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Mark Shuttleworth Complains About the 'Open Source Tea Party'
slack_justyb writes "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers for the recent release of 13.10 and talks about 14.04's codename (Trusty Tahr). He also takes aim at what he calls 'The Open Source Tea Party.' He writes, 'Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)' He cites all the complaints about Mir and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control. Shuttleworth continues, 'And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we'll get it done, and it will be amazing.' However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. He even goes so far to show some love for Linux Mint: 'So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"
You're referring to the fact that both groups like to stick to their values? I may not agree with one of them but they both have a very good record of not switching sides in the middle of a debate.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers
So the rest of us might appreciate some hints as to wtf it is. Yeah, I know, Google exists so you don't have to write a decent summary.
There is a reason why other distributions - even ones that had switched to Upstart - adopted systemd.
There is a reason why other distributions - and toolkit developers - opted against supporting Mir.
And it has nothing to do with the tea party.
Smells like Alinsky's dirty socks.
Anybody not agreeing with the Ruling Class is now "Tea Party", huh?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
When you can turn a grass roots political party into a pejorative, you have succeeded. Well done American media and the powers that be.
I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature. Then again, Americans who reveal widespread domestic spying by the government are called 'leakers' and 'traitors'. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Seigo has posted on Google+ an invitation to Shuttleworth to a public debate on Mir vs. Wayland issues.
I don't consider it political when people complain because to them you seem to act like uncooperative asshats, especially when OpenSource is supposed to be about cooperating. Something not being technical (though I remember quite a lot of technical criticism) doesn't make it political.
It just makes you look like a jackass to apply a political stigma to an open source group, and stinks of crying about not getting your way.
The true is that Ubuntu and Canonical are doing a great job. Unity is not there yet, but will be. Mir is starting, and I would bet that will be good in 2 years.
I loved linux back in '90s (slackware at the time). But after sometime I found that the fanatical community would never do a system intended for non-geeks. For this reason, I stoped using linux in the 2000s. But ubuntu changed that mentality. They have a system that have auto-updates, a good management pack system and a simple and beauty visual. I get things done in the office without going to source code. That's all I require from a computer. And Ubuntu, right now, is the ONLY linux (for desktop) that provide this.
When you get to choose which country to live in, you will without a doubt check its politics. An authoritarian regime that can throw you in jail or kill you on a whim is probably not a good place to live. Likewise when choosing an OS or a desktop environment it is prudent to check the worldview and the attitude of the developers to gauge the direction in which these projects are going and decide whether that's the direction you'll want to be pulled in.
Just as moving to another country is difficult and expensive once you put down roots, have a job and a family, moving to a different OS or DE is difficult and painful as you find your favorite progams only work on what you used to use. As things stand, I have no desire to move to Mark Shuttleworth's kingdom.
I've done some review of Canonical's license agreements for a Debian compatible software tool. Their licensing is peculiar. While individual components are being published as GPLv3, they're requesting, and getting, written permission from some contributors to re-publish the code under alternative licenses, at Canonical's whim. That is releasing licensing rights to someone else. Even if Canonical proves trustworthy (and they've not, due to their strange browser collection data practices), that goes far beyond most open source or freeware licenses.
Paranoia about open source licensing, for authors, has repeatedly proven justified. Projects released under older licenses have had their licenses carefully skirted, and software effectively encumbered with additional requirements that prevented open development. Examples have included NVidia drivers, which proprietized the OpenGL libraries, and Sun's encumbered licensing for Java. Ubuntu is doing reasonably well riding on the shoulders of the Debian upstream developers, and have been contributing back to the open source world. But this is not the first time Mr. Shuttleworth has made licensing, clearly to Ubuntu's commercial advantage and with the potential for abuse, at the expense of the open source community's safety.
Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past
But I thought systemd was the future?
Trust me, it still happens, just behind closed doors but it at least stays internally. Problem with that is there is a hierarchy and you don't get the views from outsiders which can be refreshing in such instances.
I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I agree with you in concept, but how does Windows 8 fit in with that world view?
Mr Shuttleworth can keep his mir and his unity. I am not holding my breath waiting for uPhone to take the world by storm.
hey...it's always good politics to strike while iron is still hot.
the media has force-fed the "Tea Party Is The Whole Problem" narrative into gullible mouths for a few weeks now...why waste all that free brain-washing on just the federal budget?
expect a few more metaphorical comparisons before things cool down...i'm sure they are coming
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Saying something like that is politically incorrect in Slashdot... basically the atmosphere here is "OSS or GTFO". Personally, I like your comment as it balances things a bit here.
>
By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on
Not Invented Here, eh? Tell me, where's this Mir shit coming from, and Unity? Looks like it's Ubuntu's Daddy is the one with the case of Not Invented Here syndrome. It's called projection. Get bent, Mark, you're a retard.
Windows 8
It is Krup !!
I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I like your idea, but how do you manage to avoid Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle in your process?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
How happy you are. You pay for software and do not even have freedom to choose whether you want a radical update or not. Since you are slaved you do not need to deal with all the drama bullshit you loathe.
I neither really care. I least care about you. Have fun.
Many of the problems with certain major open source software projects today happened solely because people were afraid to say, GODDAMN IT, THIS IS A FUCKING STUPID IDEA!
The GNOME project is probably the best example. In a few short years it went from being the premiere open source desktop environment (GNOME 2) to a total cesspool of rancid, rotting Mac OS X ripoff and design idiocy (GNOME 3). Today it is unusable.
While people did speak up, nobody really took a strong stance against the bad decisions. Nobody with any power in the community and project loudly and proudly said, GODDAMN IT, THIS IS A FUCKING STUPID IDEA! each time one of the GNOME crew suggested or implemented something idiotic.
Had the stupidity of GNOME 3 been dehumanized early, and shown to be the scam that it is, the Linux community as a whole would have been better off.
So I don't necessarily agree with what Shuttleworth is saying here, but at least he's speaking his mind. If he sees something as stupid, then I hope to hell he does everything he can to dehumanize the opposition. That's the best way to deal with stupidity.
with the crap UI that is shit for all the same reasons the windows 8 one is you are driving people away and doing damage to desktop linux. siding with the gnome3 mentality of screwing the users and saying "it's my way or the highway". Mark, you are the tea bagger of open source
But will the Tea Party succeed in displacing "Da Jooz" as the go-to boogeymen?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
On the one hand, Ubuntu has seriously improved desktop Linux, particularly in hardware auto-detection and driver support.
On the other hand, you've shown on several occasions that your goal with Ubuntu is to take the effort of thousands of volunteer developers and sell it and the Ubuntu install base for personal profit. That turns those same formerly motivated volunteers into chumps who worked for you for free, and nobody likes being a chump.
And then there's the UI thing, but Ubuntu is hardly the only one making mistakes there (see Gnome 3). The fundamental issue is that a significant portion of UI designers think that making tablets and desktops and phones should all have basically identical interfaces. There's a clear reason why that's a bad idea: Different kinds of input methods demand different kinds of interactions. For example, on a touchscreen the easiest place to interact with is the center of the screen, whereas with a mouse the easiest place to interact with is actually the corners, which means you want to put your icons and menus and such in different places.
I am officially gone from
I wonder if "open source tea party" members know more about computer science than non open source tea party members.
My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
So the reason you are posting in this thread is to say "lookatme,lookatme!"
OK.
Remarkably naive.
That attitude works right up to the point where the people who make your vertical market apps decide, you have to much time and effort invested in data and training to go elsewhere. Then they own your business.
Well, Mark certainly isn't wrong about systemd, but his message is lost because the NIH-syndrome he suffers from is comparable (if not worse) to Lennart's. Mark is just jealous that Lennart has (somehow) convinced so many distributions to use his "[un]justified" (Mark is completely correct on that analysis), bloated, anti-UNIX-philosophy software. I don't begrudge Mark for scratching his itches, and I praise him for any good things he has accomplished, but I view the projects that Canonical chooses to support similarly to systemd, pulseaudio, and other useless (or destructive) junk: do not want.
This "Tea Party" isn't getting funding from the execs of the top closed-source megacorps, are they?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA good troll, good troll sir.
Has any editor even read this summary? I could have written better and more correct English when I was 8.
Loud extremist uttering nonsense which has seduced a small but influential minority of idiots, dragging everyone e;se in the wrong direction and making things a lot worse.
It's what Microsoft would have wanted.
Initially systemd didn't seem invasive. It was comparable to upstart that it could run initd scripts but preferred daemons to support it native. After that it developed a new dynamics e.g. as GNOME noticed that booting had same problems as session management (initializing, monitoring and shutting down processes) and systemd solved it elegantly (however we know that pottering is part of the GNOME universe). So I would say that you can say the systemd is invasive or hardly justified but not both.
The Tea Party suffers from the same problem that the FSF and the GNU project suffer from: a reasonable enough ideology, but a total lack of pragmatism.
Without a good amount of pragmatism to go along with their ideologies, they often come off to some as extremists or crazies.
Just look at GNU project versus the various BSDs, for example. They have a similar enough underlying ideology regarding software freedom, but take slightly different approaches to practicing this ideology. The BSD community is grounded in reality, and have created superb operating systems with very reasonable licensing. The GNU project, on the other hand, is not grounded in reality, and instead has managed to only produce rip-offs of traditional UNIX utilities (still without a home-grown kernel!), extremely restrictive licenses, and strife.
Regardless of whether we're talking about politics or open source software, those with pragmatism and ideology always come across as more reasonable and sensible than those with ideology but no pragmatism, who instead come off as zealots and freaks.
Debian.
Works stable out of the box, printer was usable without even configuring it (i wanted to add it, just to see that its already a registerted printer), everything works. Nice stable versions, with a new release "when it's ready", which does not need to "wait for .1 of it for a stable version".
SysV-init still runs nice on Debian, and they will continue to use Xorg/Wayland.
So, seems a good choice for DAUs, and for experts, too.
Shuttleworth: "'So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense â" from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"
Read: http://www.debian.org/intro/organization
Debian's Organizational Structure
Occasionally people need to contact someone about a particular aspect of Debian. The following is a list of different jobs and the e-mail addresses to use in order to contact the people responsible for those tasks.
Please be made aware that mails sent to some of these addresses are publicly archived, especially but not limited to those with the term "lists" in the mail domain part.
Leader
current Lucas Nussbaum
Technical Committee
chairman Bdale Garbee
member Russ Allbery
member Don Armstrong
member Andreas Barth
member Ian Jackson
member Steve Langasek
member Colin Watson
Secretary
current Kurt Roeckx
assistant Neil McGovern
Can we expect Nussbaum to say he is proud of derivatives, like Ubuntu?
So you respond to an ad hominem attack with a physical one? Well played, sir.
His was overreach, but sometimes it *is* appropriate.
We've had the "single solution" you're talking about for many years now. It's called the X Window System and it works very well.
There are free and open source implementations that can run, or potentially could run, on just about any modern OS.
It is well-supported and well-understood by the community at large.
It is extremely flexible and extensible.
It performs extremely well (contrary to the incorrect claims of some very foolish people who never used it just fine on 25 MHz Sun and DEC workstations decades ago).
It can be used over a network without having to resort to hacks like VNC.
Just because some people feel the need to ignore this reality and instead focus on creating a half-assed clone of OS X doesn't mean that the rest of us won't continue to use what we've been using since the 1980s, and what will continue to work very well for us.
Why are you so angry?
Anybody not agreeing with the Ruling Class is now "Tea Party", huh?
That would suggest that Ubuntu/Canonical is the ruling class in the Linux world, which is certainly not true.
I'm after a more general-purpose observation here.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
if you ever end up using gnu/linux enough to really see what all the fuss is about and you can remember your post you will be embarassed, as it is rather ignorant. the "drama bullshit" is sometimes a side effect of people caring about what they are working on. also, your beloved proprietary software (slaveware) will be shown to be the dead end it is, sooner than later.
Mr Shuttleworth, With respect.... I'm not sure making out of context and irrelevant analogies to philosophical/political organisations helps the cause for which you are battling. Don't fall for the main stream media tactic of trying to introduce irrelevant political, social and philosophical argument than is required to make a point. It'll reshape Ubuntu's image to the likeness of MSNBC or CNN. In other words, WTF are you talking about? It's a PC operating system for petes sake!
I prefer the GNU-IrishCoffeeParty.
GNU-TeaParty!
because shuttleworth took debian, made it easy to install(add pretty graphic installer with pretty graphics and claim it was easy to install) an claimed it as his own invention - added his own invention of pure shitunity - and then called him a teepiier for disagreeing with sending every local search to ubuntu so ubuntu can sell it.
oh and don't get me started on pulseaudio etc. shitworth has caused more time wasted on linux support than anyone and will continue to do so.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ubuntu is becoming increasingly irrelevant and Shuttleworth is turning into a troll?
Linux vs Hurd vs *BSD
Gnome vs KDE
MySQL vs PostgresSQL
Ruby vs Python ... and any rant that complains that some piece of software isn't really "free" because it doesn't use the ranters favorite license.
Anybody not agreeing with the Ruling Class is now "Tea Party", huh?
That would suggest that Ubuntu/Canonical is the ruling class in the Linux world, which is certainly not true.
In Mark Shutupworth's mind it is!
I kinda thinked like you until Microsoft went mad. After they messed up the Office and VisualStudio UIs they lost me. Final drop was the Windows 8, which simply removed things and not just hid them into dwells of ribbon. Nowadays if one wants stable UI what can be used with muscle memory, one has to transfer to open source sw, such as Open office and XFCE.
If I have to admin the thing I use SuSE/OpenSuSE. Why? Because since 2000 it's been the most reliable for me to get up and running out of the box with the least hassle.
Currently we're running Ubuntu on AWS for our test servers building a prototype with plans to run Debian on production. That's what the sysadmin for that project is most familiar with. As long as it's REHL/CentOS, SuSE/OpenSuSE, or Debian or it could be Solaris or FreeBSD as far as I care. So long as it runs PostgreSQL & Node.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I don't care what technologies Mark or the Ubuntu project chooses to use or promote. Their projects, their time, their rules. No one else has any obligation to adopt any of it, or tailor their work to fit with Ubuntu's goals or needs.
I've read the Wayland versus Mir threads, the GNOME3 versus Unity threads, the systemd versus upstart threads, the Ubuntu versus Debian threads. Canonical's rough MO appears to be:
1. Look a project over, participate a bit
2. Integrate it into Ubuntu, sometimes poorly
3. Decide that changes are needed to fix apparent issues, write some (questionable) patches or discuss needs with project
4. Throw a minor fit when project rejects proposed changes (Mark blog post time)
5. Run off and reimplement project in the Ubuntu ecosystem with all kinds of Ubuntu-specific code.
6. Preach about how the community isn't grateful enough and that people are attacking for no reason. (Time for a passive-aggressive Jono Bacon post)
7. Ignore the rest of the ecosystem as it evolves and standardizes on non-Canonical community-built projects (Wayland, systemd)
8. Act shocked that open source communities don't take them too seriously. Ignore valid technical criticism.
Ubuntu owes its success to the communities that actually built 90% of their stack. They show their gratitude by going their own way technologically and expecting everyone to follow their lead. Instead of making GNOME3 rock after riding the GNOME desktop to massive mindshare, they went off and did Unity. Instead of seeing the writing on the wall on the init system front and diving in to Systemd they are sticking to Upstart, because NIH and differentiation. Compromise with the people that they owe their success to? Contribute to the projects that made them the popular distro they are today? Consider the desires and goals of non-Ubuntu developers? Nah, we're Ubuntu, we're visionary thought leaders who secretly idolize Steve Jobs, we don't do that except when we need something.
Ubuntu is standing on the shoulders of giants, but they've given the giants non-standard shoulderpads so that they don't have to touch icky, icky giant shoulders.
They're is like a child who expects Mom and Dad to follow his newly-made-up rules. "All future dinners will be pizza, Mom and Dad! As the most popular kid in third grade, I, Markie Mark, declare this to be our Standard Evening Meal!" Later, on blog: "Tea party-esque parental units are ignoring my plans for NO REASON!"
... become completely insane? This has to be the most bizarre and weirdly disturbing thread I have ever seen.
after generations of regulation in the United States, but you're forgetting what we did with our slums and our pollution: we moved them overseas. China has 'cancer cities' and India has a 'thriving' business dismantling boats made out of Asbestos with zero safety gear.
Basically the reason you're against regulation is you've had the benefit of it so long you've forgotten why its there in the first place, and thanks to the third world you're enjoying the benefits of cheap electronics without the run off from their factories.
As for corps abusing gov't. You act as though there's anything you can do about it. There isn't. Let's say you dismantle the Government to prevent the corps from abusing it. All you've done is created a power vacuum the corps are happy to fill with their own institutions. You've traded something that you had a say in (The Government) for what's basically an Oligarchy with a few wealthy Heirs/Heiress on top. This is what happens in real life when governments fall. It's not all kittens and ice cream. It's a few lucky a$$es that monopolize everything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I agree with you in concept, but how does Windows 8 fit in with that world view?
You vote with your wallet and buy from a different vendor.
What will you do with open source, stop using it and hope someone cares?
But you've already sold your soul to the devil (Microsoft or Apple). The problem here is that some power brokers in the open source world are attempting to follow the same script that the closed source people are stuck with. Not so much init/upstart/systemd, as these don't directly affect end user apps (these are more of a system admin headache). But the Xorg/Mir/Wayland battle is a clear attempt to build frameworks that will capture developers of user apps.
From the point of view of the tablet/phone/gamer crowd, who cares? The markets are big enough so that developers will have to support multiple stacks. Or lose customers. But the high end apps (scientific, engineering, etc.) markets are smaller and more likely to pick one platform and expend their resources on actually providing value to the customer. Microsoft nearly lost this battle early on. But they stuck their nose (and handfulls of cash) into so many boardrooms that apps had to be built for Windows. And the high end s/w developers were distracted from providing customer value to suporting multiple shitty UIs. never again.
Have gnu, will travel.
Shuttleworth claims people that oppose his little project are doing so because of politics in open source, then in the same breath labels everyone who's against Mir "Open Source Tea Party" ?
Fucking hypocrite. You know, I used to love Ubuntu back in the day. At 10.04 I switched back to Debian because I was sick of feeling like I was being led forward on a dog leash. It hasn't changed. Mark hasn't changed, and he thinks he's some sort of open source leader, far beyond the little garden he's planted. There's a whole landscape of different vegitation, man, and you didn't create it all. Stop acting like you did.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
and I would rip it out of every distro if I could. Its completely unnecessary windows bastardization of the syslog. Binary log files are for the realm of the windows looser. What brilliant brainiac decided that system log files should be put into a binary database that will completely hose your system if it gets corrupt. (Lockups and system hangs). This was the dumbest, most ignorant, anti-unix, fudmuck that has ever feature creep-ed into the linux distros. It's the worst turd ever dropped into linux.
If mir was that important, Mark, why the hell it is full of shitty code! Same as upstart. You are so up in the foodchain, you don't see where your shit goes. To the users, damn it!
I agree with you in concept, but how does Windows 8 fit in with that world view?
For any competent programmer, Windows 8 takes all of a week to familiarize yourself with. (PROTIP: it helps if you RTFM instead of bitching about your cheese being moved.)
Ugly? Yeah, kind of. Showstopper? Nope.
Smells like Alinsky's dirty socks.
Beat me to it, and said it better than I would have.
For any competent programmer, Windows 8 takes all of a week to familiarize yourself with. (PROTIP: it helps if you RTFM instead of bitching about your cheese being moved.)
Hmm. So if we switched to Windows 8, that would cost the company about $4,000 for every programmer to learn how to use it (40 hours in a week at around $100 an hour chargeable rate).
Sounds like a great idea!
Both the Tea Party and the "Open Source Tea Party" are against totalitarian tendencies in government and the bloat they produce.
So, his analogy works. And he's on the wrong side of the debate too. Fortunately, unlike the federal government, with Ubuntu, people can vote with their feet and switch to a different distro.
I didn't see anyone claim that it is hard to learn. But that something is easy to learn does not mean that it is a good work environment.
I'm sure Microsoft Bob was also quite easy to learn.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sometimes you win; sometimes you're Ambassador Chris Stevens.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Now, I have no proof, but think of how you can sell out people if you run first an SSL CA and then a very popular Linux distro. Snooping budgets are in the hundreds of billions world-wide.
People, THINK.
Not since he sold out to the spammers at Marketo and turned Ubuntu into spyware.
Both of which are a pity, as it was a distribution that many people, including me, found quite useful for deployment in environments where we were trying to ease people away from their addictions to Microsoft and Apple products. But given our requirements (among which security and privacy are paramount) we simply couldn't justify using a distribution that was known to be compromised.
Yes, yes, I know we could turn off the malware features, but that's hardly the point: once a distribution maintainer is known to be inserting spyware, they can never be trusted again. Nothing at all stops them from silently including the same thing (or something similar) in a routine update. Shuttleworth and Canonical have provided an existence proof that they cannot and must not be trusted: they should be ostracized from the Linux and open-source world, as they are clearly unfit to be any part of it.
It's not about political reasons that some of us think MIR is a bad idea.
But i guess if you are rich, you by nature toss mud at people that disagree with you and hope they go away. Yet another reason to stay away from his product.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Except with closed-source products like Windows there isn't another vendor. For Linux there is.
who thought " A tea party ! why Mr. Shuttleworth, what a delightful idea, I shall pop round to your London HQ with Apache and gcc and Linux". Then I realised it was the Tea Party, which is a lot angrier and not so much fun with its Sarah Palin and its no steppy snakey banners.
Worst POS president ever and a country gone to hell with commie socialist leftists.
>Hmm. So if we switched to Windows 8, that would cost the company about $4,000 for every programmer to learn how to use it (40 hours in a week at around $100 an hour chargeable rate).
I assume you're planning to never upgrade your compilers, editors, OS or pretty much anything else your programmers use? Brilliant!
>Sounds like a great idea!
Sounds like you didn't think your clever argument through.
I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I guess I must have imagined those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads.
Oh wait, those were real.
To call restrictively licensed software (ex. GPL) "free" can only be described as Orwellian.
http://copyfree.org
--libman
He didn't buy it, and continued to use the previous well supported version.
Does this pattern of Public Release Blogs in any way sound reminiscent of another self avowed defender of the faith?
As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.
PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.
Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.
[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382
[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...
[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195
[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
I do not think it means what you think it means.
X11 isn't holding back linux in the GUI space. All that is happening is that it isn't new and it isn't Like Windows Does It (tm).
If multi-monitor support was hard, why is it that Linux with X11 had it long before Windows and, indeed, still today the Linux version of multi-monitor/card support is being deliberately crippled so that it doesn't have more capability than the Windows version.
You're repeating a meme and have no idea whether it's true or not, it just sounds like it.
Moreover, it probably lets you "explain" why you are refusing to use Linux, even if there's no explanation for it. Well not one you can admit to in the open.
Where you will get the last version of the GPL code that isn't restricted as your fiction requires to operate. Nobody will license it for that license and therefore the code will not be able to be used for the purposes of collating massive efforts in producing quality code, the entire reason for the GPL as it currently is for being successful (esp. compared to the BSD).
Your bogeyman is like those who go "Well that will make publishers kill the authors to get the copyrights!" when copyrights not being valid beyond death is floated. Again: if the author is murdered, the publisher seeting up the hit is not gaining the copyrights either. But taking on all the risks of sponsored murder.
So, no the GPL will not be taken where you claim here and even if it did, that future version would not be assigned any new code, so the code it will contain will be old and worthless whilst a GPL license fork will gain the same code AND ALL NEW CODE for it.
Galileo tried to class time 380 years ago and the Father of Modern Physics was jailed for it. I'm Galileo of today and everyone is Catholic decedent.
I'm no fan of Shuttleworth and his desperate attempt to clone OSX, but he's right. The open-source community is riddled with bullies and fanatics. The worst of them are those who always come marching to Richard Stallman's beat, all of which completely out of touch with reality like Stallman himself, but there's quite a few other types as well.
I agree with you in concept, but how does Windows 8 fit in with that world view?
You vote with your wallet and buy from a different vendor.
A different vendor? Like Canoninical?
For any competent programmer, Windows 8 takes all of a week to familiarize yourself with.
For any competant driver, a horrible new car takes all of a week (ok, more like five minutes) to familiarize yourself with. That doesn't make it a good car, however. There, now we've done the car analogy. Now how about the "programmer" comment? Were you talking about the APIs as opposed to the dismal UI?
As a rather assholish user already noted the thing Linux/Free software needs the most are standarization and small detail polishing. busted-shitter he called it. Unglamorous thankless tasks like translations and documentation.
The thing is Ubuntu was way ahead on the way of becomeing The standard Linux distro, it had an army of loyal contributors eager to translate, debug and package things for Ubuntu.
Then Mark decided to be an asshole, hired a team of Cuppertino rejects and started going his way against any input from Ubuntu's comunity. The famous "Ubuntu is not a democracy" line was uttered, and destroyed any pretence of community the project once had.
From the begining people accepted "Canonical as the commercial consultant on all matters Ubuntu", not "Ubuntu as product of Canonical". Shuttleworth became the CEO of a company of unpaid employers that had no say in its direction. And the comunity moved on elsewhere, mostly to Mint.
And now Shuttleworth acts shocked, shocked that nobody loves him. The man that decided he didn't have to listen to anybody complains that nobody listens to him.
But... the future refused to change.
the media has force-fed the "Tea Party Is The Whole Problem" narrative
They may not be 'the whole problem,' but they've proven they're sure as shit uninterested in finding a solution.
Have you ran windows in the last 10 years?
It's probably been that long since i've logged into slashdot, but supporting windows isn't that hard. In fact, many times its easier than supporting a linux distro.. Windows by and large has uniform logging, debugging, profiling and eventlogging services that spit out almost every minute detail and its uniform from server to workstation.
I agree with what others have shared before in FOSS, if something doesn't work, it's a bug for the developers to fix and not everyone is a developer. Sure, with open source you "can" fix the bug and with windows, you're at the mercy of someone else fixing it but the purpose of actually supporting and reporting bugs on windows is much more uniform, objective and clear cut. With linux and all its distros and all its quirks about who is cool enough to fix a bug, i find most of my reports sit for months if not years before they're mainlined and by then, Microsoft or its partners have long since fixed my bug that i just reported and went back on my marry way with.
please not, i have like a 200 to 1 linux to windows support / platform implementation where i work and play but just came to say windows isn't that hard and binary isn't hard
This comment serves to undermine Shuttleworth and therefore Ubuntu. So much for all inclusiveness...now your true colors are coming through.