Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The IT world link takes you to an interstitial ad, followed by a godawful mishmash of crap.
Here's a link to the original post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517
Ubuntu has encouraged me to submit bugs and even maintain a ppa for packages I couldn't find on ubuntu. Ubuntu has encouraged me to contribute because the community is active and friendly. Redhat never did that for me.
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.
I've been paying attention for a long time. I've done the distro hopping dance for years, and I've been advocating Linux all the while. In 15 years of Linux use, for me personally, Ubuntu comes second only to OpenSUSE as far as getting out of my way and letting me get my work done. Ubuntu is the clear favorite among family and friends whom I have foisted Linux upon over the years. I've gotten far fewer "tech guy support" calls than any other distro, spent less time dealing with computer issues over the phone and I have definitely gotten fewer complaints. Therefore, I *am* inclined to believe the stats. They are doing something right, as much as it pains some to admit.
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.
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!
That's a Debian peculiarity. The Debian way is quite logical and clean, and recognizes that Apache2 and Apache are separate software packages that may collide. It also supplies a nice and clean modular configuration system for Apache2 which avoids cruft, and demarcates maintainer and sysadmin configs clearly.
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.