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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."
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
"Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.'"
This is 90% of what makes the American government unworkable.
My other sig is clever.
If you can figure out how to convince people to reject tribalism and operate in a completely rational manner then promoting free and open software will end up being small potatoes, you've probably got a nobel prize waiting for you.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Ignore him.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Just the sort of intellectual whining I'd expect from an Ubunt-dude.
It is a problem. Tribalism is different than debate, dissent, and competition. It's a state of being unable to engage in meaningful debate or to accept constructive criticism. There is (or should be) a middle ground between a "mono-culture" and the inability to accept new ideas from a member of an opposing group.
My other sig is clever.
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!
He didn't seem at all to be saying there should be a mono-culture. He stated that it was a problem that people in each individual clique seem to often, rather than being cooperative and working with the other groups (or even respecting) them, things tend to devolve into "my is better than yours!" attitudes. It's not even always between distributions. At a recent open sources convention I attended, though it wasn't really open hostility, I saw a lot more devotion and mild animosity between Gnome and KDE users than between Ubuntu and Fedora users.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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!
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?"
So tribalism == politics. Got it!
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?
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.
in addition to Bush's idiotic 700 billion banker bailout
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Only 52 comments in and it seems there is already a disproportionate number of posts moderated Offtopic, Troll, or Flamebait than a typical /. thread. All this and we're just talking about the possibility of tribalism being a problem in the free software community. Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth is on to something.
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,
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
Strangely, I never heard a word out of any of these people when Bush was running up huge deficits... their voices only became so massively amplified when a Democrat walked in to the Oval Office.
I wonder why that is?
That's easy to explain. Much like how the grass is always greener on the other side, criticism is louder when it's against your side.
How appropriate considering the topic at hand of Tribalism.
I would love to see these Tea Party guys share in some of the power to see if they live up to their claims. And Libertarians. And Greens. If the stranglehold of the two corrupt powerhouses were to be shaken with some decent 3rd party action without the populace mourning "wasting" votes within my lifetime, I can die a happy man that that the country I love will be on it's way to rediscovering her path.
More Twoson than Cupertino
You have it backwards. Triablism is the opposite of competition. Tribalism isn't "I prefer my project so I will make it better than yours" it's "You are an idiot, why bother competing when I'm already better and always will be". It's not "I like this feature we should do that too" it's "That feature is in Windows, it's garbage, lets not even think about it!"
Also, explain how racism isn't prejudice...
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
This type of action by Bush was the reason his approval numbers were so low - he lost his conservative base. Conservatives were quite outspoken about this. That being said, the fiscal bailout was quite different from the "stimulus" package. The fiscal bailout was almost completely a set of loans and the large majority of those loans have been repaid. The "stimulus" package, on the other hand was mostly a giant boatload of pork-barrel spending.
I see what you did there.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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?
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
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
Well you heard at least one voice - Mine.
I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans. And then I joined a Tea Party in December of '08. It's not my fault you chose not to hear my voice. You also chose not to hear my voice in 9/12 when I said going to war was a dumbass decision, but was passed near-unanimously by the Congress (both D's and R's).
Oh and by the way the Tea Parties date back to December 2007 when Bush was still in office. It was originally started by libertarian Ron Paul, who then stepped aside after his campaign was finished, but the momentum continued without him.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
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...
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.
That's because the TEA parties weren't happening yet. Trust me, if you'd listened to talk radio, read the blogs, watched something other than MSNBC or CNN, etc. you would have noticed. By the way, Obama has more than doubled the Bush deficit. Now THAT'S huge, in the way that an elephant's huge until you see a sperm whale.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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"?
"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
How about instead of a $950 fine, we raise taxes for everyone? Then you get to deduct (up to some maximum, say $950) the amount you spend on health care?
Or instead of health care, you get to subtract an amount for each kid you have. Or how much interest you pay on your mortgage. Or... hopefully you get my point? I guess you can argue the health care bill is raising taxes on those that don't buy insurance and is deceptive in the way that tax is being levied. I might even agree. The problem is, I fail to see how that's markedly different from other tax/deduction rules. Or at least different enough to motivate me to join protests or political rallies or tea parties.
People are already taxed more for not paying mortgage interest. That makes less sense to me than paying more to subsidize the sick (even though I benefit from the mortgage interest deduction). Why wasn't the mortgage interest deduction upsetting people as much? It effectively "fines" people for not buying real estate on credit.
It's like a segment of our population suddenly woke up and realized they have to pay income taxes following incomprehensible rules. The strange thing is, that awakening seemed to occur at the same time Obama won the election.
I have no problem with not taxing people who don't have health insurance, as long as (1) they receive no medical care they do not pay for up-front, including ambulance corps/first responders and (2) they are permanently not eligible for public health care (including medicare).
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Oh, and by the way -- random capitalization and the co-opting of terms with specific other meanings just makes you look like a lunatic. Might be one of the reasons many of us consider you to generally be trolling.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
Oh, so you want me to pay to keep the emergency rooms open, so you can use them when you get in a car accident and need them? That "fine" is a fee to keep the hospitals open, so that when you need them they'll still be there. The current situation is that you, and people like you, are opting out of the health insurance market but still expect the emergency rooms to remain on standby, which is why hospitals are going out of business and health insurance companies keep having to raise rates.
It's just like the police or fire department, except that 100 years ago we decided to lump those services together and make them publicly owned--taking the market away from private security firms and fire deparments--while leaving doctors to the tender mercies of the insurance companies. Doctors at the time just didn't have good enough unions to do the same, at least in this country.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
"No what's "wrong" is that I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance."
That'd be OK if you also forfeit your right to call ER if you have, say, a sudden heart attack.
"I posted often and frequently that the Bailout Bill was stupid, and that I was happy the Republicans voted it down. Then the Republicans turned-around and voted for the second, revised bill Nancy Pelosi came-up with, and I started calling them Bastards instead of Republicans."
Except that without the bailout you'd probably be out of the job, without unemployment benefits and in the middle of The Greatest Depression Ever. And I'm not exaggerating a bit. Without the bailout money the banking system would have collapsed.
But don't worry! Tea party stupidity has won in the end. And instead of more stimulus spending (which IS needed) USA has budget cuts and 'deficit reduction'. So look forward to enjoying deflation and stagnation! Cause that's what you were asking for.
No, it's not the same at all. The people who accept scientific consensus on climate change are backed up by research. That's not the same as blind faith leading to monoculture and non-acceptance of contrary ideas. It's up to the deniers to prove the research is wrong and to this date, they haven't.
RMS expects folks to understand the merits of Free Software a priori. I am very fond of Richard but it's necessary to accept that his mental wiring does not give him any empathy for folks who don't think the way he does. So, Open Source is a way to introduce the benefits of Free Software to people who don't think like Richard. This makes it necessary, of course, for those people to take the second step on their own: we hope that a pragmatic appreciation leads to a philosophical one.
This doesn't really apply to the interaction of Ubuntu and Free Software. Mark understands Free Software and thus this isn't an issue of Open Source not bringing the idea to him. It's a matter of the goal of profit first and beating the competition and their incompatibility with the goals of Free Software.
Free Software would be happy to lose some customers on philosophical grounds, and would be willing to take a financial hit to further software freedom. Substitute "Ubuntu" for "Free Software" and say that with a straight face.
Bruce Perens.
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.
Well of course private insurance companies are a scam, and are designed to extract the most money from people at the most vulnerable times in their lives. The better solution is to make healthcare infrastructure a public good, just like firefighters and police.
Unfortunately Joe frickin' Lieberman killed that idea back in September, when he killed the public option. So we don't get to have nice things like low-cost pharmaceuticals, or hospitals who don't have to employ twice as many insurance reps as doctors, like the rest of the civilized world. We get to share a healthcare model with Mexico and Iran, which results in us paying three times as much for a lower life expectancy than any European nation.
You're still playing the lottery, pal. There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it. Multiplied by the number of people in your family. Know how I know? I *used* to have a seven figure bank account, that's how. I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
And... frankly... if you've got 500k in the bank, I don't even care to hear you whine about a $900 tax delta, regardless of the reason. You discredit yourself instantly. Buy some bloody insurance, they won't charge you the tax, you get great value for your money.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
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.
I'd sooner DIE than steal from you.
I seem to recall you collecting unemployment benefits, and even complaining about some aspect of it. True or not?
If Wall Street speculators can gamble away the world so badly that it leads to the worlds worst depression ever, then the system already is so rotten from within that bailout money will only prolong the suffering.
Football Odds
I've got almost half a million in the bank
Good for you.
Oh and don't give me that nonsense about "expensive" health costs.
You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father also had a pacemaker, but he also suffered total renal failure and was on peritoneal dialysis. Very expensive process, and he was on it 'til the day he died. Fortunately, that's one of the very, very few conditions for which Medicare will pick up the costs no matter what your age (he died fairly young.) He was also on a drug that, at the time (this was almost two decades ago) cost about $15,000 year, in addition to the twenty grand a year his insurance company premiums went up to, because they wanted him to go away. We ran though my savings, my retirement funds, all of his money and had to sell his home. He then lost his insurance (Aetna, may they rot in Hell) and we had to bear all the costs after that. You can be proud of your half million, but if you find yourself in need of any significant level of care, you will burn through it fast. So don't get cocky.
... a tune-up would probably cost ten grand.
You simply cannot compare the relatively insignificant costs of specific medical procedures with the long-term costs of having a serious (or, in his case, multiple) medical condition(s). Now, I will agree, medical costs are definitely inflated because of the middleman insurance companies (in effect, they've completely divorced the cost of medical care from our actual ability to pay.) Imagine if your automobile insurance was responsible for vehicle maintenance
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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).
Bruce Perens.
I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.
Just wanted to let you know, if you blow through that because of unexpected medical bills (high probability, plenty of people with a hell of a lot more money than you have gone bankrupt because of it), I don't mind my tax dollars supporting your medicaid and emergency services. I mean, I think you're wrong, and shortsighted, but I don't want you to die because of that mistake. Peace.
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.
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.
The CBS Poll shows his approval rating dropping to as low as 20%, so yeah, he lost his conservative base. I think it would be safe to say that quite a bit of that 20% are made up of staunch Republicans, who aren't necessarily conservatives.
As long as government stayed out of the way the US economy was by far the strongest this world has ever seen.
That is so 2007.
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
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.
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.
Offtopic, but I was hoping to ask a few questions to an intelligent, rational member of the Tea Party. I'm assuming you qualify, since you are a member of this tribe -- and of course our tribe is very intelligent and rational. :)
A big chunk of the Tea Party platform is adherence to The Constitution and Bill of Rights. I am a studious and zealous fan of those documents. I think their underlying principles, particularly in The Bill of Rights, are surprisingly prescient and noble.
I have heard varying views from high ranking Tea Party members regarding some portions of The Bill of Rights, and while I know that it is a young party and subject to various interpretations, I am interested to hear your take.
What is your take on "Congress shall make no law" when it is in conflict with sections of The Constitution like the responsibility of The President to provide for the national defense? Does the prohibition in The Bill of Rights take precedence, or the obligation in The Constitution?
I am a strong supporter of The Second Amendment. Yet I am tempted to agree that private citizens should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons. The Supreme Court once ruled (in not protecting sawed off shotguns) that the second only applied to weapons of war, though clearly nuclear weapons are weapons of war (or mortars or tanks, for example). Many have argued the "well regulated militia angle", of course. Where do you stand on limitations to The Second Amendment?
What is your take on The Establishment Clause? The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion, yet many (including many high ranking members of The Tea Party) have expressed a belief that religious morals rightly should inform legislation. There are certainly laws which satisfy religious morals while not being an establishment of religion, like the prohibition against murder. Other issues, such as the distinction between civil union and marriage, seem difficult to divide from their religious origins. How should The Establishment Clause be interpreted, and do you feel that The Tea Party as an organization has internalized that interpretation?
Though the bent of my questions may seem hard, I am not trying to be hostile. I genuinely would like to see a party that truly put The Bill of Rights and The Constitution first -- but there are some deep conflicts between those documents and our modern interpretation of civilization. I am interested to hear your views, and your thoughts on whether The Tea Party can find a closer reality to the principles behind those documents.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Those might be medical bills from the 1970s, but today's costs are much higher.
Titanium plate in my wife's arm - 56,000. My nerve stim was 67,000 in total.
My grandmother's chemo in 2000-2002 was over 400,000.
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.
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...