily seen through insinuation of "it's a conspiracy" when there is actual proofs of trolls and shills that are paid for by (lol -> ) "online perception management services" for Pete's sake. Most everyone here realizes that trolls and shills keep many registered accounts to both mod themselves up with, and to mod others down with, especially those that don't agree with them or put their views into the crapper where they belong). Do you think you morons fool anyone here? Guess again shithead.
See subject line above troll/shill: We've stopped paying you any mind whatsoever here LONG ago here already in this exchange, so give up.
Guess "your corporate masters" won't pay you now for your "trolling/shilling" services, and for using your one of many alternate registered accounts you use for "online perception management services" in trolling or downmodding others that your "masters" fear and those others only tell it how it is about them no less, OR, your "masters" whom you shill for - you both lose/fail, and badly.
Once more - Too bad, you lose/fail, badly, and mainly because you think people are stupid and don't realize how many of those like you use multiple registered accounts to pull off crap like you do that I noted above...
I repeat: You lose, you fail, and so do your "masters' (in their naming Microsoft explicitly in fact!).
To myself and others reading here? Heh, fact is, they doing that? That makes THEM, trolls.
Same old free software against open-source debate. Both are necessary in balanced proportions.
Lesson should have been learned long time back.
We're not interested in your views you transparent and obvious trolling shill. We stopped listening to you the very second you began your baseless ad hominem attacks in fact and realized you're nothing more than just another paid for trolling shill and crony of some "online perception management service" that uses multiple registered accounts to troll others with and to shill for his corporate masters (as well as using said accounts to mod others down with and your other "alter egos" up with). We're not stupid around here shithead, unlike a worthless and skill-less obvious and transparent adhominem attacking PR flunky such as yourself. That's right, I am calling a spade a spade and you what you are. That's no ad hominem attack either. We realize you're just another trolling pawn, so, go away now trolling shill. We'll have none of your bullshit here today.
So, because you have been offered such services, every time you are modded down on slashdot, it must be because of paid PR agents doing it, and Shuttleworth is paying them to do it? Get a grip. - by dangitman (862676) on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM (#33093308)
Ah, the typical trolling shill douchebag's "last resort" - an ad hominem attack on one's mental state. Care to show us your PHD in Psych related fields, as well as your formal examination of others you are libeling? Oh, that's right: YOU DON'T HAVE THAT NOW DO YOU?? Of course not. You're just another worthless "marketing troll/shill" that uses multiple registered accounts to attempt to mod others down with and himself and his "alter egos" up with. Do you think you fool anyone, you transparent little shit? NO, you do not!
You "get a grip", you transparently obvious trolling shill douchebag. You see, I for one (per my subject above), do actually think you are nothing more than a PR shill to be blunt about it.
Too bad you screwed up here so badly already though that your corporate masters won't be paying you (or, for very long when it comes to contract renewal time) for such a huge fail on your part here, while you attempted to to shill and troll others via your multiple registered accounts here in this exchange.
That's right: They won't pay you for such transparently obvious ad hominem attacks you use here since you failed on this one SO badly.
So YOU get a grip, or rather loosen the one on your puny pencil between your legs already chump. You lost this one long ago, as your kind from the "online perception management services" (paid for shills and trolls) always do.
Yes, but we don't need trolls and haters. - by dangitman (862676) on Saturday July 31, @01:40AM (#33093308)
LOL, oh that takes the cake: Trying to play "victim" now, troll? Sorry - the "pity me" tactic won't work now, but it surely shows YOU are on the ropes, BADLY, lmao!
Your kind online? LOWEST OF THE LOW, and the rest of us around here are well aware of your kind, and your tactics/mechanics, so go fuck off now, ok?? Thank you.
> That's what we really want.
Indeed..... for a very specific value of "we".
J.
Problem is that we humans end up identifying ourselves with our ideas, and with how we see ourselves.
We cannot tell ourselves apart from our identity, so we end up defending it just as we would defend ourselves.
This makes very hard for us to open up to different ideas or different ways.
Also, this 'identity' is a criterion that allows us to tell 'us' apart from 'them', hampering our capacity of compassion, ie any capacity of recognizing that those on the other side are, after all, not so different from us.
To convince someone to kill someone else, you always have to create a strong identity that makes the potential victim 'different' than the potential killer.
This is true at any scales, from nations at war to family quarrels.
Your statement makes even less sense than saying something like "knoppix killed debian".
Don't let anger and a feeling of lost control lead you to places that will look petty in hindsight.
And over time the only people left with that motivation, when there are gate-keepers, are going to be ...
Personally I got into open source to scratch my own itches, and trade scratches with other people with the same set of itches; Ubuntu might be taking my work and giving it to an entirely new audience, but that's not stopping me from doing what I've been doing all along. Also I think the issue of them being gate-keepers is somewhat exaggerated -- while they are attracting users with a very shiny gate, the garden has no walls, so even if they locked it up people could still come and go as they please.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
On your second citation, even by your own statistics, if 30% of health outcomes was from "genes" and "access to health care", 70% of health outcomes would come from something other than genes and access to sick care.
But, when you think about it, "genes" don't act alone in most cases (excepting a very few rare conditions). Genes interact with the environment and your history of behavior. That also includes nutrition.
For example, here is an African-American health care researcher suggesting vitamin D deficiency has had a big impact on the health of people in the USA with darker skins:
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
Some other related research:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/the-black-community.shtml
This is not to argue against social and economic reforms (we need lots IMHO), just to demonstrate how nutrition or outdoor exercise or choice of clothing and so on can have a big effect on your health from even just this one factor, as health emerges from an interaction of genes and environment in the context of our personal choices (and what we know about how their consequences) -- in this case, the CDC has been doing a terrible job for decades at informing people about the connection between vitamin D deficiency and ill-health, or even studying the issue.
Lifestyle choices for anybody that include whether you smoke, how promiscuous you are, how much you exercise, what drugs you use, your connection to nature, how much you drink alcohol, how much you sleep, what sort of job you decide to take or train for, what sort of friends you cultivate, what community you choose to live in, your spiritual practices (including meditation), whether you laugh a lot, what sort of media you watch and how often, as well as what you eat (including whether it is organic), remain dominant factors in how long you live. Still, sure, how polluted your environment is makes a big difference too, but in almost all cases, not as big, and people often still make choices that relate to that as well (like where to live). And, how well your body handles a more toxic environment is also effected to a big degree by nutrition (how well your body can deal with heavy metals or how good it is as preventing cancer).
If the CDC really cared about your health, they would have raised the US RDA for vitamin D by a factor of ten a long time ago.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
I don't see how that CDC page backs up your point. Glancing at that page, how do they quantify "small"? The world "small" isn't even on that page. The major killers in our society are heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and some consequences of obesity, and almost all of those preventable (or for cancer, greatly delayable) by excellent nutrition (which links to behavior, since you control what you put in your mouth). Even Alzheimer's and other dementia is probably greatly reduced by good nutrition. Statistics:
"10 Leading Causes of Death in the U.S., 2004"
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html
Dr. Fuhrman, for example, has built an eating plan that works to reduce lots of disease, based on thousands of scientific studies that say nutrition is a very significant aspect of health:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
BlueZones, as another example, is one approach to building healthier communities that had an immediate significant (one year) reduction of heart disease and mental illness (including by creating parks and promoting healthy nutrition at local restaurants):
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To support your point and build on it, see the knol I put together here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
It includes references to things like:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" by Harvey Cox (a professor of divinity at Harvard University)
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
"Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies. "
The religious aspect of so much economic thinking is one reason arguments about it are so contentious.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Interesting link to the Kirwin Institute. One page from there:
http://kirwaninstitute.org/research/talking-about-race.php
"At Kirwan, we agree that all too often implicit and explicit race talk has indeed been used to divide and alienate. At the same time, we believe colorblindness, though sometimes urged by people and organizations with the best intentions, is a mistake--one with profound consequences. The critical question is not whether to use race, but how to talk about race in a variety of contexts. That question is an empirical one we engage in through a number of projects. In some cases we specifically examine how people talk about race and how such conversations impact their behavior. In other work we look at how issue "frames" operate. And in still other projects we look at the efficacy of using class-based or universal policy approaches to racial matters."
Thandeka says something related to your point on policy, too: ..."
http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"My point is this. Talk of white skin privilege is talk about the way in which some of the citizens of this country are able to avoid being mutilated - or less metaphorically, to avoid having their basic human rights violated. So much for the analogy. Here are the facts about so-called white skin privilege. First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class.
As did Shirley Sherrod (in the later part of the video related to the controversy, suggesting that racism was invented as a systematic institution to keep poor people of any skin color from cooperating):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk
Howard Zinn says something similar in "A People's History of the United States":
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices."
On the general issues of "-isms":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankism
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Am I the only one you read 'tribaDism" ? Of course, it is an issue for the perpetuation of male nerds. But did anyone really expect women to wait for you to finish your StarCraft 2 marathon?
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Choices are important, but the way our society is structured often limits them. For example:
Dr. Fuhrman, for example, has built an eating plan that works to reduce lots of disease, based on thousands of scientific studies that say nutrition is a very significant aspect of health:
Yes, nutrition is very important. That's why where you live really matters. Do you have easy access to fresh foods and vegetables? Is there are farmer's market near you? Or is it a sea of fast-food restaurants? It turns out that in poor and segregated neighborhoods, the most convenient food sources are processed sugary foods from quick-stop gas stations and fast food joints. It's pretty tough to find a farmer's market or organic co-op in poor or racially segregated communities.
Isn't Shuttleworth guilty of doing exactly what he is accussing others of?
"Those people over there are always wrong about accussing others of being wrong." Accusing people of "tribalism" is a form of tribalism itself.
Ubuntu is about Ubuntu That's the point. Here in Austin a month does not pass that we don't get at least one call saying "I tried Ubuntu but I didn't like it, I think I would like to try Linux". Fanboy-ism may be partially to blame here and possibly the marketing measures by Canonical. Ubuntu has not become synonymous with Linux, Ubuntu has become synonymous with Ubuntu. Let the distro wars rage...if MS was correct about anything, it's that the strife between distro users will ultimately prove to be our largest fail-point. And to the point of "freedom". The majority of people we switch to Linux don't care about Free as in speech, fact is many of them see it as a non-issue. They want their computers to work and even after being spoon-fed the meanings in Microsoft EULAs they could care less. For the majority of people, we come off as wild-eyed fanatics when we preach "Freedom".
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
Funny that every time I tried to use Ubuntu (tose were a few), something simply didn't work. Somehow, the free drivers aren't at par with Debian's, but yeah, the proprietary ones work. Who need devices that lack proprietary (first class on Ubuntu) drivers, because the manufacturers publish their drivers at the Linux kernel. I'm not compiling a custom kernel just because a distro wants to make free drivers second class, thank you.
By the way, Debian stable just plain works. You get from the CD to a default set of application in little time more than the one it takes to download everything. And if you miss proprietary drivers, you just need to add the non-free and contrib branches and get them. Yes, it is harder than having they installed from the start, it takes a full 15 minutes of configuring.
Oh, and it is quite funny that you use a Debian distro just because apt trolls tell you they are better. It seems as if (nonsense, I'm sure) they are right, after all.
Rethinking email
Yes, I'll completely agree on that issue of access to fresh food as it relates to social class or segregation, good point.
Isles, inc. is one example group in Trenton that has made a difference fostering community gardens is the inner city for fresh veggies (as well as other benefits): http://isles.org/
Here is a co-op just started in a town as part of regenerating it:
http://www.mohawkharvest.org/
But our society could do a lot more. These issues are all intertwined.
And then these issues are interwoven with product design, advertising, profit-driven commerce, and externalities:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
People with less free time to understand all this then are also at risk (another issue of either income or lifestyle).
So, a complex mix of issues. But, they are systematically addressable, even without massive government involvement (as nice as it would be to throw a lot of resources at the problems). Get you vitamin D, pennies a day, have a garden or at least grow sprouts in your kitchen, buy more vegetables, soak and cook beans, buy frozen fruit instead of ice cream, make green smoothies in a US$100 blender.
http://www.greensmoothierevolution.com/
The most important foods to buy organic (generally, stuff you don't peel):
http://www.greenwala.com/community/blogs/all/6290-The-Dirty-Dozen
In general, it is cheaper and healthier to eat vegetarian. Permanently turn off the TV that mesmerises people into eating more junk.
It can be a positive upward spiral, of one improvement leading to another. First vitamin D, cheap and easy, then smoothies, then other changes... Any small group of people in any US community can make these basic things happen for themselves and their neighbors, as Isles, Inc. shows, as the Mohawk Harvest Cooperative shows, as lots of other examples show.
Still, it can be hard to throw off the mental parasites (like coming through mainstream TV, or even sometimes through school programs influenced by the meat and dairy industry) that keep us down.
* "Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html
* "Dean Ornish on the world's killer diet"
http://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_on_the_world_s_killer_diet.html
* "Ann Cooper talks school lunches"
http://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches.html
* "Mark Bittman on what's wrong with what we eat"
http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html
From:
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Unfortunately people like you and me are not really welcome in Ubuntu because it is overrun with those tribalist noobs who just want their pretty desktop, buttons on the left, and other crap like that. They will only tolerate us so long as we spend all day answering their noob problems. As soon as you start pointing out obvious shortcomings in the latest and greatest Shuttleworth idea, they start saying "well maybe an advanced user like you would be happier on Fedora/Debian/Gentoo."
For one thing, gainning market share is the only long term viable protection against the kind of atacks free software is suffering today. Nobody would care if Linux users knew about software patents or not if corporations didn't have enough money to "convince" legislators, for example.
As a for profit gate keeper, Canonical is the less usefull friend of FOSS they can be, but the entry barriers on that market are quite low, so they can't be too harmfull either. If everybody turns against them, they'll be gone in no time (and that is what they are fighting here). Now, about politics, most people simply don't care. They wouldn't start caring if they knew you personaly, and even if they cared, they wouldn't care enough to help. I repeat myself here, the best we can get from them is they not helping the proprietary software makers that want to destroy us.
About why contributing to Debian, I guess they are worth to have an awesome operating system to use. Wasn't that the goal from the begining? (I really don't know, I only met Debian at Woody.) But I can't really say much, since my contributions are much much much smaller than yours, of course.
Rethinking email
My ex-girlfriend is an oldbagger.
Does that make me sexist?
.
- aqk
F U
no, he just wants the pot to have the name of the person how cooked it, and why they made it for you. Read the sign if you want or not, but at least the sign is there.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I have yet to get ubuntu on a computer or a VM... of course all of those same computers run gentoo quite happily. So in my experience, no ubuntu is not less hassle.
one computer the CD refused to boot in, booted fine in my main desktop, but not in that one. Gentoo and debian CD's were fine.
One computer didn't like my video card (ati pci thing from 2003) best i got was800x600 vesa, on the 1280x768 native panel.
Both vbox and kvm choke on the livecd/installcd.
Also mostly I use XFCE these days, and while I know I can get Xubuntu, all I really want is a vanilla xfce install.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Open source folks have to get used to the idea not everything in a popular OS / distribution needs to be open
Like hell. I will not get used to it, not will I quietly acquiesce and spread my legs for proprietary software. I came to free software to get away from that shit.
The use of software is not really idealogical struggle
How much of your time do you spend connected to some manner of computer during your day? Four hours? Eight? More? Half your life? More?
If you're not free for half your life, you're not free. Maybe you don't care about that. I do.
And you misspelled ideological.
personally I wish people would really stop framing it in that fashion.
I don't care.
At the end of the day some people would / will want to be paid for their effort for creating software for your use
A goddamn lot of people get paid for working on free software. I get paid for working on free software.
Other people believe that everything should open and free for everyone which very awesome, but looking at the material history of the world has never really occurred as everything created has some intrinsic value.
We've never had a magic machine where you could put a loaf of bread into it and make an infinite number of loaves of bread. If we did, would you not say it was inexcusably criminal to withhold loaves of bread from anyone, for any reason?
Well, that's what free software is. Free software is the infinite loaf of bread machine.
Sure there will be some good hearted souls out there that will give stuff away, but you shouldn't really rely on that if you want better software variety and wide adoption
*checks business card* Yup, I still make money working on free software. Do you seriously not get the difference between free beer and free speech? Lots of entities make money selling free speech. Newspapers, for one.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
paid kernel devs, like redhat and suse. Getting hardware vendors on board, like suse and redhat. Getting 3rd party software(like oracle) on board.
Basicly something other than the closed launch pad, and some shiny guis for config files. (that work fine if you are on close to standard OEM desktops, but heaven forbid you have a hardware raid controller and want to run LVM or NFS on /.)
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Dude... you're making no god damned sense. You said:
So you're saying you only contributed to Debian to line your pockets? Really?
Frankly, you sound like an incredible hypocrite. RedHat has been praised for *years* for building a Linux distribution that's built upon the free efforts of thousands of free software developers. But suddenly Shuttleworth is at fault because the Debian guys give away their product under a license that allows Ubuntu to use their output?
Please.
If you give away your product under the GPL, you have no one to blame but yourself if someone manages to profit off that work by packaging it up in a nice shiny wrapper and offering a support contract. Christ, this is the dream of the GPL come true: open source software thats profitable, using a business model that doesn't take away from the freedoms of its users. But now its bad because you're not getting your share? Talk about bullshit.
I've read this entire thread, and I largely agree with the criticisms of Ubuntu that you've laid out. But this particular post I have to give -1 Hyperbole.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
By the way, Debian stable just plain works
It's also old old OLD. It is absolutely *perfect* for, say, a server, but as a desktop OS, it leaves a lot to be desired (I would know, I was a Debian users for years).
If Debian is so worried about their marketshare they'd adopt some of the things Ubuntu is doing. ie, provide a more cutting edge version of their product that has more polish and functionality. If they choose not to do that because its contrary to their philosophy, thats their choice, but they shouldn't begrudge Ubuntu's success.
Oh, I don't disagree with anyone who is pissed at Canonical for their attitude regarding contributors. I was merely pointing out that Canonical, thru Ubuntu, has done more to bring the concept of FOSS to the home user masses than the entire FOSS community has ever accomplished.
That said, Shuttleworth really does need to wake up to the fact that if he abuses the community enough, the community will license him out of existence.
GSVEMR
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers. It's a matter of their profits coming before principle.
So then fork Ubuntu and create your own project. Hell, take Ubuntus changes and roll 'em back into Debian and create Debian Desktop. Voila, the cross-pollination enabled by open source works again.
Seriously, you just sound like you're suffering from sour grapes. You aren't getting yours, so Ubuntu must be evil...
Given all I've been reading here about how Shuttleworth is still pouring money into Canonical/Ubuntu in order to ensure it's survival, I think it's a big disingenuous to compare Canonical with Red Hat.
As someone else in the comments pointed out, without a userbase, the only thing a open source project is is just a hobby. Which is fine and good for the hobbyists, but the idea of free and open software is to benefit everyone.
I ran Debian Stable on my home machines for years. I considered it the best of the linux dists at the time - but it just wasn't good enough to do everything I needed to do. I spent entirely too much time frakking around trying to make things work for it to be worth it. I run Ubuntu now, because by and large - and I have 6 installations on six different computers - it just friggin' works. I have entirely too much to do nowadays (struggling to survive) to burn tens of hours every week just maintaining the systems that I need to have operating 24/7.
The customers I've turned on to Ubuntu are happy with their systems for that same reason. When the "non-profit" dists get as good as Ubuntu, I'll gladly use one of them myself, and turn people on to them instead of Ubuntu. But they simply aren't there - and yes, Debian isn't there, not in usability, and not in support community (the Ubuntu support community rocks)
GSVEMR
You're talking about people being free. Free Software is software that gives people the Four Freedoms. Proprietary software does not give people those freedoms and is, thus, not Free. You are free to use proprietary software, but that software restricts your freedom in what you may do with it. No one is asking Canonical to restrict people's freedom to use proprietary software. What is being discussed here is Ubuntu coming with proprietary non-Free freedom-restricting software, and whether it's an acceptable compromise or not.
When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
With all due respect, Mr Perens, that sounds awfully close to jealousy.
Canonical and Red Hat provide the service and support for those users you so disparage. If the company isn't returning QPQ as much as you feel they should, you have a right to be angry about it. But bitching about the end users not contributing to the project in the same way is ridiculous.
I think that you've lost sight of the fact that without users, software is just a bunch of bits. I think that both those companies (and others) have proved that the larger your userbase, the more demand there is for your code, the more users will contribute back to your code - even if it still is just a small percentage, it's still larger overall.
I still have a great deal of respect for all you've done for Debian and linux overall, but I'm afraid that in this particular venue you are coming across as evangelical and whiny. Now I'm not a coder anymore, save for the occasional quick script or whatever I need, but decades ago, long before RMS, when "free software" was what one wrote and gave away in order to help people out, few of the people I worked with would have thought that anyone would actually complain about not getting rich off of the code we wrote, or complain about the people using the code without signing up to some sort of pseudo religious ideology. We wrote code and we gave it away because it benefited everyone in the long run. That is the point.
I still have a lot of respect for you, but it's less than it was before. I can't speak for anyone else but I suspect from reading the commentary that you've blown a lot of your "street cred" here, and that's a damned shame. I'm starting to see Shuttleworth's "tribalism" remark in a new light.
GSVEMR
"It’s just like someone saying “All black people are [name your prejudice]" and "So, for example, when a woman makes it to the top of her game, “it’s because she slept her way there”."
I really don't like to read things like this in the context of a software discussion.
It is just offensive.
Its just like saying - "It's just like saying Mark Shuttleworth is a dirty thief who smells and has gross stains on his underwear" and "So, for example, when Mark Shuttleworth makes it to the top of his game, "it's because he took it up the ass". Just offensive rubbish that has no place in a blog about software from the founder of a software company. It is just offensive.
I think that there is inevitably a conflict between the goal of software freedom and the existence of a financially powerful gate-keeper who stands between the financially un-powerful free software developers and the vast majority of users. The goals of the gate-keeper will never align with those of the folks making the software.
So all Debian needs to do is figure out all the things Ubuntu focused on that worked (give them some credit, they did some things right - ease of use, marketing, branding, ease of use, advertising, ease of use, outreach, release schedule and ease of use) and do those better than Ubuntu. It's not impossible but it's hard.
The only reason they stand between Debian and the users is that they do some things right. I don't even have to like Ubuntu to see that. That they will be out-competed is only a matter of 'when'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/profile/Sam%20Bowles
It may be that altruistic people who do things for society may also present greater tribalism.
At least that was my take on a series of lectures given by Dr. Bowles.
When you have market share, you can then start to dictate your own terms. If Canonical can make Linux on the desktop more viable and attractive to end users and can build a respectable audience, then software and hardware makers will have to take notice. Until then, we have to play on their own terms. Those terms are to either accept their proprietary crap (if available), and/or develop our own open-source drivers and software.
Sure, we all gave away code when it helped everyone. The problem comes when there's a social imbalance, and two companies collect the majority of benefit (not just payment, but the community and so on) from the work that we all do. IMO it's a real problem.
Bruce Perens.
"Not everyone wants to learn the intricate details of how their OS works, some of them just want to use it. "
For those that want to poo-poo this concept - witness a small 'fruit' company that came into a market saturated and owned completely by dozens of phone vendors with hundreds of commercial phone releases and entrenched service providers. In 5 years it's become the phone of choice. Why? Not because it's based on a unix software, not because it's open, not because it offers choice/DRM-free content/or any other of these niceties. In fact, it does all of these things WRONG - and STILL completely destroys the rest of the market and companies that have done the nice things. Why? Because - really - 99% of the average users just want to play youtube videos, surf the web, post on facebook and have it all supported by some happy fraternety/sorority kids. They could 100% care less about some tech feature-list of a piece of hardware; they want interwebz, youtube clips, instant access to lady gaga's newest music, cool fart apps, and they want it all from one storefront so they don't have to think about. They'll even pay a higher price for the hardware, software, AND DRM'ed content to get it. They. don't. care. about. the. nerd. stuff.
They buy it because it has learned how to be the coolest kid in high school - and everyone wants to be around them. You can hate those kids as much as you want. You can rant against them because they aren't the smartest or fastest. But they are the coolest and/or most beautiful - so they walk charmed lives. Why does this happen? There are reasons and pricinples - but it does - and it will as long as we have human nature; any you better learn that principle as a software engineer if you want to make your own way or start working for someone who does.
I'm a 15 year software professional and I've learned that the race rarely goes to the most 'empirically correct' answer. What good is a solution if nobody uses it? It's got to be written from the standpoint that it *solves a real problem* your users have - and solves in the way *they want/need it solved*. The second you say "well, they should do it this way because..." you have already failed.
I know the intricate details of Linux, but don't want to be bothered by them, so I choose to use Ubuntu.
Then you won't know many intricate details of Linux after some time. Linux is very dynamic, and people not keeping in touch with the developments lose their "expertise". Maybe some essentials remain constant - but knowledge enough to be able to debug and troubleshoot is mostly lost within 1 or 2 years. Not that it is necessarily undesirable - maybe you don't care, which is fine.
Though your C, python case is right - C is not that dynamic.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
"Who in their right mind would work if 90% of ever dollar earned went to the government?"
Citation needed. See also, for endless citations why what is implied in your first statement is wrong:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
"It's those high income people who buy big ticket items that create jobs."
Citation needed. In reality, this suggests they plow their money into the "casino" economy of derivatives, etc.:
"Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
Poor and middle class people usually spend every dollar they have in the real economy.
"You really think they are going to work 80-100 hours a week like most small businesspeople I know if they know almost everything they are working for is going to be taken away from them? They are going to shut down their business, or at least reduce them in size until they get down to a much smaller tax burden. That means a major loss in jobs for everyone else."
And if the work needs to be done, there will be twice as many 40 hour jobs. Citation to the contrary needed otherwise. Many people don't succeed in business because of this "arms race" of crazy hours. You're suggesting forcing people to work crazy hours and neglect their family and volunteer civic activities in their community is a good thing? It would seem to be something better engineered away. Maybe our society would be a lot better off if such businesses did shut down (in the context of a basic income, or a gift economy, or resource based planning, or stronger self-reliant local communities), since the families and communities of workaholics would be happier?
"The high tax rates are what dragged out the recovery from the Great Depression. The more you tax a person the less money he has to spend."
Citation needed, because progressive taxes work differently, as would a progressive tax redirected to a "basic income".
"The less money he has to spend the fewer products he buys. The fewer products that are bought the more the economy shrinks."
A "basic income" guaranteed to all through the government (along with a high tax on income beyond that) would ensure steady market demand, evenly distributed. That is where I'd suggest most of the tax goes -- back to the people to be more evenly distributed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If 50% of the US GDP was taxed and redistributed evenly, it would still leave a GDP equivalent to what the US had around 1993 to motivate those who wanted more. The 1993 GDP was enough to motivate entrepreneurs then, why should it not be enough now?
"And since it is private business that creates jobs and funds government what's the net effect? Less economic growth."
Citation needed. Governments can get revenues from renting public resources like land, spectrum, and fishing rights; they can tax monopoly patents and copyrights; they can print money which is non-inflationary as long as what is printed is what is needed through economic growth, and so on. When a baby grows physically, parents are happy; when an adult grows physically, it may be cancer. We need to move to economics not so dependent on endless "growth" based on, essentially, a financial pyramid scheme of endless increasing debt.
"Think about it."
I have thought about it. A government with a sovereign currency works differently than the logic of finance for an individual, especially a government with rentable assets (which are often being given away now in corrupt sweetheart deals) and which also has a legitimate right to step in and deal with externalities (whether negative externalities like pollution and risk of war or economic collapse, or positive externalities like healthier peopl
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
First, I'm very impressed with what Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical have done with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. It is my impression that the effect of Ubuntu has been to encourage everyone to fix a lot of configuration and other problems that were, in the aggregate, creating a barrier to beginning to use Linux.
There was a period of of years in which I would load new versions of Linux from several sources and be amazed at how much a new user was expected to know about configuration.
It doesn't matter if Ubuntu and Canonical did the work; Canonical's leadership caused the job to be done.
You said, "Isn't that what Shuttleworth is trying to assess?"
Assessing, being analytical, is what I think Mark Shuttleworth should do. Instead, he is doing very little assessing or analyzing. He is using a common word, tribalism, apparently to avoid taking an interest in all the steps of a complex social phenomenon.
He apparently hopes someone else will do the analyzing and theorizing about how to handle his problem.
In his article, he has made some useful comments. But calling anger a "playground squabble" shows the lack of depth in his thinking. When he says "playground squabble" he is implying that the people to whom he is talking are acting like children. That's an attempt to shame or intimidate; it's not analysis.
What is happening in actuality? My guess is that the anger comes from trying to work on a complicated project with too little coordination. People are blaming each other rather than the cause of the problem. They do that because they don't feel socially empowered to criticize the lack of true leadership.
Notice that Linux Torvalds gets different results. Although Mr. Torvalds sometimes lacks social elegance, he has provided true leadership, and that leadership has provided an atmosphere in which people work together. I am not saying Mr. Torvalds' leadership has been perfect. It has been amazingly good, however. Who would have thought the world would come together and create the kernel of a good computer operating system for everyone to use?
When we talked at OSCON 2008, Mr. Shuttleworth asked me what I thought about how to handle anger. I've done extensive analysis of anger, and I told him what I think. However, as I said in the former paragraph, I don't think anger is the correct fundamental diagnosis of his present problem. The "tribalism" he describes is in this case just a symptom of the lack of sufficient coordination, I'm guessing.
I gave Mr. Shuttleworth printed copies of a 27-page manual that can be downloaded from my web site that shows part of my ability to understand how sociology and technology interact. I have no evidence that he read it.
My understanding is that Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical has never made a profit. For example, see the November 2, 2008 article Canonical founder will wait for profits. Canonical's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion, is the poor marketing and public relations. The article referenced in this Slashdot story is a good example of poor public relations. It says to the business community, "I don't know how to handle this situation well."
I think that, if Canonical had professional marketing and public relations, it would have no trouble making a profit. Numerous articles say, "You can't make a profit selling a desktop operating system", but I think that is not the problem.
In my opinion, Mr. Shuttleworth is facing a problem that, if solved, could be life-changing for him. If he is willing to encounter the difficulties of personal growth, Canonical will be a success, and his life will be enriched. If he is not willing, Canonical may never make a profit.
Well, I think it's an overall negative for Free Software to create rich and powerful corporations who stand between the users and the developers.
Can you elaborate on this part? I use Ubuntu, but I guess I just don't see how they stand between me and the developers in any negative way. If they deviate Ubuntu packages significantly from their Debian roots and go in a strange direction and/or fail to contribute back to the upstream, they will eventually be unable to accept any of the patches from upstream, and they will then have completely forked and be on their own. If they do that, one of two things is likely to occur. One, they will fail to keep up with new features and fixes that come from the community, and they will stagnate and become useless (likely); or two, they will succeed wildly, because they saw a need that was going unfulfilled, and the market of users (and developers) flocks to what they've done, and eventually Debian drops the original branch of the package and picks up the Ubuntu fork (less likely). Either way, as a user, if I want to step around Ubuntu and get my packages directly from the developer community by pointing to a different repository or building from the source, are they really stopping me? And, they are releasing their source code, right? If they're not, well, then I also would have a significant problem with them.
Is the problem that the developers that Canonical pays are developing things that Canonical wants, not things that you want? And as a result, their patches are not applicable / desirable in the upstream? If so, I would suggest that this is why they pay them - if you don't pay developers, then they produce only what they as developers want to produce (and well they should!) If you wanted Canonical to pay you, you'd have to do what Canonical wants, and not what you want - and really, it sounds like you would not really be happy with that arrangement at all. I can't say I blame you, you have a completely different set of (noble, worthwhile) goals. I guess I just don't see how what they are doing diminishes you or your work in any way, as long as they uphold their part of the agreement and release the source, so that you can (if you should so desire) adapt their work to be useful to you. Yes, it would be nice all around if they could pick up more of the "common ground" work, and perhaps they should be shamed a bit for that. But I think they've been an overall positive factor in advancing acceptance of free & open source software with users.
The worst thing I've ever seen come out of the open source world is the Ubuntu One Music Store. I can understand selling promotional T-Shirts and coffee mugs, but why is an "open source" organization is running a clone of the iTunes Store is beyond me.
Probably to make money, and to cater to all the people out there who like things simple. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? I wouldn't calll it "the worst thing," though I can't say I've ever used it.
Not everyone wants your idea of a system; get over it.
Then we can reasonably expect it will fail on its own, no need to be snippy about it. Just wait.
...I believe the blog post that pointed this out is the "stuff that Mark didn't want to hear".
I side with the blogger. Mark shouldn't be a weenie and try and hide behind bad rhetoric.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I never read a more true and insightful a comment.
There are other Debian based distributions out there, but even as I make that point I know it does not make yours any less relevant. If Canonical is making money off of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is being based off of Debian I don't see how they can possibly push a position of "we support free software and the community" without actually financially supporting Debian or at least contributing development time to the Debian project - which they could then simply integrate directly into Ubuntu so it's just a matter of who's directions and schedules the developers are following.
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
I'm currently still seeing it in 10.04LTS, after doing something very simple and reasonable that selinux would have been able to handle with no problem. So the "solution" of apparmor being easier still didn't solve anything - I just lost the power of Selinux, and traded it for something that hangs updates. Because hey, after all, if I'm installing mysql-server then OBVIOUSLY i want it to start during the install process, right? And replacing init with Upstart, when it is no where near ready for production use even now several releases later, was a bad move. Mysql is a very basic thing to want to have working on a average, run-of-the-mill, lowend server; ie, the Ubuntu Server target audience. What sort of testing occurred?
And it was also just an example. Maybe you can explain why this bug still exists? Does Canonical think that using ldaps to auth a machine is unimportant? And that's as a *client*, so that means Ubuntu can't be used as a workstation OS where ldaps is in use, unless you do something like I suggested in comment #91. This is the sort of thing that happens when people do feature updates downstream without submitting upstream; Canonical has intentionally fostered a culture of people not doing the right thing (kudos for you for not being among them) with code changes, and as a result has created their own divergent forks that they now have to continuously spend time remerging with their proprietary changes. RedHat does a feature freeze with only bug updates per release; that's *reasonable* because it creates a reliable basis for people to develop upon. How much do they change basic things like apache, mysql, etc - without submitting things upstream? Almost none at all.
I could go on. The point is merely that Shuttleworth is whining about a problem he created; people aren't being unfair to him. He tried to change too much, had too big an ego, and that might have worked anyway (like it does for many others in the OSS community)...if so many basic things weren't broken. Wanting a laptop to start faster (hence Upstart) is no reason to break servers. Solutions should solve the problems they're aimed to; in many cases with Ubuntu tools, the "solution" mainly just makes new problems.
But, they can still turn it around. They do have a large base, after all...and they did hop on the Cloud sooner than others, so they've got a head start there.
ps - I'd really like Canonical to answer some day why removing /etc/postfix means I can no longer install postfix. It's not even enough to just create the directory.
If i *remove* an app, I want it gone. If I'm *installing* an app, do everything necessary to install it. I see no other distribution with this problem...especially ones that use that icky rpm which is supposedly so inferior.
That issue was fixed in 9.10. The MySQL daemon wasn't fully converted over to Upstart.
I'm currently still seeing it in 10.04LTS, after doing something very simple and reasonable that selinux would have been able to handle with no problem. So the "solution" of apparmor being easier still didn't solve anything - I just lost the power of Selinux, and traded it for something that hangs updates. Because hey, after all, if I'm installing mysql-server then OBVIOUSLY i want it to start during the install process, right? And replacing init with Upstart, when it is no where near ready for production use even now several releases later, was a bad move. Mysql is a very basic thing to want to have working on a average, run-of-the-mill, lowend server; ie, the Ubuntu Server target audience. What sort of testing occurred?
It was fixed, but it appears that it broke again (possibly due to some sort of typo in the upstart script, if I understand it correctly). There is an update going out right now to fix this. Please check to see if it solves your issue.
And it was also just an example. Maybe you can explain why this bug still exists? Does Canonical think that using ldaps to auth a machine is unimportant? And that's as a *client*, so that means Ubuntu can't be used as a workstation OS where ldaps is in use, unless you do something like I suggested in comment #91.
Well, that isn't my area of expertise, and the issue doesn't seem to be a blanket "LDAP does work", but rather a particular combination of issues breaks LDAP. But, I could be mis-understanding it, though.
This is the sort of thing that happens when people do feature updates downstream without submitting upstream; Canonical has intentionally fostered a culture of people not doing the right thing (kudos for you for not being among them) with code changes, and as a result has created their own divergent forks that they now have to continuously spend time remerging with their proprietary changes.
Yes, the Ubuntu community has shot from the hip fairly often and just made changes without working them back upstream. Maybe this comes from the mindset that developed while they work on making extensive changes to the desktop and not have those changes accepted back upstream (because the changes weren't mature enough)? Well, we as a community have been working to change that mindset for the past year (at least, I have seen it this way) and are really trying to get developers to think about the upstream more and to improve workflows to make this easier and more reliable.
I do agree that we need better testing and QA. RedHat has an extensive build testing system and has worked hard to develop good release practices and checklists. I would like to see Canonical do the same.
Meh, I have always preferred RPM anyway, even with its faults. It seems that apt is a little too paranoid while rpm is a little too lax. If you are still having issues, I believe doing a forced remove should completely remove postfix from the database and then allow you to reinstall it, but I am hardly an expert with apt/deb.