Mark Shuttleworth Complains About the 'Open Source Tea Party' 419
slack_justyb writes "In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth sends his congrats to the Ubuntu developers for the recent release of 13.10 and talks about 14.04's codename (Trusty Tahr). He also takes aim at what he calls 'The Open Source Tea Party.' He writes, 'Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)' He cites all the complaints about Mir and even calls out Lennart Poettering's systemd, who is the past has pointed out Canonical's tendency to favor projects they control. Shuttleworth continues, 'And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we'll get it done, and it will be amazing.' However, not all has earned Mark's scorn. He even goes so far to show some love for Linux Mint: 'So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"
B-O-O H-O-O. (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a reason why other distributions - even ones that had switched to Upstart - adopted systemd.
There is a reason why other distributions - and toolkit developers - opted against supporting Mir.
And it has nothing to do with the tea party.
Aaron Seigo's retort (Score:5, Interesting)
Stupidity deserves to be dehumanized. (Score:1, Interesting)
Many of the problems with certain major open source software projects today happened solely because people were afraid to say, GODDAMN IT, THIS IS A FUCKING STUPID IDEA!
The GNOME project is probably the best example. In a few short years it went from being the premiere open source desktop environment (GNOME 2) to a total cesspool of rancid, rotting Mac OS X ripoff and design idiocy (GNOME 3). Today it is unusable.
While people did speak up, nobody really took a strong stance against the bad decisions. Nobody with any power in the community and project loudly and proudly said, GODDAMN IT, THIS IS A FUCKING STUPID IDEA! each time one of the GNOME crew suggested or implemented something idiotic.
Had the stupidity of GNOME 3 been dehumanized early, and shown to be the scam that it is, the Linux community as a whole would have been better off.
So I don't necessarily agree with what Shuttleworth is saying here, but at least he's speaking his mind. If he sees something as stupid, then I hope to hell he does everything he can to dehumanize the opposition. That's the best way to deal with stupidity.
The reason people attack you, Mr Shuttleworth (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand, Ubuntu has seriously improved desktop Linux, particularly in hardware auto-detection and driver support.
On the other hand, you've shown on several occasions that your goal with Ubuntu is to take the effort of thousands of volunteer developers and sell it and the Ubuntu install base for personal profit. That turns those same formerly motivated volunteers into chumps who worked for you for free, and nobody likes being a chump.
And then there's the UI thing, but Ubuntu is hardly the only one making mistakes there (see Gnome 3). The fundamental issue is that a significant portion of UI designers think that making tablets and desktops and phones should all have basically identical interfaces. There's a clear reason why that's a bad idea: Different kinds of input methods demand different kinds of interactions. For example, on a touchscreen the easiest place to interact with is the center of the screen, whereas with a mouse the easiest place to interact with is actually the corners, which means you want to put your icons and menus and such in different places.
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Interesting)
I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature.
They're not.
The "Tea Party", on the other hand, is -- as well they should be.
It started as a populist movement with some people advocating the things that you stated. And that was a noble goal. But like many "grassroots" movements, it was co-opted by powerful (read: rich) influences, and has been steered instead towards their current position: a rabid, economically-ignorant (yet politically-involved) group for which the merits of an idea are trumped by whether or not their "team" endorsed it (Democrat: bad, "Republican": good.)
I have no love for either mainstream US party, and initially I thought that the Tea Party idea might end up developing into a viable third party platform with values closer to those of classic liberal philosophy. (Note: "liberal" here is used in its original form, not as a synonym for Democrat). Sadly, they turned out nothing like that -- and the folks who currently wear the label are worthy of the scorn they get.
We have. It's called the X Window System. (Score:1, Interesting)
We've had the "single solution" you're talking about for many years now. It's called the X Window System and it works very well.
There are free and open source implementations that can run, or potentially could run, on just about any modern OS.
It is well-supported and well-understood by the community at large.
It is extremely flexible and extensible.
It performs extremely well (contrary to the incorrect claims of some very foolish people who never used it just fine on 25 MHz Sun and DEC workstations decades ago).
It can be used over a network without having to resort to hacks like VNC.
Just because some people feel the need to ignore this reality and instead focus on creating a half-assed clone of OS X doesn't mean that the rest of us won't continue to use what we've been using since the 1980s, and what will continue to work very well for us.
Re:invasiveness of systemd (Score:1, Interesting)
Amen. I was always a systemd nay-sayer and my first use of it has confirmed all the negativity. Installed the latest Fedora and everything was working well until rebooting after a yum update. Now systemd/journald are completely wedged. I can boot in single-user mode and manually start everything except systemd and journald. (And since journald is hosed, I have no system logs to look at.)
Re:We have. It's called the X Window System. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that we have an existing solution, but to claim that there's no reason to replace it is to claim that no one can come up with something better. I agree that it's well-supported, that it can perform well, and that VNC is a hack. But I'm not sure that it's true that it's well-understood, especially given that people are far more likely to handle remote desktops with VNC than with X, even in environments where people largely use Linux instead of Windows. That prevalence of VNC over X suggests to me a serious gap in understanding of the community at large.
This leads me to think that while X is still a good solution, it may not be the best solution, and that's why I'm watching Wayland with curiosity.
Re:B-O-O H-O-O. (Score:4, Interesting)
Because RH did it, and that's all. Looked at from all technical perspectives systemd is a net loss for everyone except Lennarts ego. Politics and personality are driving systemd adoption, not any technical need.
Now matter how well Lennart implements systemd, it will always be a shitty idea.