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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
"That's the best way to deal with stupidity."
Erm, no, it is not and your very post is an excellent example of why. You come across as an adolescent ranting about people who don't do things their way.
Dehumanization is done by those who don't think their idea can stand on its own. Often they are correct.
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.
Maybe. But KDE 4.0 was total crap, too. But it had a nice new foundation, and big ideas. with 4.2 they were usable again, with 4.4 they started taking real adavantage of their new frameworks.
akonadi and nepomuk are still both PITA despite having great concepts, but the rest works like a charm. So, doing something new is not the problem. Doing something wrong, is the problem.
Its a german personal pronoun.
I agree that we have an existing solution, but to claim that there's no reason to replace it is to claim that no one can come up with something better. I agree that it's well-supported, that it can perform well, and that VNC is a hack. But I'm not sure that it's true that it's well-understood, especially given that people are far more likely to handle remote desktops with VNC than with X, even in environments where people largely use Linux instead of Windows. That prevalence of VNC over X suggests to me a serious gap in understanding of the community at large.
This leads me to think that while X is still a good solution, it may not be the best solution, and that's why I'm watching Wayland with curiosity.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
systemd is a lot better than shell clusterfuck that there was before. People really should stop complaining about dependencies. It suggests that you reuse other people's work, not re-inventing wheels. It doesn't matter whether it uses DBus or internal re-invented IPC mechanism as far as system stability is concerned. You just have no idea what you're talking about.
that's because it is dead simple for an idiot to use VNC.
remote using X requires a bit of thought to setup, and a continuous running stream in the back of your mind saying this window is running on "X" computer. It gets more complicated if you start running multiple windows on multiple machines.
I love network windowing with X. but I see so many people who struggle with VNC and RDP it is laughable. They don't quite understand that they are not running applications on their local machine even though it is displaying in front of them but on another one.
That being said since I do understand it I find X networking really really useful. indeed X should be standard windowing system for things like ships. Where you need to remotely control a bunch of different computers/machines from a single location.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Wow. What we've had (and loved) for decades is a clusterfuck. How enlightening. Don't complain about dependencies -why the hell would you want to choose your own system logger or cron daemon. Idiocy!
Also, no one reinvent anything ever okay? Unless your name is Lennart and you want to replace all that modularity and flexibility with one big thing.
Hey, lets have a registry while we're at it okay? /sarcasm
Language like yours typifies pretty much every pro systemd statement you can find.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I love Lennart Poettering's response:
https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/RCfN9NwZrLN
NIH is only a problem if you "invent" something inferior to what's already there. And really, NIH is an intellectual weak argument that someone uses when they lack the stones to make an argument based on metrics that are actually meaningful. Lennart is actually very clear on the technical reasons why he chose to create systemd even if Mark wants to remain ignorant of them.
Also, we'll know that Mark as actually done his homework when he learns the proper capitalization of systemd. Come on Mark, at least read the fucking cover page and FAQ.
I want this account deleted.
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/
Lennart is actually very clear on the technical reasons why he chose to create systemd even if Mark wants to remain ignorant of them.
Those are not "technical" reasons, those are personal.
Basicly, To surmise for the non-developers, Lennart says that he doesn't like programming events. That's pretty much all he says against the Upstart.
P.S. OK, I'm omitting the stupid part where he complains that "but upstart starts everything!", apparently displaying lack of knowledge what the SysV init scripts do (for which Upstart is the replacement).
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
remote using X requires a bit of thought to setup
Adding -X to the ssh command is really freaking hard.
I've been in IT for coming about 18 years, working with end-users to one degree or another the entire time, and I've never met anyone who didn't understand that the apps they used under Citrix, RDP, or VNC were running remotely and just being drawn locally. They may have been frustrated that they couldn't access local resources (this can be good or bad), but few if any of them thought the programs were installed locally.
It should be dead simple for most people to use a remote desktop capability without much thought on how to set it up because most people are not interested in anything other than the apps appearing on their screen. Microsoft has refined this well enough that it's used in enterprise environments large and small with enough auto-configuration that it will adapt to the local capabilities but can be overridden by a power user if so desired. Anyone who wants to see Microsoft's dominance at least challenged should accept that this is the way it needs to be.
I understand that X does its job well. But there are those who believe that the system in place does not do it well enough. Wayland's devs are in that group and are trying to address it. What concerns me is the group of people who refuse to accept that it should be done any other way and actively try to shoot down alternatives, even before they've had any real chance to use it. That contradicts the foundation of the open source community.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.