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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.'"
Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu also has more users than those other distros combined?
I'm a regular Ubuntu user. I use it on 13 machines in my shop and personal life. Having it done and well integrated with easily obtainable extras makes my life much easier. From less powerful to my most powerful this product just seems to work. So, to that end I do thank Mark Shuttleworth for his efforts and I hope he realizes that he has made other's lives better.
Not everyone contributes back to society or to the world at large in equal measure. Canonical does some things that others don't and others do what Canonical doesn't. To use code contributions to the kernel and to Gnome as a measuring stick just doesn't seem right. Let's be smart and look at the overall effect this has on the world.
Here's to you guys.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Further, it probably has the least number of technical users because it's probably the most popular "plug-and-play" (or close to it) distro there is. Thus, there may be fewer people who can trouble-shoot their own problems.
Table-ized A.I.
heh I applied for a membership on the DSL fourms 4 years ago just to post a question, and have still not been approved I spent nearly an hour today on slackware trying to see what options I had with a no cd no usb boot system, finally on some 3rd party blog I found a 5 page walk though that read like Russian stereo instructions so yea they may seem to have more problems, but its honestly hard to get any other distro's to even setup a localized place to ask questions, I love it on my home machines, hm how do I do that, Oh I know... google XYZ on ubuntu and there is a half dozen threads all pointing me in the right direction and that is a good thing, no matter how much the hardcore nurds want to spin it
A lot of Ubuntu's critics say what they say because they think they are "too good" for it since it comes with training wheels on. Ubuntu, being a distro, has no obligation to write source code -- that is done by thousands of programmers elsewhere, and they are doing a damn fine job. A distro is meant to package the work of those programmers in a way that people can use it without needing a CS degree, and Ubuntu is getting that right imo.
So, the critics need to stfu and stick with their obscure distros.
This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.
Ubuntu is without a doubt the best distro for most users. Yeah, I know I could have more customization with Debian, yeah, I know I could be faster if I ran Gentoo, yeah, I know I could be more on the bleeding edge if I used Fedora, but when it comes down to it, Ubuntu is the best distro for most people. I -like- the fact there is a forum where I can post a question and it is answered in about 15 minutes, I like the fact I can do 99.999% of the things I need to do without using the CLI, and I like the fact that I have a lot of software in the repository.
And the best part is there isn't really any sacrifice. Is there anything that I can't do with Ubuntu that I can do with Debian? Just because I don't have to use a CLI for everything doesn't mean I can't if I want, etc.
Yeah, so Ubuntu doesn't have the nerd "cred" that I'd be getting if I ran Gentoo, but I have a usable system that is nearly infinitely customizable without having to sacrifice usability.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Blech, there's no worse "statistic" than counting the number of Google results for various terms.
If you compare "bible" with "quran", you can see that there are about 10x the results for "bible". What does that indicate, are there 10x more Christians, or readers of the bible? You can also see that Malawi, Swaziland, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have the highest regional interest for "bible", so what can you conclude about that? Are those the most "Christian" nations? The US isn't even in the top 10, in fact all 10 are African nations. I see that Indonesia is ranked #8 for regional interest in "quran", can we conclude that Indonesia is the 8th most "Islamic" nation?
If you went on only those numbers, you would conclude that followers of the bible greatly outnumber followers of the quran. The actual difference is about 2x, not 10x. You would also conclude that Pakistan, Gambia, and Somalia are the worlds largest Islamic countries, but the largest (by population) is Indonesia.
Google "stats" are pretty useless.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So we can see the thought process here:
Developing Linux Kernel = Valuable
Getting Linux into users hands with convenient, easy-to-use installers, providing support, etc. = Not Valuable
To borrow one of Shuttleworth's analogies, a brain can't function without a body to house it.
Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distro, which I can only assume is pulling quite a bit of interest to Linux. A fraction of these new Linux users are also logically speaking developers. And these would then be potential Linux contributors.
I have a hard time seeing how spending a lot of effort into making the most popular desktop Linux distro on the market could be a bad thing even when going as specific as Linux contributions. Developers are just a subset of users! Any successful distro is a good distro for Linux, and heck, it's not even important to be successful. That's kind of what this whole open OS is about. Play around and have fun. If you're doing well too, well, that's a nice bonus for Linux!
And Ubuntu is among those that are doing well.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Well, neither "A Glass of Coke" is actually a recipient made of a sugar-flavoured drink. It's a common grammatical rule called Metonymy, and it's commonly used to exemplify the language to avoid excessive verbosity.
The same could be said about the idea of prepending GNU to Linux, giving to the name the dubious function of being considered somewhat an homage or representation of the intentions of the author. Personally I'm not offended if my friends just call me "Sal" without citing everytime my father's and my grandfather's name like some aristocrat used to think. It would just make every conversation tiring, ad would give an idea of self-importance more annoying than anything else to my speaker.
I am an old school user from the beginning with Slackware and such. I settled on Redhat because it felt the best to me. This was before Ubuntu came out and Debian was on the map but no competition yet for Redhat. (I'm sure that will be a matter of opinion for many though.) In spite of all the great things about Ubuntu, I'm stuck with Redhat because I simply know it too well. It is largely quite predictable in the way they do things and in their philosophies. That they are active contributors to the source and supporting software is nice but not the reason I continue using and supporting Redhat.
I was dismissive of Ubuntu at first. One of the biggest turn-offs to me was the fact that nearly everyone refuses to say the name properly. (Damnit! The U makes the same sound each time! Ooo-boon-too! Why is it so frikkin hard?!) To me, that aspect alone makes me think idiots will use it. (I know I am WRONG as hell about that, but at some level, I tend to tie intelligence with linguistic skill) On top of that, I don't like the colors the defaults are using. Moreover, the naming convention? What plans have they after "Zippy Zebra?" And really? Are they intentionally copying famous comic books where the first letter of the first and last names have to be the same? (You know, like Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and all that?)
But you will notice I make no TECHNICAL complaints about Ubuntu... (well, there is one... apparently the way they set up their Avahi daemon doesn't work well with my SME DNS server... turn that off and it works fine.) That is mostly because I don't have any.
As far as the response of Shuttleworth? He's right on all counts. I completely agree with his responses. If any one distro helps make Linux a household word, it's Ubuntu. It's slick. It's polished. It seems to perform well everywhere I have seen it. And it is especially true about the source for information for the most solutions. It is the Ubuntu forums... good for me that I don't have much trouble translating from Ubuntu to Fedora. In some extremely important ways, Ubuntu is a huge contributor.
If Linux is being taken more seriously by the various industries out there, you can thank Ubuntu for a big part of it.
I'm sure someone else will have said it, but I reckon this is one of those cases of "it can't be measured, therefore it must have no value". Ubuntu has done amazing work getting Linux more visible and better established, that alone is worth a significant amount.
So we can see the thought process here:
Developing Linux Kernel = Valuable
Getting Linux into users hands with convenient, easy-to-use installers, providing support, etc. = Not Valuable
That seems to be the gist of the article, and is one case where some members of the OSS community have really lost sight of something important: code is not the only thing projects need. It is true that Canonical hasn't done particularly much in the way of code, but it has found other ways to pull its weight, particularly in terms of user support. And pull its weight it most certainly does. Whether or not it does more than other companies, I can't say: you can't measure it like you could lines of code or number of applications. But it is grossly unfair to call it parasitic: it does things that frankly nobody else is bothering to do on the scale that Canonical does it. It has earned treatment as an equal to the more established players, even if it fulfills a very different function from them.
Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.
The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.
I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.
I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.
My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.
What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.
Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.
Without attempting to establish equality, let's just say both of those are essential.
About a year ago I upgraded my synaptic (the only user-friendly package manager I know so far). Turns out that the Debian guys missed a critical flaw which made Synaptic crash when loading the repos. Downgrading synaptic using command-line tools was a royal pain in the ass. That's the kind of errors that I hate, and the guys criticizing Ubuntu are much more prone to commit them.
While I don't like Ubuntu myself (for some glitches I've experienced - ironically, in the user-friendliness area), I do agree that it has set the bar on user-friendliness. More user-friendly = more popular. More popular = more pressure on the devs to write software that just works.
As an example, I'll use Mepis 8.5 - it's being released with the latest version of KDE. Well guess what, the installation screen is quite unusable if you have an nVidia video card. You're stuck at 640x480 (or 800x600 if you're lucky), and the installation screens are clipped. Sure, you can install the drivers in RAM, but then you have to reboot. DOH. All installed drivers vanish. Another problem that could be solved with community support.
With more community support, these problems will go again after the devs realize that the world they're writing software for is NOT a world filled with closets stacked with old network cards, cables, old consoles, a hard disk full of debugging and developing software and regexp cheat sheets stappled on a nearby wall.
As much as it hurts, the devs need to get off their clouds, open their eyes and see that the people who use distros like Ubuntu are people who have a life - ok, a busy life - and don't have the resources, the time, nor the brains to solve those pesky problems.
I still remember the days where one had to edit the xfree86 .conf file by hand after following a series of instructions. I sincerely hope those days don't ever come back again.
An engineering project that can't be sold is just a project.
You hit the nail on the head. I've recently been promoted to a more bureaucratic place at my company, and I've come to realize that a lot of things I considered of uttermost importance in software development were not as crucial as I thought. Now, I'm not saying they're not necessary. But I overestimated them. Also, I've learned that it's the sales department which makes the companies earn their income. No income, no salaries. No salaries, no employees.
Linux devs who have never understood the management and marketing side of companies, simply lack the vision needed to improve and promote the kernel/OS they love so much.
Linux is GPL licensed.
Ubuntu is using Linux according to the GPL license.
If the developers didn't want this to happen, they shouldn't have used the GPL license.
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