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Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama
In the wake of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a number of contributors from its community have been speaking out, saying they're uncertain about their role and their future working on Ubuntu. They're concerned about how Canonical is making decisions, and also how (and when) those decisions are being communicated. Now, Mark Shuttleworth has addressed the issue in a blog post. He said,
"The sky is not falling in. Really. Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical's contribution is massive. It's simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets 'what it wants' more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don't get exactly what I want. It just doesn't work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu. The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That's nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I've watched and participated in, the biggest meme is 'if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting.' Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans. If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else. It's also the case that we've shifted gear to leadership rather than integration."
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
I can leave my girlfriend at a Gnome 2 machine forever and not get any questions about how anything is supposed to work, because it's functionally very similar to Windows.
Put her in front of a machine running Unity and she's continually asking 'why is this doing this?', 'how do I do this?', 'where did that window go and how can I get it back?', and 'what is this crap anyway?'
So I would say that Canonical has gone out of its way to make Linux hard to use.
This was the core of his rant:
He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship.
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
Unfortunately, unfun stuff includes refinements to code to make sure it works well, drivers, documentation, gnarly bug fixes, and the like.
Futurist Traditionalism
It is a false choice to say that pandering to mercantile interests will always go against the FOSS/Server interests. They often can align. Plus, Linux has succeeded despite its desktop and difficulty to install, not because of it. Shuttleworth isn't advocating putting trusted computing in the hands of MS, he just is saying things should be easier on the desktop. And why the hell not?
Z
To an extent, I like the distro, but I've had similar complaints about how they have changed user level features in the past without offering any kind of migration path. Now it looks like the same mentality behind Canonical's management and release style has finally reached developers as well.
Well, it isn't the end of the world. There are plenty of other distros. I wouldn't be surprised to see most of the devs just go back to Debian.
Every post Shuttleworth plays this "1337 crowd" card just to avoid actually discussing the issues.
The issues at hand this time were "Mir" and "the lack of descision power from the Ubuntu community". But he choose yet again to blame everything on the "1337 crowd".
It's not about difficult vs easy when it comes to distributions. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE installs with relative ease these days. But Canonicals insistance of doing everything alone, fragmenting with new upstream projects. There's no rhyme nor reason for Mir, and all it does is cause headaches everywhere. And that's what they've gotten most shit for these past days. Not their ease of use.
-- Linux user #369862
At the end of the day it's his company and if he wants to take Ubuntu in his/their own direction that's up to them.
I used Ubuntu for many years and was really happy with it. I moved on since then and use another distro.
Ubuntu has done a lot of great work for the Linux community and also got a few things wrong (in my humble opinion).
There is no reason to hate them for it. People make the opinions known and it's up to Conanical to take these opinions on board or not.
There is so much choice out there for Linux and if you don't agree with Ubuntu's direction use something else. Ubunutu is open-source so you can roll your own version or use a derivative.
But really all the hate for Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is childish.
Freedom as in speech not beer.
This post makes you sound like a dumb person with a massive chip on your shoulder.
In fact, that attitude launched Linux.... It was about "I'm better than you"
No, the attitide that launched Linux was: I'm writing a kernel for fun and I want to share it with you.
The fact that this has transformed in your warped little brain to other people trying to make themselves look better than you has become a self fulfilling prophecy. They gave away cool stuff for free and you complain aabout it. Now, they do look much better than you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have seen this as well. It's not uncommon for someone coming from Windows to ask "What is a good Linux distro to learn on?". Some knucklehead will pipe up with Gentoo, LFS, or Slackware so that they "learn" linux.
Most new users have embraced Linux by starting with Ubuntu rather than getting frustrated and giving up like in the "good ol' days".
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
The rub comes in that Ubuntu is not necessarily a "fair" representation of what "the Linux" is, anymore than Android is.
I've seen many a person who has been using Ubuntu for a significant amount of time flounder when given another distro to work with: even Debian. There is a "*NIX way of doing things", and Ubuntu often deviates from that. Sometimes dangerously far.
And it can hurt the community. Many an Ubuntu user comes wandering in to the support forums for (insert FOSS project here) all confused, and it is difficult for the community to help them because between Debinization of the package and what Ubuntu does to the Debian package it's often hard to figure out where things have moved.
Ubuntu is walking a path away from what Linux (and other Unices) have been in the past towards something of their own design, often not asking what Linux people want. That's all fine and dandy, but for Shuttleworth to basically tell long-term users "we're gonna do what we want, go fuck yourself" is not right either. And that's basically what he's saying.
It's more than a rhetorical tactic. It's an intellectual fail that was inherited from the GNOME project. The fail goes like this: "We must have a good default UI. Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak. Because noobs are so noobish they will click on Advanced, screw things up, and then complain to us."
False and Wrong, idiots. And a big fail. There is plenty of software (especially a lot of Apple software, which I hear is quite popular), with preference dialogs that have "Advanced..." buttons, and guess what, noone on the forums is complaining of stuff that was misconfigured. (They are complaining of actual Apple fails, but that is another story).
That one epic fail---that one decision that you can't have both a simple UI, and a button somewhere in the preferences that caters to your advanced users, is the root of all the backlash against GNOME and Ubuntu. Your hubris is costing you dearly.
Put an effing advanced button on all your preferences. And no, gconf-editor or dconf-editor or any of that garbage doesn't cut it. It needs to be COMPREHENSIBLE to be useful.