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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.'"
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.
Then you have been out of the loop for about half a decade. Fedora and Suse are literally just as user friendly as Ubuntu is.
There is literally no configuration necessary through the device auto detection, partitioning, they have auto updates as well and fantastic package managers.
They are also much much more closely related to the enterprise distributions making them a better fit for anyone seeking to move in to administration from a professional standpoint.
Tea Party "values" were the primary cause of a 2-week federal government shutdown. A complete shutdown. That wasted $26 billion. All of those salaried federal employees are still going to be paid for all that sitting around we told them to do. That is not fiscal responsibility, but the Tea Party was right there in the very middle of it. There is no contrived caricature here, the Tea Party is a fucking joke.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
lol.. I guess news and factual information doesn't get in your way at all. The government wasn't all shut down, less then 25% of it was because of the budget battle. The rest remained open because of a law passed after the previous shutdown that declared certain government services and departments essential to the security and safety of the country and that they would remain open for a period of time if congress fails to provide funding for them.
Also, of that 26 billion spent, a sizable portion was spent on going the extra steps of securing open air monuments that have remained open in previous shutdowns and forcing private businesses near parks to close down for the duration. Or in other words, part of the 26 billion was specifically induced in order to make the people pay for the actions in congress.
Now what is a fucking joke is when an aging war vet is locked out of the war memorials and faces arrest for trying to see what was erected in their honor while illegal immigrants are welcomed to the same area to protest the fact they haven't been granted citizenship for not following the rules to enter the country.
And your version of fiscal responsibility issues ignores the fact that the shut down was an attempt to save loads more then 26 billion. The only reason the $26 billion was wasted is because they failed to accomplish their goals. Had they been successful, the 26 billion would have been less then the amount saved.
Jesus Christ, you hit all the talking points. Bravo sir.
It got marked troll because it's pure tea bagger fiction. More and more people are waking up and seeing right through all these bullshit prepackaged talking points.
The irony is that by framing this in Tea Party terms, he's actually alienating a significant proportion of dedicated followers. Like it or not, but libertarians tend to favor F/OSS, and, conversely, a lot of F/OSS developers and users are libertarians. Needless to say, their perspective on Tea Party is considerably different from what Mark seems to espouse, and they will take offense at this comparison. All in all, a very bad PR move.