Ubuntu Isn't Becoming Less Open, Says Shuttleworth

sfcrazy writes "While the larger Ubuntu community was busy downloading, installing and enjoying the latest edition of Ubuntu yesterday, a post by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers. He gave the impression that from now on only select members of the community will be involved in some development and it will be announced publicly only after completion. There was some criticism of this move, and Shuttleworth responded that they are actually opening up projects being developed internally by Canonical employees instead of closing currently open projects. He also made a new blog post clarifying his previous comments: 'What I offered to do, yesterday, spontaneously, is to invite members of the community in to the things we are working on as personal projects, before we are ready to share them. This would mean that there was even less of Ubuntu that was NOT shaped and polished by folk other than Canonical – a move that one would think would be well received. This would make Canonical even more transparent.'"

Comments

Re:Ubuntu can fuck off

[poet]

Said the Anonymous Coward.

Mini-mod me

[noobermin]

Before you mention a) your technical problem with 12.10 b) your disgust with unity c) your leet alternative of cinammon/openbox/awesome/i3/dwm/twm/tmux/screen/tty2, can we save those for the appropriate forums or articles? This article is about Ubuntu becoming more closed, not about unity specifically or otherwise.

Re:Mini-mod me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and no.

Like it or not, the 'off-topic' flood shows what really bugs people about the topics Ubuntu and Shuttleworth.

Holding too close to 'the topic' can make the forum too much into an audience for press releases.

Re:Mini-mod me

[marcosdumay]

Your post goes only to show that Ubunu clearly have image problems. In a way, they always had, but it was restricted to the same people that care if it is getting less open now. Nowadays, they've annoyed so many people, that the old time haters are outspoken, and can't even have a coherent conversation between the newby haters.

Ok, inside the topic, people always complained that Ubuntu was too closed, and that it was getting even more closed, except for a small period, when they started to cooperate with Debian. In fact, it doesn't seem to be getting more closed, it installs closed softwre by default (it has always done that), it mixes closed software with proprietary in their repos (again, as always), it installs software with a big risk of being sued for infringing patents by default (not new), it gets money from private entities (as always), it customizes a few things the way its patrons like (that's new, it used to inherit patronized customizations).

Personaly, except for installing too much closed software by default, I don't care about any of the above. And even the proprietary software, I care about it mostly because it is low quality, and wouldn't care if I could just ignore it.

It's becoming more open

[Culture20]

...to closed source software. And incestuous design methods. And to advertising money.

Re:I wish he would make it less buggy

[MrEricSir]

Sadly, ATI decided to stop support in its closed-source driver for the FirePro M7740 chip, which Dell sold me in a "workstation-class" laptop less than three years ago.

As someone who's been in the same boat, I don't think it's fair to blame the manufacturer here. Your hardware didn't change -- your software did.

Blame whoever broke binary compatibility with the existing driver.