Slashdot Mirror
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.
Where is the "crowd" that he referred to? Who wants Linux to be "hard"?
Everyone I know wants Linux to "work". And to work "consistently" with an internal "logic".
It's not as bad as it used to be, but when I purchased redhat (back when one could go to the store and buy it), some random guy sneared and said "i wish people would use slackware, then you really have to know Linux"
I see here plenty of comments about this vs that leaning the same way.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Shut up Hairyfeet, we know it is you hiding behind that bad English.
There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
Seriously though, Canonical has more "skin in the game" than any other Ubuntu contributor and they are funding the lion's share of the expenses. You'd think this would be justification enough for them to "wield more power than the average contributor". Unlike other "authoritarian" regimes, you are free to leave and start your own fork without fear of being hunted down and shot. You can always go help Mint. I agree with Shuttleworth, if you don't like the conditions at Ubuntu then go somewhere else and try to be grown up and not poison the well when you leave.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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".
There seems to a common denominator in "unfun" stuff as regards coding. It's the bits which rely on libraries, protocols, formats or hardware which haven't been standardized yet. If we all had two image/sound/video formats (lossy and non-lossy), one time format, one type of graphics card and CPU, one file format or data transmission format, one (spoken) language (which we'll all move to eventually given enough centuries), or (horror) one OS or programming language, software would be much more exciting to write, knowing it will stand the test of time.
The tedium is found in writing code multiple times for uncommon formats, CPUs and OSs, increasing code complexity (bugs), and knowing that it will probably be dead one day. Yes, competition and multiple standards is probably a good thing initially, and hardware is certainly changing and improving for a while, but when things finally settle down in a century or two (?), the real productive work will have just started.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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
I can guarantee such a mentality exists.
From http://dwm.suckless.org/
The crowd he is talking about are busy; they will be back when they finish compiling Gentoo...
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.
True? this is utter bullshit.
Or more speciffically, it's utter bullshit in the way that he's talking about.
Noone wants Linux to be hard.
The trouble is that he's focussing solely on a minority of desktop users, labelling their problems as more importand then dismissing everyone else as "leet" and saying they want it to be hard.
That is bullshit.
I don't want Linux to be hard. I want it to be easy. As easy as possible, in fact. This is why I'm in general getting rather leery of Ubunbu and have moved to Arch on a number of my systems.
Basically, ubuntu is so full of magic to make it "easy" that it's getting harder and harder to make it work the way I need to, and figure out what the hell is going on under the hood when something does go wrong.
Arch by comparison is much simpler, and much better documented. Therefore getting it to do interesting and useful things is often considerably easier than the same with Ubuntu. And if it's set up you can have all the user nicieies that one expects in a modern system (sane audio, 3D graphics, sane hot plugging, sane package management).
I mean sure, he can go nuts with ubuntu if he wants. It's his distro. Just don't expect me to help create a system I don't enjoy using and don't be surprised if people wanting control over their own system abandon it for an easier, simpler distro.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.
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
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 was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
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.
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.