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Canonical's Troubles With the Free Software Community
puddingebola (2036796) writes "Bruce Byfield looks back at the soured relationships between Canonical and the free software community. Partly analysis, partly a review of past conflicts, the writer touches on Mir and Wayland, and what he sees as Canonical's attempts to take over projects. From the article, 'However, despite these other concerns, probably the most important single reason for the reservations about Ubuntu is its frequent attempts to assume the leadership of free software — a position that no one has ever filled, and that no one particularly wants to see filled. In its first few years, Ubuntu's influence was mostly by example. However, by 2008, Shuttleworth was promoting the idea that major projects should coordinate their release schedules. That idea was received without enthusiasm. However, it is worth noting that some of those who opposed it, like Aaron Seigo, have re-emerged as critics of Mir — another indication that personal differences are as important as the issues under discussion.'"
'... probably the most important single reason for the reservations about Ubuntu is its frequent attempts to assume the leadership of free software ... [S]ome of those who opposed it, like Aaron Seigo, have re-emerged as critics of Mir â" another indication that personal differences are as important as the issues under discussion.'
Seeing the same critics reappear does not necessarily mean it is a personal difference. It really only indicates that the underlying disagreement remains. Mark Shuttleworth believes in centralization of authority, Open Source is implicitly about decentralization of authority. That is a difference with Mark Shuttleworth's world view; as long as he holds it, and particularly when he tries to be the central authority, he will not fit in the Open Source world. That is not personal in the sense of holding a grudge, but it won't change unless Mark genuinely embraces the decentralized nature of this method of software development.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
... I gave a chance to Unity about 3 months ago, with 12.04 LTS. I liked the desktop disposition (Mac global menu with side launcher), and the general integrated look and feel. Use of apt-get is really nice (as in Debian), and with use of PPAs I can keep almost all my software update to date in a global way. Almost all configurations are simple, which helps new users. Driver support is good (I just had to setup the hybrid graphical cards with Bumblebee). In the other side, I thought the fonts were a bit big, and I don't like the dark theme. How to text font sizes? Install third part software. How to install new themes? Install other third part software (themes is one of the most cool features of Linux DEs!). Can I change the duration of notification? Re-position launcher? No, no, only using more third part softwares. But ok, in my mind, all the problems can be fixed in the future. Then I started to look into launchpad to see the bugs opened, and the future plans. Almost all important issues related to Unity are still open, with almost no comments from Canonical (usually in KDE we have an official dsposition after few hours). Most of Canonical efforts then are focused in "convergence", which my question is "who asked for?". As the future Ubuntu phones will not use the same desktop applications, why I need a new Linux based device? I'd love if Canonical works in better integration with Android: the MTP support is a joke (stop to work after few minutes), and would be nice to attend my mobile calls with my desktop headset, read my SMS on systray, etc. I think that offer a better support for the most popular linux based mobile will be a nice flag. And then, I tested the new Ubuntu version. And I saw that I have Amazon over all the places: in desktop search, in the launcher, all activated by default. Why this? In these days of all the concerns about NSA and privacy, why not sell the "you're using an open source product with all the privacy concerns" flag? If they want financial support, why not allow users to donate, like on KDE? (I'm a KDE e.V. member). I remember too, the old Mandrake club, where users have access few days earlier than "normal" users. In my minds, it's a shame that the most talked Linux distribution has enabled, by default, a shareware scheme. And the worst: the dash search do not works well. I have avidemux installed, and if I type "demu", I got nothing. If I want to run the calculator, and I type "calc", I'll get "OpenOffice Calc" as first result. So, I mean, I can understand when Canonical choose the Unity way. Gnome team is out of this planet, removing all basic features from applications, and forcing a tablet/mobile interface too. But I cannot understand why force the shareware behavior, or other duplicate efforts, like Mir, Ubuntu mobile, etc.
Canonical have been making a major loss for years and yet still put more and more money into Ubuntu and open source software development. You may still want to see them as greedy, but is it greedy to not want to make losses year on year?
Am I the only one who LIKES Unity? Ubuntu is the distro that got me to switch from Win 7 to Linux (still have to keep Win 7 around for one or two things though). I really don't understand all the hate other than the stupid Amazon search lens thing (which I disabled). My best guess is that it might be because I'm a new convert to Linux rather than a long time user.
The Linux kernel was nothing special. Seriously. There were many such hobby projects at the time, and it wasn't a particularly great one.
What? That's news to me. I was on comp.os.minix when Linus announced it, and downloaded version 0.11 (but I don't think I ran it until 0.12).
The only other UNIX-like OS at the time IMHO was Minix, but due to Tannenbaums resistance to "complicating" Minix into something that used the full capabilities of the 386 (i.e. the MMU etc.) Linux took off like a rocket. (There was even a patch set adding i386 capabilities to Minux, but it had to be distributed as a patch set, Tannenbaum wouldn't let it be integrated into Minix proper.
So, sure, 0.10, 0.11 and 0.12 weren't even complete but it only took on the order of weeks before Minix was left in the dust feature wise, and the rest as they say, is history. Remember that while 0.10 etc. may have lacked an init, it ran almost everything else, in particular they could self host gcc, i.e. they could compile gcc, which was no mean feat. (And something that Minix couldn't, though my memory is vague on that point).
So what were these other systems that were so much more sophisticated? You aren't thinking about the various i386 BSD-variants that sought to bring BSD to the masses? They weren't really "hobby projects", the legal ramifications weren't at all clear, so their development was severely hampered, and the people had this stick up their collective asses about what hardware was good enough to be worthy of support. Which lead to the consequence that you couldn't actually run your BSD-of-the-month on hardware you had. Linux was above all a much more pragmatic affair. If the hardware was in widespread use, it usually got support quite quickly, no matter how much of an ugly cluge it was deemed to be. But of course some of them were fairly feature complete, since they were original UNIX, source code and all. (And also slower on i386, but that's another story.)
Stefan Axelsson