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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.
after the users left, it's normal that the devs leave afterward
Be or ben't
The title is "dozens resign" while the article (and summary) is "one resigned." Everyone else was laid off.
So part of the summary makes it sound like they're leaving in protest, while another part makes it sound like their positions will be going away - perhaps a "quit or be fired" sort of thing?
Of course I could just read the article, but I don't want to lose my Slashdot cred... so what's going on?
#DeleteChrome
Yea, I hear Linux already had a desktop and they decided to make their own anyway.
I hope you don't get modded down because you're absolutely right. I had to stop using Ubuntu because systemd made it so unreliable. I experienced way too many times when my system wouldn't boot properly. Thankfully I had my phone and could search for help online but I just couldn't keep putting up with this. I've switched to FreeBSD and it's so good so far but I would like to use Ubuntu again. If they got rid of systemd and used Xfce I would gladly return to it.
So, in other words, some investors came in and suggested "Just take a few dozen of the employees out back and shoot them, and that will totally focus the rest of the team!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The Unity vs GNOME debate is just like this comic: http://extrafabulouscomics.com...
but i use KDE so i don't really know what i'm talking about
Linux as my primary desktop died in '08.
there were IO scheduler (allegedly) issues that caused lock-ups of my interface, and it never really got better from their.
I really liked the over-all gnome 2 interface, I liked the "ugly" colors of Ubuntu, and finally felt a Linux Desktop was a nice smooth interface, with Compiz giving it a nice smooth windows moving over windows, slight flourishes (gentle wobble on the windows really made dragging them feel nicer, a good minimize and maximize animation, etc) that made it all just feel connected and smooth.
Once Windows 7 came with it's mouse-over preview taskbar, and edge snapping, the ideal way to manage windows was no longer Linux for me, and it was relegated to when I needed it specifically.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And I didn't really mind Pulse Audio, per application volume was a big pro for me, and maybe it wasn't because of pulse audio, but they came about at the same time.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You realize there are more than 3 linux distributions, right? And saying that one of the most mainstream distros, known for feature instability, changing it's org structure (again) is killing diversity is kind of making me scratch my head. Like, what the hell are you talking about?
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.
I/O related lock ups, or well, extremely long hangs, were finally fixed in 4.10 with writeback throttling.
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 Shuttleworth is being a responsible adult and cutting the people who aren't doing anything useful and getting things back on track so that they don't waste man/woman hours on projects that don't have any point?
If so then good.
Does this also mean Canonical is going to ditch Mir and focus on helping to improve Wayland instead? Why reinvent a different and incompatible wheel when you could just help refine the one that is already there? This seems to be the reasoning behind switching back to GNOME as the default DE.
Does this mean Canonical is going to stop wasting time on dumb and redundant ideas like Ubuntu phone? I hope so.
If they're cutting these sorts of time wasters then it makes sense that they'd also cut the people that worked on those projects. Unlike Apple, Canonical is showing real bravery here by cutting employees from an already controversial company (open source people like to get angry). But if that's what brings the company back on track then more power to Shuttleworth.
What's curious to me is how Canonical got off onto those bullshit projects in the first place. Seems to me like the execs who suggested such fad-chasing (Ubuntu phone) and wheel-reinventing (Mir and Unity) should also be on the chopping block if they aren't already.
(full disclosure: I use Ubuntu on all of my computers at home and at work)
So, 10 years later?
Glad I gave up after a year rather than hung around.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
This depends on the flavor of Mint you pick. Or at least it did the last time I tried it. There was a version based on Unbuntu, and another based directly on Debian. (Of course, Ubuntu is, itself, based on Debian...but it at least used to do lots of massaging for compatibility and adding drivers.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Linux is the kernel and Linux is very successful in the embedded world on ARM. For example, Android is currently based on the Linux kernel. Many WiFI routers use Linux.. Linux is becoming strong in the automotive industry for Infotainment systems etc.
Linux is strong in web-servers. TiVo uses the Linux kernel. IBM is a big user of Linux in their super-computers.
The Linux kernel is not going to go away any time soon. It is much bigger than just Desktop Linux on a PC.
The success or failure of a Desktop environment project is independent of the Linux kernel because many of these projects are cross-platform. This cross-platform environment is helped by the use of GNU utilities and libraries which implement POSIX (and other standards). For example, you could use the free BSD kernel like Apple does for their iMacs.
Note that I am not a Ubuntu user as I prefer Mageia (Red Hat based) with a KDE Desktop environment. Mageia is a community run distribution so there is no corporate company behind it to muck things up.
A word of warning from history... do you remember the UNIX wars ? This was caused by commercial UNIX vendors introducing "diversity" to lock their clients into their UNIX systems.
The phrase you are looking for is the "convergence" of desktop environments. In fact, I would say that Ubuntu was using a divergent strategy which has now failed. This means the Desktop Linux systems become convergent again just like in the days before Ubuntu existed.
you missed the whole Unity fiasco, just a wee six years of that as default
I'm conflicted here. On one hand, I despise Unity, so I think dropping it is a very welcome change. How refreshing that a company is actually listening to its users. I only wish it would have happened a long time ago. It's a bit ironic that the primary UI is shifting to GNOME though, who practically make a living from ignoring their users' wishes.
On the other hands, I feel really bad for these people who are now out of a job. They were most likely the devs who were just following orders to move Unity forward.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
I never did understand how the bitter unfuckables arrived at "cuck" as their concept of the ultimate sick burn. I mean, I get the idea of projection and all, but why expose one's own ultimate insecurity this way? How is that tactically sound?
Ubuntu is by far the buggiest OS ever released, open source or proprietary.
That's why I stick with stable, bug-free, Windows ME, although I'm hearing good things about Vista
Canonical lost 31 of about 700 employees. Most linux distros have 0 employees and maybe a couple of hobbyists. I think Ubuntu can survive.
To the same extent as they always did. That's what makes them linux. Of course they do use different versions.
Actually the variety here has improved. Before systemd and upstart, everybody used sysvinit -- now there's a little variety and there are non-systemd debian forks.
Debian and Fedora both offer a wide variety of desktop environments. Who cares what the default selection may be?
Did they ever not?
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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.
So is Ubuntu Linux effectively a dead project/distribution at this point?
Wow, hyperbole much? There's a lot of very profitable things with Ubuntu Linux and now they're going to focus on them. That your favorite part of "things Canonical" is being paired back doesn't mean the whole is dead.
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.
Um, Linux is doing quite fine really. I think you're thinking Linux Desktop = All of Linux, which is an incorrect statement.
Between the PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Wayland, and systemd disasters, we Linux users have seen so much turmoil these past several years.
Okay at some point everyone is just going to have to move past this dead horse, it's turned into a jelly like substance from all the beating. All of these projects have evolved from the infantile stage they were once in, maybe some of the critics should too?
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.
The problem isn't that the ecosystem is less diverse, it's that your definition of the ecosystem is highly limited. If we limit all of Linux to just those two distros and their derivatives, then yeah, there's not much separating them, but news flash, there wasn't much separating them before.
Even the package management is almost identical now, with the main difference being whether we type "dnf" or "apt"!
(facepalm) Yes on the surface they look similar, so quick question do you scream this when talking about tools like sed, tar, diff? The whole point is to offer somewhat similar commands to make the life of admins a whole lot easier. However, if you look inside of dnf or apt you'll see that they operate differently on how they build internal databases, how they manage memory, etc. (since Slashdot loves car references) just because all cars have a gas and brake pedal doesn't mean all cars have the same engine.
This lack of diversity has resulted in stagnation.
A lot of people think diversity = innovation and that's not an exactly true statement. I think it should be obvious why that is. Additionally, if anything Linux in a broad sense is far from stagnant. Again, I think your statement comes from a limit of perspective to just the surface of a Linux Desktop. Even in Linux Desktop world a lot is going on under the hood. Not every release needs to include 50000 bells and whistles.
I really want Linux to succeed, but all of these developments leave me feeling very uneasy.
No. You want Linux Desktop to become the dominate choice and the fact is that's not happening, ever. People "computer" differently now a days and there are blends of "Linux" so to say that already address that space. RedHat or Ubuntu or whoever, might move into the workstation or they might not. But the home PC market is having a rough enough time trying to convince people to be in the "home PC market". Few if any are worrying about "home Windows market" versus "home Linux market" because they're just trying to address the core tenet here of actually getting PCs sold. So stop worrying about something that's not going to happen and be happy about the dozens of other ways that Linux has dominated in several different markets outside the PC.
Cinnamon is not Gnome 3. Not even close. Get a clue.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now you're trolling. If you like Gnome 2 then use Mate. Even XFCE has Edge snapping. Ugly Colors? You talk as if the Colors can't be changed. Obvious Troll is Obvious.
Linux has always had audio, you just used to had to be smart enough to set it up and enable it.
The people that "Leave" after a short period are the same ones that complain how bad windows is, but want linux to adopt the same shit theyre complaining about windows systems sucking at. they dont want to learn, they want everything to "just work" even if it makes it insecure. the linux community is inherently against that model. so the crappy windows users will never jump ship because Linux isnt crappy enough for them.
Ubuntu was pursuing a different convergence strategy. Like Microsoft, they believed that they could create a single user interface that would span desktop and laptop computers, phones, and tablets. They were wrong, and now they're abandoning that strategy.
So this is wrong? "So they decided to create their own desktop environment, one that retains the same look and feel of a GNOME 2 (or MATE) desktop, but built atop GNOME 3 technologies. That was how Cinnamon came to be."