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Mark Shuttleworth Complains About the 'Open Source Tea Party'

Posted by Soulskill on from the we-are-the-knights-who-say...-NIH! dept.

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.'"

8 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 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.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    5. 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. 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.

  3. 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.