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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.'"
I upgraded to 12.10 last night and spent the morning with a non-functinal system. Disabling my externa monitor has stopped the UI from hanging. At the moment it looks like the window manager (or what passes for one these days) can't cope with multiple monitors, at least configured the way I use them (laptop with a large external monitor, laptop monitor configured to be geometrically below the external montitor). I noticed that windows on the laptop screen go into this mode where the window border pulses, as if something in the window manager is thrashing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Said the Anonymous Coward.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
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.
sucks Amazon cock
So would I if they were going to pay money to support my business.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It must be fantastic over their in Mint-land, wear you can have you're traditional desktop and true freedom and all that.
Its truly free, write?
There has to be a way to make this statement more clearly. The less coupled with the NOT is too close to multiple negatives for my lightning fast reads. "This would mean that there was even less of Ubuntu that was NOT shaped and polished by folk other than Canonical â" a move that one would think would be well received."
20 characters max for the password? How will I use my favorite poems as passwords?
...to closed source software. And incestuous design methods. And to advertising money.
You are not less perfect than Lore
Ubuntu is not becoming more or less open or closed. It's always been as it is, the SABDFL's distro. Thus it was brown, now it is bruise coloured; thus it was Warty, now it is cool to find Amazon suggestions in searching for files and applications. Ubuntu's main problem is that Mark says things. He should just do what he does and have another person speak for Ubuntu who won't have to "correct misperceptions" because they won't actually know what Mark is doing and so can just say nice things.
Whoosh...
My recent experience installing Ubuntu from a live USB stick was good. It's true, I can't stand Unity, but I just boot to it once then install kubuntu-desktop right away. This was on a brand new Ivy bridge machine, and everything just worked, including sound, 3D acceleration (of the lame itegrated 6 core GPU) and suspend. As opposed to the Debian live boot, which did not manage to bring up eth0. I love Debian and I use it on servers but this time Ubuntu solved my problem and Debian was just lagging too far behind.
I have whined about Ubuntu in the past, and it does have its warts, but the bottom line is, it's a damn slick package and that's not even considering the price: free.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Really? Mine was so fluent that installing Cinnamon was just a matter of adding the LMDE repo.
Unity is now too slow to run inside VirtualBox, even with Hardware Acceleration and the Guest Additions
while
Things get marked 'notabug' and 'wontfix' in all sorts of bug trackers, all the time, by all sorts of developers. It's quite a leap from there to 'doesn't have any interest in feedback from the community'.
I'm replacing Ubuntu with Debian! ... oh wait, I already did that like a year ago. But I'm even more glad about that decision now.
After trying to use the beta, and now release, and after months of fighting Unity in the the prior versions: I got so fed up that I actually started creating my own OS from scratch! Well, from Assembly... Initially anyway.
First I made a Hex editor for RAM (in under 446 bytes) that can call into the edited memory. I wrote that to a USB drive, plugged it into a spare computer which is now Dev Machine Zero. After booting the MBR hex editor I created a "Save RAM Segment to Disk" by manually inputting binary op codes (machine code). Once I could save my work from RAM to disk, I began work on a simple 2 stage chaining boot loader -- It already lets me multi-boot and supports my extensible hash-based encryption, which I use for signing/decrypting the 2nd stage loader and primordial kernel. As soon as I'm done implementing keyed SHA3 I'll use it to support full drive encryption at boot. It been little over a week of evenings and my bootstrap loader now replaces GRUB on all my systems. I'm also about 1/4th of the way through my new assembler language (it's currently a subset of 8086 only); When it's done I'll extend the Assembler using itself to support macros and finally begin bootstrapping myself into a compiler for a higher level language, like C (or maybe a C-ish lang of my own design).
I sometimes do low level work on custom embedded systems programming, so I know a bit about OS development / design. I could use a cross compiler and/or a VM in a host OS, but I where's the fun in that? Besides, I can PROVE my bootstrap and compiler process didn't inject any back doors (as in Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust). There simply was no room for back-doors; I can "trust no one" because every last byte is accounted for.
It's been forever since I wrote any Real Mode code; Ah fond memories: Outputting MOD files to the PC speaker, low res 320x200 256c graphics, direct disk IO, 640K + "High Memory"... I'll almost be sad to make the switch into Protected Mode and write the device drivers & file systems.
Well, Thanks Ubuntu! I've had this idea for an Agent oriented OS kicking around for a while -- If it weren't for your usability failures pushing my frustrations over the edge I would still just be thinking, "Any idiot could do better than this!" instead of actually giving it a shot. Also, to all those "why re-invent the wheel" types: When's the last time you saw a wagon wheel on a sports car, eh?
I'm still a loyal NetBSD & Slackware luser, but screw Ubuntu. I still have to use Ubuntu for testing packaging of my other projects, but instead of fighting the UI or glitches now I just take a deep breath, get a fresh cup of coffee and add a new feature to the only OS developed with my usability in mind.
After the numerous bungles with Unity, Amazon, and other decisions maybe Mark has learned something. Having outsiders inside would help reveal mistakes before they become mistakes. That would likely solve the publicity problems facing Ubuntu.
No. Trisquel is libre (free as in freedom) though and so are a dozen or so other distributions. Linux Mint uses the mainline kernel and other software which is non-free. Itis gratis (available at no charge). A small part of the kernel is non-free so most distributions are not truly free. libre-linux is a derived version with those bits removed.
ThinkPenguin's one of the few places you can get freedom friendly hardware that works across distributions and versions. They even support Trisquel and have a version of the site (libre.thinkpenguin.com) that is FSF friendly (contains no support documentation on distributions which include non-free software). They don't actually ship or support non-free software on any distribution though. They don't need to since they only sell hardware that isn't dependent on non-free software. Ohh and they contribute to a ton of free software projects. From the FSF to Trisquel (25% of profits from the libre link go to the project). They also support a number of other distributions and projects (not all are FSF complaint though- but none develop non-free software).
I learned the hard way that non-LTS Ubuntu releases are alpha software. LTS releases are beta software on release day. Wait for the .1 release of LTS and you've got a good stable system.
The biggest problem with installing non-LTS is that any bug reports are fixed in the NEXT version and they don't give a damn about the the version you're actually reporting from. THEY treat it as alpha, therefore you should not be surprised.
-Written from 12.04.1
So...I understand if some of these practices are not typical for the open source development model. Like putting more emphasis on donations and sponsors, and having a closed core developer group.
But maybe these are just damn practical moves. Maybe the extra cash will help ironing out the horrible amount of bugs, and improve the performance and hardware support. Maybe having a controlled development team will help having a clearer focus on technology and design, without there being million APIs and UIs fighting for popularity. All good things for the Year of Linux on Desktop?
Is that a case of a noob comparing ubuntu with debian stable again?
Use debian testing or unstable.
Even power users want to have stuff that just work. So yes, ubuntu is not for content creator, more for consumers. The way content is pushed directly when people try to work is a testimony of that target, and that's the vast majority of the users IMHO, and that's what Mark target.
Is that a case of a noob comparing ubuntu with debian stable again?
Far from it. OK, feel free to go ahead and demonstrate your leet skillz by making a live USB boot stick with Sid. Let me know when you've got your QA done.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not only Ubuntu, but also e.g. NVIDIA make the same mistake:
It's _us_, the geeks, that install and recommend software (and hardware) for all our friends, friends of friends and our companies.
I don't like Ubuntu anymore simply for this statement that they _want_ to abuse my friends brains for their advertisments, so the next 100 linux installations won't be Ubuntu anymore but probably plain stable Debian from now on. .. just like all the PCs I recommend to friends don't contain NVIDIA but integrated Intel graphics adaptors since quite some time now. .. same goes for Android over iOS as it is somewhat less locked down, LibreOffice over others, etc. etc. etc.
In the end it's my responsibility to recommend the best for my friends and customers, and this is how this turns out.
I see this argument from time to time.
Regardless of the merits of any system, if some OS enables a "noob" to do the same things as a "leet" and in less time, then in my opinion it is superior. Of course, horses for courses and all that kind of thing, but if you're using debian to do things that are easier to do in ubuntu, then you're just wasting effort.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
It must be fantastic over their in Mint-land, wear you can have you're traditional desktop and true freedom and all that.
Let me guess... you're a Windows user!
Free Martian Whores!
One of the other commenters quoted Linus, "Talk is cheap, Show me the Code". I have that on my coffee mug right now :-)
Unfortunately most of my work is in machine code and although it works for me, it isn't well tested since that's not my main concern just yet. When I get to the point of having more stable code in a more readable form than raw op-codes or half-implemented ASM, then I'll be sure to release it. Until then, here's the raw memory bootable hex editor I mentioned: Hexabootable. This one has a couple more features and a Visual interface rather than my first EDLINE like input method; Although it fits in a 512 byte boot sector there's no room for a drive partition table (meh, those are really more of a reccomendation, not an essential rule). You should still be able to boot it from a drive via:
dd if=hexboot.img of=$YOUR_DRIVE
or using a VM (which you should use instead if you value your hardware).
I went through and heavily commented EVERYTHING, so even folks who don't know x86 assembler can follow along. There's 26 bytes left of space in the image, so when I have time I'll see about squeezing in the text input mode I've implemented in machine code on a live instance; Till then it's Hexadecimal all the way.
Happy Hacking!
You're developping an OS because the UI had problems ? If your coffee machine fails you start designing a nuclear power plant ? And if your car is having tire problems you probably start building your own refinary...
It was something I'd wanted to do for a while, and instead of just complaining I'm actually doing something about it now. Don't get me wrong, I can use any OS fine, but that doesn't mean that I won't be frustrated while doing so, and thinking of all the ways everything could be improved, if only they did it differently... UI issues with Ubuntu Unity was just the tipping point. Without them it may have been years before I got fed up enough to start a whole new OS -- I might have even been content with just making a new window manager (or improving XFCE), but the proverbial camel has now broken its back.
I have a sligtly different take on OSs inspired by shortcomings that most modern OSs have... Some things I want to do just aren't possible using Linux or BSD. Some things I want to do could be implemented in a POSIX OS, like these, but just aren't being done. For instance: Set up groups for capabilites, and run every program as its own user. So, you'd have Firefox, wget, IRC clients, etc in the "WAN" group, IRC, ThunderBird, etc in the "Identity" and "WAN" Groups, groups for managing different services, etc. Each program also gets its own group. This way, no program can read any other program's data (or your data) unless they have permission. ThunderBird can't access your IRC chat logs, the IRC client can't access your Internet History files, etc. If you wanted to give Firefox access to say, run say Steam clients: You'd add Firefox to the "Steam" group.
Apache is often configured to run as its own user -- Everything else needs to do this too, IMO. Without a policy to enforce this behavior in the distro or OS itself it just takes too much effort to keep re-configuring things this way. If the OS enforced such behavior natively then many other things become possible, like trusted Agents, fully sandboxed plugins, and being able to automatically query for capabilites regardless of the particular programs installed...
My way isn't for everyone, but it suits me. I'm a "Focus on the Solution, not on the Problem" sort of guy.