Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama 302
In the wake of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a number of contributors from its community have been speaking out, saying they're uncertain about their role and their future working on Ubuntu. They're concerned about how Canonical is making decisions, and also how (and when) those decisions are being communicated. Now, Mark Shuttleworth has addressed the issue in a blog post. He said,
"The sky is not falling in. Really. Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical's contribution is massive. It's simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets 'what it wants' more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don't get exactly what I want. It just doesn't work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu. The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That's nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I've watched and participated in, the biggest meme is 'if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting.' Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans. If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else. It's also the case that we've shifted gear to leadership rather than integration."
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
Where is the "crowd" that he referred to? Who wants Linux to be "hard"?
Everyone I know wants Linux to "work". And to work "consistently" with an internal "logic".
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
I can guarantee such a mentality exists.
From http://dwm.suckless.org/ [suckless.org]
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
True? this is utter bullshit.
Or more speciffically, it's utter bullshit in the way that he's talking about.
Noone wants Linux to be hard.
The trouble is that he's focussing solely on a minority of desktop users, labelling their problems as more importand then dismissing everyone else as "leet" and saying they want it to be hard.
That is bullshit.
I don't want Linux to be hard. I want it to be easy. As easy as possible, in fact. This is why I'm in general getting rather leery of Ubunbu and have moved to Arch on a number of my systems.
Basically, ubuntu is so full of magic to make it "easy" that it's getting harder and harder to make it work the way I need to, and figure out what the hell is going on under the hood when something does go wrong.
Arch by comparison is much simpler, and much better documented. Therefore getting it to do interesting and useful things is often considerably easier than the same with Ubuntu. And if it's set up you can have all the user nicieies that one expects in a modern system (sane audio, 3D graphics, sane hot plugging, sane package management).
I mean sure, he can go nuts with ubuntu if he wants. It's his distro. Just don't expect me to help create a system I don't enjoy using and don't be surprised if people wanting control over their own system abandon it for an easier, simpler distro.
Re:Translation: It's mine, and you don't matter (Score:5, Informative)
That is exactly what I did. It's the same thing, less the fluff, less the drama and less the commercial interest.
Re:Unity is hard (Score:2, Informative)
Because Unity's license forces contributors to give their copyright over to Canonical, which is the only reason it exists.
That's an outright lie, plain and simple. Look up the Canonical Contributor License Agreement and then promptly eat your hat.
What you're saying is a prime example of poisoning the well, or, at least, an irresponsible level of applied ignorance.
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:3, Informative)
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
Re:True (Score:3, Informative)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dwm [debian.org]
0.64% of Debian users have this package installed, according to popcon.
Hardly a crowd.