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Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO (theregister.co.uk)
Alexander J Martin, reporting for The Register: More than 80 Canonical workers are facing the axe as founder Mark Shuttleworth has taken back the role of chief executive officer. The number, revealed today by The Reg, comes as Shuttleworth assumed the position from CEO of eight years Jane Silber, previously chief operating officer. The Reg has learned 31 or more staffers have already left the Ubuntu Linux maker ahead of Shuttleworth's rise, with at least 26 others now on formal notice and uncertainty surrounding the remainder. One individual has resigned while others, particularly in parts of the world with more stringent labour laws (such as the UK), are being left in the dark. The details come after The Reg revealed plans for the cuts as a commercial get-fit programme instituted by Shuttleworth. The Canonical founder is cutting numbers after an external assessment of his company by potential new financial backers found overstaffing and that projects lacked focus.
So is Ubuntu Linux effectively a dead project/distribution at this point?
A shakeup of this magnitude can't be good for the project's health.
This really makes me worry about the health of the Linux ecosystem as a whole.
Between the PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Wayland, and systemd disasters, we Linux users have seen so much turmoil these past several years.
Now things are getting so uncertain within the Ubuntu world, with the whole Unity-to-GNOME-3 switch and now this news.
If the Ubuntu project falters, the Linux ecosystem will be getting even less diverse.
Even now there are fewer and fewer differences between Fedora and Debian.
In so many ways Debian and Fedora can be considered essentially the same: they use the same kernel, the same init system, the same desktop environment, and much of the same userland software.
Even the package management is almost identical now, with the main difference being whether we type "dnf" or "apt"!
This lack of diversity has resulted in stagnation.
I really want Linux to succeed, but all of these developments leave me feeling very uneasy.
It's interesting. This article was first posted with the headline "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO." Then it was re-posted less than a minute later as "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO."
The only difference between the two is "As Ubuntu Switches to GNOME," but if you look at TFA, the word 'gnome' does not appear. So someone went to the effort of editing this post to add gnome to the headline despite its having nothing to do with the article. I guess to give us a target for hating on? Two of the stories about gnome this month have gotten more than 300 comments, which is relatively big these days for Slashdot.
Just an observation and a theory about the way our overlords try to influence the discussion.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but... I've met Mark and I'm pretty sure his IQ is in the 90th percentile. He's one smart motherfucker... seriously. Bit of a psychopath maybe, like many CEOs, but one smart motherfucker.
Yes, the phone, unity, and Mir were projects competing in saturated markets fighting uphill battles. He funded those out of passion, and put his own money on the table for it. Who can blame him for that? It sucks that he couldn't find the market for it. But driver support won't be impacted by this.
Ubuntu seems to be doing well in the cloud though, and Mark can't keep funding Canonical by himself forever. From a cold commercial perspective, this seems like a smart move.
They are canceling development on two big in-house projects, Mir and Unity, and laying off many of the people who worked on those projects. The Register article is a followup on a previous article (which they linked), where this is explicitly confirmed by Canonical.
Upstream projects and contributors had a problem with this and so the work of maintaining Mir and backends for upstream projects was pushed back on Ubuntu. Then when the phone flopped all the stuff became surplus to requirements.
I think they would have enjoyed more success with their mobile platform to have used Wayland in the first place. They wouldn't have had to hire so many people to work on it, wouldn't have alienated other contributors, and would probably still have held stewardship of their mobile platform. Even if it still flopped it would have been a cheaper flop than the one they're facing now.
It did work, for a time. Ubuntu brought the desktop to linux that worked. The very fact that I could install Ubuntu on a laptop without having to tinker with ACPI and all other nonsense was a big plus (If anyone remembers installing linux on the laptop was a very painful experience pre-2010 days, still is). They fixed a lot of annoying little problems and contributed quite a bit to "get things working". They had the easiest installer of any linux distribution. They had an established community that was dedicated to Ubuntu and contributed a lot to fixing things. Being debian based just made it better.
Then they decided to make their own spinoffs of projects that really sucked and splitting off from all the desktop environments that worked, instead of contributing to fixing and making them better. The whole unity thing, Amazon and all the other nonsense. They should have stuck to what they were doing before, it was just fine, instead they tarnished their image and reputation with this crap.
The only spinoff which I think would have been fine is ubuntu on phones and tablets. They had quite a development following on those devices (They had a huge loyal following for the phone, ever since the whole NSA stink and a lot of people were very enthusiastic for it). The phones would been quite successful if they didn't have limited production (Seriously, they sold every handset they made). Their poor business decisions pretty much killed Ubuntu phone.
My theory is that the projection is so strong that it would never occur to them to question whether others have the same insecurity. It's not even worth evaluating to them: emasculation is the absolute worst thing for them, so it must be the worst thing for everyone, so trying to undermine their opponents' masculinity will be the most devastating attack they can make. Sadly, it differs from schoolyard insults only by vocabulary level, so it makes them look pretty pathetic, and because there's absolutely no way to reason with someone who thinks calling an opponent 'cuck' is a legitimate rhetorical approach, it tends to end the conversation and then they think they've 'won'. So they feel pretty good about it and keep doing it.