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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.'"

27 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Of course... by stephenmac7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Of course... by Lord+Kano · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People with flexible ethics are often inconvenienced by those with principles that they don't compromise.

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    2. Re: Of course... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.

      Except that people don't agree on what the requirements are. Your requirements are not the same as mine. Even people that share requirements may not agree on what is the best solution. Your proposal will likely lead to this.

    3. Re:Of course... by Daemonik · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People with uncompromisable principles are often an inconvenience to everyone.

    4. Re:Of course... by Oligonicella · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not nearly as much as those who change with the breeze.

    5. Re:Of course... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Without people with uncompromisable principles it's the law of the jungle, and most of us will soon be reduced to serfdom again where might and money makes right.

      Shut up and stop trying to sound clever without actually being it. As the last few years clearly have shown, we desperately need more inconvenient people.

    6. Re: Of course... by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.

      A single solution? In Linux?? You're as crazy as whoever modded you "offtopic". Mods, read the FAQ. He isn't offtopic. I disagree with him, too, but that's not a reason to downmod someone.

      Nerdfest, choice is one of the best things about open source. You're wrong, Shuttleworth is wrong, and those opposed to him probably are, too.

      If you want a single solution, get an Apple or a Windows machine. Leave my choice alone, I LIKE choice.

    7. Re: Of course... by chmod+a+x+mojo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Except that people don't agree on what the requirements are. Your requirements are not the same as mine. Even people that share requirements may not agree on what is the best solution. Your proposal will likely lead to this [xkcd.com].

      Not really. If we standardized everything ( or at least as much as humanly possible) similar to LSB it would make support of specialized distros much easier. Then it would all come down to who uses what standard modular configurations and / or provides the best support.

      As an added bonus devs could not only write once but only have to worry about what particular package extension the program is packed in. If you know for a fact that lib X is going to be named exactly X and is in directory C you can just put out RPMs / DEBs that will install on any system using those types of packages.... as it is now, Ubuntu names things slightly differently than Debian / Mint / Other derivatives and you have to tweak the packages to install on each system. It would save a LOT of time if distro maintainers didn't have to customize the installs of thousands of different packages.

      --
      To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
    8. Re: Of course... by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No it isn't, not really. Right now FOSS is suffering from three MAJOR problems, which seriously hamper progress. If these problems were to be soled things would be a LOT farther along.

      1.- The "Taco Bell" problem. This is where limited resources are squandered on the illusion of choice and ego stroking and its a serious issue. How many distros on distrowatch fit this description? "Its (insert Ubuntu/Debian) with (insert KDE/Gnome or derivative) along with (insert LO/FF/Gimp/Chromium) and just enough changes to make things incompatible"? Probably a good 90% at least. If this ego stroking illusion of choice were removed and that effort instead put to use fixing issues with one of the big three? It would go a LONG way to fixing the second problem.

      2.- The "busted shitter" problem. You ask someone to paint you a picture or write you a song for free? You'll have plenty to choose from,many of which might even be good. Ask them to fix your stinking shitter for free? Better get used to pissing in the sink. All the "easy and fun work" in Linux is pretty much done,while all the nasty work, regression testing, documentation (how many place holder help files are in your average distro?) bug fixing, drier testing, application compatibility testing, all the nasty work that really adds polish to an OS and make it shine? Too much of it simply isn't getting done. For proof go look at any distro's forums after a major release and how many "update broke my driers" posts you see. More importantly look at how many of these are involving the "bog standard" hardware, the Realtek and Via sound, Realtek and SiS networking, the major wireless chips, things that should frankly NEVER be allowed to break because of the number of people using those chips...yet they are crapped on constantly. It doesn't matter how well your OS looks, the second it starts crapping on bog standard hardware it looks Mickey Mouse.

      3.- The "FOSSie faction" which is frankly what TFA is talking about. Right now there is a war going on in the FOSS camp, on the one hand you hae the pragmatists that want Linux to be able to compete and hold its head up high when compared to OSX and Windows, then you have the "FOSSies" which I use that term because like Moonies its ALL about the dogma, who frankly don't care if Linux is a broken POS as long as its "purity of essence" with regards to GPL remains 100% intact. Try to bring up the lack of a hardware ABI and you'll find out soon enough its not a technical issue, not a design issue, its a RELIGIOUS issue. You'll quickly hear things like "it would allow companies to put out non GPL drivers" (Newsflash, they already do and ya know what? They are often the ONLY drivers that work worth a shit, see Nvidia) and "spirit of the GPL" and other such nonsense. At the end of the day you can have a useless "GPL pure" distro, see GNUsence, or you can compromise and actually make something work.

      At the end of the day his calling them the TEA party is an apt description, as like the frankly ever more militant RMS there is NO talking to them, NO compromise, its their way or the highway PERIOD. This frankly is trashing Linux as Joe and Sally Average don't give a shit about your "GPL Spirit" all they know is their wireless was trashed and video wonked on the last update. Its sad really, to have so much good work, killer DEs, better than Windows now honestly, plenty of killer software, but the whole driver and subsystem situation really isn't any better than a decade ago and sadly its not the code, as Shuttleworth is finding out its the politics.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    9. Re: Of course... by RMingin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While I agree that "FOSSies" can be detrimental to some proposed feature additions, I disagree with your general sentiment that they are detrimental to all progress.

      If you take the opposite point, that anything should be added if it adds to the user experience, you'll end with a distro that is Windows. Fully binary, almost impossible to support or troubleshoot, but it has SOO MANY shiny things, also binary-only.

      The FOSSies may be extreme, but they built and maintained the sandbox up from nothing. While you think you have grand plans for that sandbox, you MUST respect those who set the original rules, or you will not be welcomed in their sandbox.

      For a real world example, I run Debian on my laptop. In it's purest post-install form, it is lacking quite a few things, a very few I consider essentials (needs binary blobs to make the Intel WLAN go), and some others that I very much like but could live without (Chrome with all the Google services instead of Chromium). I even installed a few things that would make the Debian purists cry (Steam, which is binary-only, and on my desktop, the binary-only Nvidia driver).

      What's the point? With a few minor tweaks, I can add any binary-only shinies that I'd like. Debian doesn't stop me. It just doesn't offer them out of the box, which seems to be your preference. The difference between us? I accept a little adjustment and tinkering to make everything Just So, and acknowledge the POV and desires of the DFSG or FOSS purists, even where I disagree or don't feel as strongly, while you mock and deride them and seem to expect the distros to package things YOUR WAY and support YOUR vision.

      If you don't understand why the GPL is important, you're still free to use and abuse Linux. Just don't expect anyone who DOES understand it's importance to care about your POV.

      --
      The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
    10. Re: Of course... by jasno · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not trying to be too snarky, but do you work on open source projects?

      Whenever I hear someone talk about what the FOSS community should or needs to do, I first ask myself that question. This 'FOSS community' is not some monolithic entity which acts in some coordinated way to make you or anyone else happy. The 'FOSS community' is a collection of folks ranging from developers donating their time and efforts to paid devs hired by companies that derive benefit from FOSS software. Sure, that s/w engineer with too much time on his hands could probably advance the 'FOSS cause' by shuttering his unique distro and instead running regression tests of recent packages against modern hardware, but what makes you think you or anyone else can place those moral obligations on him? Did you ever think that many folks in the 'FOSS community' are having fun and enjoying their hobby?

      What you call 'an illusion of choice' is *actually* choice. You can choose not to use those developers efforts and instead donate your time to a project you deem worthy.

      Have a problem with the "busted shitter" problem? Are you offering to spend your time and energy on a thankless project with little personal rewards? Why not? This is one of the problems for which distributions were created in the first place. Companies charge money for their software so they can pay people to do these thankless, mind-numbing tasks. Support one of them, or figure out a new way(bug bounties maybe?) to motivate people to work on the broken shitter, or, you know, stop putting moral obligations on the 'FOSS community'.

      I'm sorry - I know this is coming off as rude. You sound, to my ears, like an idealistic kid who points his fingers at the world but doesn't actually pitch in. Try to understand what the 'Foss community' is, and how it got to be what it is.

      The 'Foss community' is many things, but it is not slave labor. It is not here to provide you with no-cost software that performs as you wish.

      --

      http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
  2. Yikes by cookYourDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yikes by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 4, Informative

      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..
    2. Re:Yikes by maztuhblastah · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature.

      They're not.

      The "Tea Party", on the other hand, is -- as well they should be.

      It started as a populist movement with some people advocating the things that you stated. And that was a noble goal. But like many "grassroots" movements, it was co-opted by powerful (read: rich) influences, and has been steered instead towards their current position: a rabid, economically-ignorant (yet politically-involved) group for which the merits of an idea are trumped by whether or not their "team" endorsed it (Democrat: bad, "Republican": good.)

      I have no love for either mainstream US party, and initially I thought that the Tea Party idea might end up developing into a viable third party platform with values closer to those of classic liberal philosophy. (Note: "liberal" here is used in its original form, not as a synonym for Democrat). Sadly, they turned out nothing like that -- and the folks who currently wear the label are worthy of the scorn they get.

    3. Re:Yikes by Microlith · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, intelligence doesn't mean sane. The Tea Party's problem is that they're crazy.

    4. Re:Yikes by evilviper · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Limited government DISEMPOWERS corporations. It removes barriers to bring products into the market place which enables smaller cottage players into the game.

      That's utter nonsense that has been extensively and repeatedly disproven. There is no government involvement that causes "economies of scale", which naturally favors big, entrenched players. Government involvement PREVENTS collusion that would lock-out smaller players. And we have ample historical references for exactly what you're proposing, and it led to giant monopolies, robber barons and the great depression.

      None of the mega banks would have survived the financial crisis without the BIG GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS;

      Several big banks were well capitalized and did not need the government bail-out, UNTIL it came time to acquire some of the failing players, in which case the fed helped to cover some of the massive losses they inherited.

      Which industries were most abusive: rail, mining, oil would be likely candidates and hmm which industries did the Government have the biggest roles in....

      Standard Oil developed WITHOUT government involvement, and it was the Supreme Court ruling that broke it up. They're a good example of what a large company will do to squash all competitors, if there are no government regulations around to stop them. You should seriously read up on it, because this one company alone stands as stark proof that everything you're saying is patently false, and directly contrary to all reality.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  3. Aaron Seigo's retort by Curupira · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seigo has posted on Google+ an invitation to Shuttleworth to a public debate on Mir vs. Wayland issues.

  4. Re:I know I will get modded down but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:$$ for software by houstonbofh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  6. Re:Love the smell of authoritAyrianism in the morn by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. The reason people attack you, Mr Shuttleworth by dkleinsc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  8. Re:We have. It's called the X Window System. by Martin+Blank · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  9. Re:Even a Tea Party can be right occsionally by AlXtreme · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    Although I enjoy slinging mud, copyright assignments and contribution agreements are commonplace when contributing to larger free/open source projects.

    Transferring copyright for example to GNU is mandatory when contributing, gives the project the flexibility to relicense in case an upgrade is in order (like GPLv2->GPLv3) and avoids having to hunt down all individual contributors in case a change in license is required. Such agreements are in place with Apache and Mozilla too.

    All things considered, GNU would indeed be more trustworthy in my book than Canonical (if only because GNU doesn't have a commercial motive) but regardless when an "entity" does the bulk of the work I think it's fair to allow them the flexibility to relicense when contributing.

    It is a different situation when the owning "entity" drops the ball and the community does the bulk of the work, but then the option to fork is always open. LibreOffice serves as a nice reminder that being able to relicense doesn't mean much if the community decides to fork and move on.

    --
    This sig is intentionally left blank
  10. Re:Wait, what? by visualight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:B-O-O H-O-O. by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Actually, systemd's kind of socket activaction has one use: if you run a large server bank of small customers' virtual machines whose daemons stay off a vast majority of the time. For any other use, it's useless or even actively harmful: you won't know the daemon fails to run until you actually need it.

    Another part of systemd is that it cripples cgroups for any other users, forcing them to beg systemd for any action. Again, this matches Red Hat's server farm's needs, but not those of most of us.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  12. Re:We have. It's called the X Window System. by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    remote using X requires a bit of thought to setup

    Adding -X to the ssh command is really freaking hard.

  13. Re:B-O-O H-O-O. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.