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:4, Interesting)
It's not as bad as it used to be, but when I purchased redhat (back when one could go to the store and buy it), some random guy sneared and said "i wish people would use slackware, then you really have to know Linux"
I see here plenty of comments about this vs that leaning the same way.
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
Seriously though, Canonical has more "skin in the game" than any other Ubuntu contributor and they are funding the lion's share of the expenses. You'd think this would be justification enough for them to "wield more power than the average contributor". Unlike other "authoritarian" regimes, you are free to leave and start your own fork without fear of being hunted down and shot. You can always go help Mint. I agree with Shuttleworth, if you don't like the conditions at Ubuntu then go somewhere else and try to be grown up and not poison the well when you leave.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
Re:Unity is hard (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Unity's license forces contributors to give their copyright over to Canonical, which is the only reason it exists.
Here's a fun exercise: Go to the Ubuntu website and try to find the word Linux anywhere on the front page. It's as if they're trying to hide the fact that they're a distribution of Linux all of a sudden, as if they want to sell themselves as Ubuntu the -platform- (for tablets and phones) rather than Ubuntu the distribution. And there's no room for freedom on a tablet or a phone.
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:5, Interesting)
The tedium is found in writing code multiple times for uncommon formats, CPUs and OSs, increasing code complexity (bugs), and knowing that it will probably be dead one day. Yes, competition and multiple standards is probably a good thing initially, and hardware is certainly changing and improving for a while, but when things finally settle down in a century or two (?), the real productive work will have just started.
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the criticisms of Ubuntu are that they are largely fragmenting from the norm without a lot of coordination with community projects, not that they are making Linux 'too easy', that would be absurd. It is ironic, as one of the things I appreciated about it versus suse or fedora back in the day was how they made the most straightforward use of 'upstream' function whereas other distros added a lot of distro-specific fluff for management. I was out at Unity, and they continued on to Mir.
I will say that I am also disappointed at what the Linux desktop has been becoming. Ten years ago, Windows was an inscrutable mess of an OS under the covers. If you wanted to do nearly anything from a programming/scripting perspective in terms of managing the platform, you had to understand a ton of obscure stuff off of MSDN if it were possible at all. Linux was a lot more transparent and easy to understand how it worked at a glance. There were some limitations that were rough going from workstation/server to desktop/laptop market (e.g. making a wifi config without root privilege wasn't feasible, handling the acpi sleep button took some contortions, and controlling shutdown/restart similarly required explicit root authentication all the time).
Ten years later, MS has either replaced or hidden much of their overly complex stuff as they have advanced powershell (still a ways to go, and winmgmt is still a lot more fragile than it should be). Meanwhile, the typical Linux distro now has dconf, network manager, polkit, systemd, and worst of all dbus. Some more capability has come about, but it has become pretty inscrutable to the admins with a bourne shell scripting level of understanding. More advanced programmers appreciate some of the additional structure, but shell commands to script some capabilities are no longer easy (complex dbus-send commands, non-obvious configuration location and no longer human readable content) or impossible. The Linux desktop of today is growing a lot of the badness of the Windows desktop of a decade ago, and the Windows desktop is growing a lot of the goodness of the Linux desktop of a decade.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Food for thought regarding standardization. (Score:4, Interesting)
I get dreamy thinking about this. It would simply everything. However, I have one thought of caution.
Standardization creates a single point of failure.
Allowing solutions to exist simultaneously, and develop independently, allows there to be no single point of failure and for multiple solutions to be tried at once.
I think there's a reason nature (insert name of deity or deities if you'd prefer; I'm agnosticism agnostic!) chose to go with natural selection. While less efficient on the surface, it works in every situation and eventually, produces a time-tested quality result.
Just food for thought, not a contrarian argument.
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:5, Interesting)
He try to frame things in a binary fashion. Either you want to have easy stuff on the desktop and then you should not criticize him, or if you are against him, then are against having stuff for everybody. That's just a rhetorical tactic.
In practice, the issue is not that Ubuntu make things easy, because that's a good things to do, it is that Canonical is not respecting the community and do not discuss, because they think time to market ( or cadence, as they explain ) is more important. That's ok to believe that, but you have to be clear. removal of UDS 3 months before without discussing first, lack of respect for those that have bought plan ticket, and took care of accomodation. Not caring about community rules ( ie pushing changes after freeze ), that's the same, not caring about respecting rules for community. Using the Ubuntu name becuase they own the trademark. Not respecting the rules that community should follow.
Of course, Mark never say he is treating people unequally. Or never even try to defend that, he prefer to attack stawman, like the minority of people who think "ubuntu should be kept for elite". I never seen people like this, at most, I have seen people that complain we removed what they used, which is not exactly the same. So yeah, infuriating opponents by using lame tactics is the way he react to that. He did like this for the Amazon issue, he did that for Unity, etc.
The only thing I can say is that he is being too emotional about the project, thus making everybody realize this is *his* pet project, not the one of everybody.
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:3, Interesting)
'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.
No, of course nobody says it. They DO, however, imply it heavily, and that's what's being heard. Every time a user interface improvement gets shot down in discussion because it's "not important" or "not worth our time testing", every time documentation gets put off because it's boring, every time a new user is treated condescendingly because they couldn't decipher poorly-written incomplete documentation (or are told to read source code), every Debian user (it's always the Debian users) grumbling over someone writing a GUI to something the for which the neckbeards have only had a CLI for years... THAT'S when it's being said. Not out loud or verbatim, mind you, but it's definitely being said.
Re:Red herring (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sad to agree with you.
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
Mark, it's not a black-and-white world.