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Shuttleworth Answers Ubuntu Linux's Critics
climenole writes "Technomancer wrote: 'Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Linux's founder, maintains that he and Ubuntu are doing right by the Linux community and the even larger open-source community. In recent weeks, Ubuntu has been criticized for not giving Linux enough support. Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't do enough for producing Linux source code.'"
From my experience, the distro that gives less back to the community is Suse.
I have Suse systems at work and there's always some catch, it never works seamlessly unless you go to a full (paid) Suse solution.
Ubuntu, OTOH, is nearly transparent, you never feel like you are being obstructed by it. In the worst case, if everything else fails all you need to do is to fall back on some Debian solution that will almost always work in Ubuntu.
Big hand for the RMS wannabe, everybody! Thanks for dropping by with yet another tedious rehash of how the FSF wants people to refer to Linux. Have you considered maybe getting a life?
This reflects user dissatisfaction with ubuntu being much higher than the others.
Or maybe you just suck at computers and should move on to other pursuits?
According to your technique, Windows and Apple are awesome, and Ubuntu ... isn't.
If you carefully flilter the well-spun bleeding-heart marketing crap out with a pair of tights you get Shuttleworth saying:
"we do damn all except improve our own distribution - which we invest in so much - purely because we are altruists that want to improve adoption"
Focusing exclusively on improving the adoption of his own distribution, sucks money from the whole ecosystem of other vendors that have contributed far more to GNU/Linux than him. Canonical's contribution is pititful, and -worse- their massive marketing and polish focus (while needed) has sucked funding and users away from those distributions that used to fund development.
Talking of watching the code flow in - is just crud; Canonical steals the credit (why are people writing to thank him ?) for other people's work - while trying to put them out of business by undercutting them on price (Zero dollars) for their work. They totally screw up the economics and social compact around the code - and apparently have no shame: Adoption (of Canonical controlled stuff - not even called 'Linux' cf. their homepage) is apparently a good in itself that justifies poisoning the well: go for it.
The button order is a 100% total complete non-issue for anybody who has a little bit of a clue.
It goes beyond a trivial preference because there are programs that don't use the native interface and have buttons on the right. So he is actually causing some interface consistency issues with the change.
The community clearly didn't like the change so why keep it? Because Shuttleworth cares more about cloning OSX than the collective opinion of the community. He is in his right to use GPL software to clone OSX but he should drop any pretenses about Ubuntu being a distro that is community driven.