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."

Comments

Umm No

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not why they hated Mir. Canonical had committed to helping flesh out Wayland, and then suddenly abandoned that effort and developed Mir instead, despite Wayland being much further ahead and doing everything Mir wanted to do, better. Wayland is essentially finished and ready for the masses now, but it could have been at this point *years* ago if Canonical hadn't backpedaled and switch to a worthless piece of trash instead. Also calling it open source when they surround it with licence agreements is rather farcical. They wanted to monetize it hard if Ubuntu phone kicked off, this abandoning of it only happened because they realized they had completely failed that effort.

Amazingly Still Doesn't Get It

[Luthair]

I don't think he recognizes the issue people had - when Canonical became successful they began acting like they were the 800-lb gorilla in the room and that they could do whatever they wanted and everyone else would fall into line. Classic not invented here syndrome, then expecting others to write & maintain support for Canonical's custom software.

Sending user searches to Amazon doesn't help either - the Linux community is much more privacy minded then the general community using public.

Re: Never understood the Ubuntu hate...

[iCEBaLM]

It's a double edged sword. Windows is so popular because there is only one current version of Windows and everyone knows it and all Windows applications work on it. If you want to develop for Windows there's no guesswork, and the design decisions you make aren't going to split your potential userbase.

If you want to run a Linux application you have to make sure it'll work on your distro, then hope your distro has a package for it or else shit gets fucked up, then make sure it works with your desktop environment, etc. As a developer you have to make design decisions that will split your userbase. Do you support systemd? What distributions do you target? Do you use GTK? QT? Plasma? GNOME? And which version? All of these will split your potential userbase, and now Canonical wants to add Mir to the mix?

This is why Linux on the Desktop will never reach critical mass. It's about the car interior and we're all busy reinventing hundreds of sets of wheels.

Re:Interesting

[rtb61]

How about extended frustration can really fuck up people's sense of humour. Computer geeks use computers a lot, so frustrations with regard to usability or changing stuff and repeated day after day, all day long. For computer geeks that means months of no longer just focusing on what you are doing with computers but focusing on how you are doing it, why it isn't working, what you have to change, constantly undoing errors, disruption of thought processes, constant grinding frustration and aggravation. Now that is when you decide to make the choice to switch, Having used computer for decades I have done it many, many times with many applications and it never ever gets less annoying but I can tell you, when it is forced upon, wow, that frustration and anger causes you to make even more mistakes, more errors, more disruptions and really does piss you off.

No keep in mind, this is not in isolation but across hardware, applications, operating systems, every corporation seemingly fucking with you. Seriously, why the fuck do you think they would ever be happy with that, just why the fuck do you think that is acceptable. When you make the change it is annoying but not that bad, your choice, when you force it on others, kaboom and not just once but many, many times.

I am surprised some of them don't get violent, so many unsympathetic people in corporations floating around who just ignore the impact of forced changes upon people who do not want them, repeated changes, again and again and again and again and again (now if I wrote that down a thousands times and you were forced to read it every single time and not just once but say a hundred times, how would you feel?).