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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."
Yes, the criticisms of Ubuntu are that they are largely fragmenting from the norm without a lot of coordination with community projects, not that they are making Linux 'too easy', that would be absurd. It is ironic, as one of the things I appreciated about it versus suse or fedora back in the day was how they made the most straightforward use of 'upstream' function whereas other distros added a lot of distro-specific fluff for management. I was out at Unity, and they continued on to Mir.
I will say that I am also disappointed at what the Linux desktop has been becoming. Ten years ago, Windows was an inscrutable mess of an OS under the covers. If you wanted to do nearly anything from a programming/scripting perspective in terms of managing the platform, you had to understand a ton of obscure stuff off of MSDN if it were possible at all. Linux was a lot more transparent and easy to understand how it worked at a glance. There were some limitations that were rough going from workstation/server to desktop/laptop market (e.g. making a wifi config without root privilege wasn't feasible, handling the acpi sleep button took some contortions, and controlling shutdown/restart similarly required explicit root authentication all the time).
Ten years later, MS has either replaced or hidden much of their overly complex stuff as they have advanced powershell (still a ways to go, and winmgmt is still a lot more fragile than it should be). Meanwhile, the typical Linux distro now has dconf, network manager, polkit, systemd, and worst of all dbus. Some more capability has come about, but it has become pretty inscrutable to the admins with a bourne shell scripting level of understanding. More advanced programmers appreciate some of the additional structure, but shell commands to script some capabilities are no longer easy (complex dbus-send commands, non-obvious configuration location and no longer human readable content) or impossible. The Linux desktop of today is growing a lot of the badness of the Windows desktop of a decade ago, and the Windows desktop is growing a lot of the goodness of the Linux desktop of a decade.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
He try to frame things in a binary fashion. Either you want to have easy stuff on the desktop and then you should not criticize him, or if you are against him, then are against having stuff for everybody. That's just a rhetorical tactic.
In practice, the issue is not that Ubuntu make things easy, because that's a good things to do, it is that Canonical is not respecting the community and do not discuss, because they think time to market ( or cadence, as they explain ) is more important. That's ok to believe that, but you have to be clear. removal of UDS 3 months before without discussing first, lack of respect for those that have bought plan ticket, and took care of accomodation. Not caring about community rules ( ie pushing changes after freeze ), that's the same, not caring about respecting rules for community. Using the Ubuntu name becuase they own the trademark. Not respecting the rules that community should follow.
Of course, Mark never say he is treating people unequally. Or never even try to defend that, he prefer to attack stawman, like the minority of people who think "ubuntu should be kept for elite". I never seen people like this, at most, I have seen people that complain we removed what they used, which is not exactly the same. So yeah, infuriating opponents by using lame tactics is the way he react to that. He did like this for the Amazon issue, he did that for Unity, etc.
The only thing I can say is that he is being too emotional about the project, thus making everybody realize this is *his* pet project, not the one of everybody.
I'm sad to agree with you.
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
Mark, it's not a black-and-white world.