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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."
Java Model Railroad software is both free and part of my life. Could not have a much fun in my hobby if it was not there. And a dedicated group is keeping it alive with regular updates. Thanks to all who help keep open source viable for the rest of us. Thomas DeSoto, TX
This is exactly the kind of idiotic comment I'm talking about.
So there's just as much hate for Fedora is there? Both OS's use Gnome 3 & Systemd....
I don't see it that way. Look at the hits GIMP takes. Look at the hits Python and Perl take. I'm not talking about technical objections; I'm talking about just general hits.
There is some basis for some of the technical hits - for instance, Perl legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on its typical readability, and Python legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on whitespace. But both take hits as if using them would be the freaking end of the world, and it tends to be way over the top. GIMP is an awesome bit of software. The anti-GIMP diatribes are amazing to read. Etc.
I really do think that people just like to find something they think they have an adequate excuse to kick, and then spend lots and lots of time kicking. It's some kind of perverse instance of self-validation or something.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
My pet hate is for amy application that needlessly seems to have to have a connection to the Internet or set up its own servers and connect to other websites.
Does a programming IDE really *have to* keep all manuals online and require to be connected to the vendors server to send back telemetry?
Does a web browser really need to have a SSDP server and send out multicasts to 239.255.255.250. Who does it hope to connect to? Does a web browser really need to pre-connect to Facebook, Amazon and Google?
... mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
More or less anything can be described this way. Sometimes it's more fair, sometimes less.
Comments like yours are well-described by Mark Shuttleworth. You show much hostility to alternate options or choices. WTF business is it of yours whether others choose differently than you?
For example, yeah, Windows sucks. It's also an easy solution to problems. Easy solutions to problems mean fewer problems, which doesn't suck. So people use Windows and get on with their lives where they focus on something that's more important to them than Windows sucking. What's wrong with that? Is it any of your business?
The one that always make me laugh is the systemd hate. I see people here who claim to administer Linux machines explaining how awful it is. But every person, and I literally mean 100%, that I know in real life that I know for fact administer Linux systems, all don't have issues with systemd.
Which one do you mean?
* Pulse Audio? * Systemd? * Unity/Gnome 3/KDE 4? * Windows 8/10?
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
I think this is exactly the kind of comment that Shuttleworth was talking about.
Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement? If it's that easy to enumerate the things they did wrong, why isn't it easy for you to just do it the right way without bugs? (Please don't take this personally, I'm using the universal 'you' for all people reading this)
PulseAudio is not perfect, but it is improving, and is itself a big improvement on older sounds systems that often didn't work at all for many setups. Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement on the old script init that couldn't handle modern features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode. The desktops are not perfect but are trying different design philosophies out, because honestly, user design is not a 100% solved known problem, but the latest GNOME 3 and KDE/Plasma 5 releases are very nice and polished (your comment including KDE4 suggests you haven't tried KDE in a while; I encourage you to do so). Were those things buggy at first? Sure. But I suspect many distros rushed (possibly a bit too fast) to switch to them precisely because the older systems were not working, and they were ready to get them fixed. Even Windows 8/10 have parts that I dislike (mostly the telemetry, and 8's inconsistent mix of metro with the old GUI) but they deserve kudos for massively improving their default security posture and modularizing the system (I have way less crashes than XP/7!).
The answer is that modern software engineering is a VERY hard problem. And like many things in computer science, there are lots of trade-offs -- you often must sacrifice one thing to win at another. Many of the issues people complain about are design decisions that are not necessarily the result of bad programming practice, but rather the trade-off, and the developers are showing they might have a different priority than you. And that's ok. No one has to agree 100% of the time on anything. But that said, you can respect someone's work and decisions while still holding your own differing opinion, and that often gets lost in the arguments. Shuttleworth had a not-invented-here problem on some issues, but the community's response was sometimes just as bad. Both sides had merit to their arguments, and both sides have made mistakes. It happens. Let's not demonize anyone for trying to see their vision through.
I'm in no way condoning laziness of course -- I expect all projects and developers to quickly address security issues and release but and security patches promptly, for example. The privacy issues that Ubuntu and especially Windows brought up are worth a very critical eye. But let's remember that software is hard for anyone, no matter how much experience you have, and stop tearing each other down. In fact, in true open source spirit, contribute bug fixes ... or start your own fork!
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.
This. There are tons of distros out there, and I don't have problem with people using any of them. What I have problem with is Canonical's attempts to force everyone to Ubuntu and their way of doing things by doing their own versions of already established projects. This way they can lock people in.
Its the same kind of crap that Microsoft and Apple (now with Metal) pull. The only difference is that Mark *thinks* that Canonical is an 800-lb gorilla and when people see through his BS, he throws a tantrum and blames it on the community.
Don't believe me? Read about how Canonical screws the community here:
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome
Also, read about the crap that Canonical/Mark tried to pull:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canonical-abused-trademark-law-to-target-a-site-critical-of-ubuntu-privacy/
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/fixubuntu/
The problem is that Ubuntu/Canonical have fanboys just like Apple. These fanboys will keep preaching about it, no mater how badly they keep getting screwed. Its puzzling really.
In reality, if Cannonical/Ubuntu died off, everyone would be better off.
> Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement
> on the old script init that couldn't handle modern
> features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode.
Yes, because I'm going to hot plug anything besides a keyboard & monitor on a crash cart into a (hardware) Linux box, or put an EC2 instance into sleep mode.
Half the problem with people "hating the mainstream" is that half-baked tools that don't fit the use case are being forced on us. Systemd may ultimately be perfectly cromulent on a consumer desktop focused Linux like Ubuntu or Mint... though I would still argue that it was rolled out there well before it was ready for prime time. But the majority of Linux systems out there are not consumer desktops, are they? And it has no goddamned business at all in a datacenter distro like RHEL, CentOS, or (upstream) Debian. It breaks modularity, tries to do too many things in one service, needs to be updated & rebooted too often, tells us to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in too many places, and is difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong, not least because it also forces journald and its binary logs onto us.
I'm not religiously attached to SysV init scripts by any means. But systemd was not the right replacement for them. It wasn't ready for production when it was launched. And the only reason it's even tolerable now is because the "new way" of doing things is to not try to fix a system that's gone wobbly; but to just unceremoniously kill the instance and launch a replacement. (And even there... you'll note that Amazon has not drank the systemd Kool-aid. Their own (Red Hat based) distro is still happily using init and syslog.)
Imagine all the people...
The ones that really irritate are the downloader installer stubs. I run a whitelisted firewall and it's a royal pain to get those working without disabling the firewall. There's absolutely no need for this. Just give me the full install!