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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 liked ubuntu. I didn't like unity, but only because it was terrible as opposed to any specific political reason.
Mir on the other hand... Mir is not mainstream, it's not even out yet, so you can't lump the hate for Mir in with the hate for Windows. It's different.
The big problem is fragmentation and duplication of work. We all pretty much want the same thing, a free and open desktop operating system we can use day to day. We have this ancient X windowing system that should have been replaced a decade ago that has been standard on pretty much every Linux desktop ever, and instead of everyone working on a solution together, we have, again, different camps creating different solutions.
The problem is this task is so monumental it's taking years to develop, and on top of that it's fragmenting the developer base which not only causes it to take even longer, but support for any of the solutions to be slower.
Why isn't linux on the desktop? Fragmentation. Mir only adds to that problem.
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.
"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".
RH has had its detractors for years, way back to the 90s, so no, it's not just Canonical/Unbuntu or Gnome 3 and systemd. The Gnome project itself is also no stranger to criticism. Distro choice has always been a divisive subject for a variety of reasons, mostly boiling down to technology decisions and the commercial/political aspirations of the vendor.
The "you're just a hater" excuse is a fallacy that shuts down discussion. It's used by those who don't want to address the criticisms made.
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.
> 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.
Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement?
And that shows the second aspect of the issue nicely: The assholes that come along with the polished turd. You are too dumb to understand, but I will repeat it anyways: There is no need to a replacement. What was there before already works nicely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
> 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 GPL also allows criticism, so if you don't like criticism "pipe down and enjoy your slice of GPL freedom"
Why does Canonical hate the main stream, and tend to roll their own instead? Wayland, Unity, Upstart ...
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!
There's part of the problem. ALSA has advanced enough that the best way to improve sound handling is to uninstall Pulseaudio. Why polish a turd when there's a perfectly good toilet handy? I thought GNOME2 was quite adequate, but switched to XFCE4 when they totally screwed it up. Udev was handling hotplug just fine without systemd butting in. Suspend works fine with init scripts.
Too many confuse "different" with improved. To really be an improvement, it must either do something useful that the old way couldn't do (or be made to do), or it must do it much more elegantly than the old way could.
So I'll turn it around, why are we beset with these re-invented wheels when they could have made a few tweaks to get the old system to do what they wanted?
If you want the new shiny to be embraced, just offer it up. Don't yank away what was working nad cram it down people's throats. People don't like things being crammed down their throats. If it doesn't catch on and you really want it to, ask yourself and others why? What feature got dropped that turned out to be more important to more people than you thought?
Consider, Xorg took over XFree overnight. It did so because it did everything XFree did but configuring it sucked a lot less. It didn't tell people who were happy the way things worked now that they were wrong and would have to do it differently now. Nobody complained about udev. Nobody got all that upset when sendmail was demoted to alternate.
So why can't Wayland get a foothold? Because they not only refused to promise any sort of support for display over the network, but actually denied that X could do it. (I understand that's been/being addressed now).
Why do people hate on systemd rather than addressing it's issues? Because their bug reports get marked wontfix and notabug. What's the point of submitting a patch if it's already been made clear it will be rejected?
So why not Mir? The correct question is "why Mir?". We've seen claims about things it will one day bring to the party but they aren't yet evident. And now, the other fear is playing out, too likely to be abandoned.
"Why haven't you done it" is the most idiotic open source response in the world designed to put people in their place as though somehow a person who can't write software (or doesn't have time) doesn't deserve an opinion.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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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