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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.
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
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Cinnamon is not Gnome 3. Not even close. Get a clue.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."