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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."
Interesting it took him this long to figure out that its common human nature to find a scapegoat and kick it endlessly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Never understood the Ubuntu hate,
particularly for Mir.
Just seemed to be a lot of idiots jumping on the bandwagon.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
The best reason anyone could come up with was (para-phrasing) "it'll mean closed-source graphics drivers will have to support 2 display servers, and they may not want to do that"
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.
Literate people hate your post.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
As a moderate conservative, I hate the stupidity that has become the Republican Party.
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.
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
What seems to not be able to enter his thick.. opinions, is that Ubuntu diverged sufficiently from what people loved.
The UI seems to be promoted by whoever couldn't get a job with apple.
The controversial systemD was pushed in although Ubuntu isn't red hat nor uses it the same way.
Mir was the 'yeah devs want to refactor to Wayland, but WE can do it better".
On a on a on.
In retrospect, I have no clue how Mr shuttleworth acquired his wealth (nor can be arsed to Google it), but with Ubuntu, some things from that character are reflected in the failed direction: delusion, inability to scope, inability to judge the market userbase, insensitive to the development culture.
Etc etc.
Of course he isn't seeing this as a failure on his end, but instead : entire *communities* are wrong.
Typical psychopath.
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.
while you were fretting over muh ideology, the joos took over this country. just now they have brought us very close to ww3
fuck you cuck
This is why I'm not a Republican anymore.
If I were in charge of a company that made FREE software I'd tell the trolls to go fuck themselves. Fucking losers don't have anything better to do.
I don't respond to AC's.
Gnome (2) was mainstream. Unity was a totally confusing resource hog peace of shit. In 1998 I installed SuSE with KDE at my friends, still would not give anyone Unity crap in 2017. If Ubuntu would just focus on getting rock solid Linux to the people. But no, they need to tinker with everything and f*ck it up in non standard ways. That is not the way to success, and how you make friends, ...
My 2 € cents, ...
"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."
Mr. Shuttleworth has exactly identified why it will NEVER be the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
Summarizing today's news story, wealthy and somewhat benevolent Mark Shuttlesworth doesn't appreciate some of the criticism his projects have received, notwithstanding his mixed generosity. I say mixed because part of the plan was to make money, too (though I think he's donated way more money than he's earned on this Ubuntu thing). His real unhappiness is probably that he feels his generosity is insufficiently appreciated.
I actually agree with Mr Shuttlesworth that much of the criticism was unjustified, but I have two responses: (1) Some of the criticism was merited and (2) What else could they contribute?
Response (1) is about the biggest problem with the big donor model of charity (even if Ubuntu has some non-charitable aspects). Sometimes the big donor makes a mistake. In general the big donors don't just throw in the big money and go away. You can say it's a matter of trust or accountability or whatever, but they stay involved. In the specific case of Ubuntu, the development priorities have sometimes gone a bit astray. Obviously the shell kerfuffles are examples, but the low priority on Japanese language support has actually been the main recommendation barrier in my case. I'd like to encourage people to adopt Ubuntu, but (after using the OS for many years (probably since Dapper Drake in 2006)) I still can't.
Response (2) is really about frustration. At least I don't see what other alternative most of the potential users of Ubuntu have. Some of the top programmers presumably have Mr Shuttlesworth's ear and can influence things, but most of us are on the outside. Way on the outside. I actually think that many of the problems with Ubuntu are ultimately due to programmer-driven decisions. Good programmers want to do fancy things. They want to push the envelope and develop fancy features for fancy hardware. Or maybe it's just my problem that I have other things to do with my time or that I'm too cheap to buy new computers fast enough?
I need to disclaim that I feel some frustration and disappointment with Ubuntu, too. I had hopes that it would become a dominant desktop OS, but it never did. It's not like there weren't major opportunities. For example that Vista fiasco. It's just that Ubuntu never filled any of the big vacuums. However, I mostly didn't care that much, so I never even investigated the details. I just observed the results.
(By the way, I do think there is at least one possible solution. Are you brave enough to ask me about the Charity Share Brokerage for small donors? Hint: Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren't there yet, but maybe that idea could be fixed...)
Anyway, things sometimes turn out for the better, at least when the term is long enough. Turns out the desktop OS doesn't matter that much anymore. Maybe Linux won out after all, but via the backdoor leading to Android smartphones? Still a bit of the big donor problem, but at least the google seems more competent than evil. For now. I recommend Dogfight on the smartphone war, but maybe you have a good book to recommend? (Yeah, I'm sure there are some interesting blogs and webpages, too, but mostly I find them as half-baked as this selfsame noddie.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But you're still apparently clueless if you left the Republican Party over anti-Semitism.
Re-read my original comment. I wrote "stupidity" of the Republican Party. Any party that takes pride in and makes ignorance a virtue is a party not worth voting for.
I'm skeptical, but if true I'm sure the Republicans don't miss a Democratic partisan shithead like you.
Without moderate conservatives in the Congress, the Republicans are going to have a hard time rubbing two nickels together (see healthcare bill).
Ignoring the last 16 years of Schumer and Reid and claiming the Democrats are good guys is proof positive you are a fucking moron.
That's your opinion, not mine.
The GPL also allows criticism, so if you don't like criticism "pipe down and enjoy your slice of GPL freedom"
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.
While you may be correct with those examples, Shuttleworth just comes of as bitter that his pet NIH project failed.
After all, Mir is not, and never was, mainstream.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Why does Canonical hate the main stream, and tend to roll their own instead? Wayland, Unity, Upstart ...
Now I agree with him that a lot of people in OSS do not act like professionals and they make petty arguments that a most always boil down to an emotional attachment to the code that one has written. That really annoys me. However, the lack of support for Mir to me comes down to the fact that it is redundant with Wayland and isn't as big of a technical step forward as Wayland. There is a real cost to needing to implement 3 different display drivers for each GPU instead of 1 or 2 (X11, Wayland, Mir.) So it is entirely understandable to me that there would be some pushback. Once Intel decided to only provide drivers for X11 and Wayland that really should have been the wakeup call to just switch to Wayland and be done with it instead of trying to reinvent absolutely everything.
GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions. There is only one true way, and everyone has a different version of that way. That's why open source art tools are never going to be good enough until they've ripped off Paint shop Pro, Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, MAYA, Lightwave, Caligari Truespace (my preferred tool), Rhino 3D etc etc. It's never going to be good enough to have one or some of those tools. It has to be all of them.
So he hates canonical for trying to develop their own desktop environment? In other words trying to move away from mainstream kde/gnome/....