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

Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate...

[Ynot_82]

I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd

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....

Re:And also...

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Amazingly Still Doesn't Get It

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:O RLY?

[SvnLyrBrto]

> 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.)