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Canonical Founder Criticizes Free Software Developers Who 'Hate On Whatever's Mainstream' (google.com)
Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth said Saturday that "I came to be disgusted with the hate" on Canonical's display server Mir, saying it "changed my opinion of the free software community." After announcing his company was abandoning Unity for GNOME, Shuttleworth posted a gracious thank-you note to the Unity community Friday on Google Plus. But on Saturday, he added a sharper comment:
"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.
What? Err, FYI, Red Hat was very much behind GNOME 3 and systemd (and PulseAudio and Avahi). Lennart Poettering works for Red Hat.
Ubuntu and all the others are just falling in line behind the Red Hat mafia.
> systemd
They deserved all of the hate for forcing that on us. I maintain about 60 developer workstations, and it's an absolute pain troubleshooting with systemd since it so often swallows log messages. Problems that should take seconds to fix can take hours because often things just aren't logged. Often we have to resort to using strace and read through thousands or millions of lines of crap to find the error message.
The GPL also allows criticism, so if you don't like criticism "pipe down and enjoy your slice of GPL freedom"
Upstart and traditional SysVinit pretty much ignored output; if your script didn't send things to syslog or custom logs, then it went nowhere. Pretty much the first thing I noticed about systemd was how much less-frequently I had to modify init scripts to figure out what was wrong.
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