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

I wish he would make it less buggy

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:I wish he would make it less buggy

[MrEricSir]

Are you using a proprietary video driver? I've had much better luck using the open source drivers with dual monitors on Ubuntu.

(And yes, that goes for both Unity and Gnome 3.)

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.

Re:I wish he would make it less buggy

[Narishma]

The only graphics drivers on Linux for Intel chips are open source, so if you have an Intel GPU, you can't be using proprietary drivers.

Re:I wish he would make it less buggy

[plasticsquirrel]

If you want fewer bugs, then Ubuntu LTS is really the way to go. Those LTS releases are expected to be relatively stable for 5 years. When you are on the quick release cycles, anything can happen. This is the same principle between stable / testing / unstable with Debian. When you are on the bleeding edge, things break. When you are using the stable version, you should be able to expect that very few things will ever break. I wish more Ubuntu users paid attention to this principle, especially during the early period of Unity, when everyone was complaining about it being so buggy. Then when the LTS release came out (12.04): "Hey, Unity is actually pretty decent and stable now!" Of course it will be stable.... that's the stable version.

Re:I wish he would make it less buggy

[Blaskowicz]

Geforce 8/9 GPUs are dying, netcraft confirms it. Well, they suffer from a hardware manufacturing defect that may manifests after years, I sure had a few crashes with my 8400GS, first when testing OpenArena (this is a game that is worth for testing purpose but is so inferior to Quake 3 it's not worth playing). Hard to tell if just the driver crashed or it's because of the hardware.

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.

Re:Ubuntu can fuck off

[MichaelSmith]

sucks Amazon cock

So would I if they were going to pay money to support my business.

Re:Sorry, we can't here you over here,

[noobermin]

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?

It's becoming more open

[Culture20]

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

Re:It's becoming more open

[marcosdumay]

And now I must ask. If it is becomming more open to closed source software, is it more or less open?

Because I can think of some arguments for "more", some arguments for "less", but I'm tending to aswer "the two aren't related at all".

Re:Ubuntu can fuck off

[Tough Love]

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.

Re:Sorry, we can't here you over here,

[Tubal-Cain]

Really? Mine was so fluent that installing Cinnamon was just a matter of adding the LMDE repo.

Re:Maybe if he changed the way he said it

[AdamWill]

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'.

The new Ubuntu was the best thing to happen to me!

[VortexCortex]

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.

Avoid non-LTS releases

[Pausanias]

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

Re:Ubuntu can fuck off

[dudpixel]

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.