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.'"
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.
Re: Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.
I agree. As long as it is mine, Mine, MINE, MINE DAMNIT!!!!!!!!!
The picking of that solution is the hard part.
Re: Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's often the wrong part. Sometimes there's two solutions to the same problem because there's two ways of people looking at the problem.
Who needs to pick a solution that everyone has to use when you can pick a solution that you want to use?
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Re: Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree that "FOSSies" can be detrimental to some proposed feature additions, I disagree with your general sentiment that they are detrimental to all progress.
If you take the opposite point, that anything should be added if it adds to the user experience, you'll end with a distro that is Windows. Fully binary, almost impossible to support or troubleshoot, but it has SOO MANY shiny things, also binary-only.
The FOSSies may be extreme, but they built and maintained the sandbox up from nothing. While you think you have grand plans for that sandbox, you MUST respect those who set the original rules, or you will not be welcomed in their sandbox.
For a real world example, I run Debian on my laptop. In it's purest post-install form, it is lacking quite a few things, a very few I consider essentials (needs binary blobs to make the Intel WLAN go), and some others that I very much like but could live without (Chrome with all the Google services instead of Chromium). I even installed a few things that would make the Debian purists cry (Steam, which is binary-only, and on my desktop, the binary-only Nvidia driver).
What's the point? With a few minor tweaks, I can add any binary-only shinies that I'd like. Debian doesn't stop me. It just doesn't offer them out of the box, which seems to be your preference. The difference between us? I accept a little adjustment and tinkering to make everything Just So, and acknowledge the POV and desires of the DFSG or FOSS purists, even where I disagree or don't feel as strongly, while you mock and deride them and seem to expect the distros to package things YOUR WAY and support YOUR vision.
If you don't understand why the GPL is important, you're still free to use and abuse Linux. Just don't expect anyone who DOES understand it's importance to care about your POV.
Re: Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to be too snarky, but do you work on open source projects?
Whenever I hear someone talk about what the FOSS community should or needs to do, I first ask myself that question. This 'FOSS community' is not some monolithic entity which acts in some coordinated way to make you or anyone else happy. The 'FOSS community' is a collection of folks ranging from developers donating their time and efforts to paid devs hired by companies that derive benefit from FOSS software. Sure, that s/w engineer with too much time on his hands could probably advance the 'FOSS cause' by shuttering his unique distro and instead running regression tests of recent packages against modern hardware, but what makes you think you or anyone else can place those moral obligations on him? Did you ever think that many folks in the 'FOSS community' are having fun and enjoying their hobby?
What you call 'an illusion of choice' is *actually* choice. You can choose not to use those developers efforts and instead donate your time to a project you deem worthy.
Have a problem with the "busted shitter" problem? Are you offering to spend your time and energy on a thankless project with little personal rewards? Why not? This is one of the problems for which distributions were created in the first place. Companies charge money for their software so they can pay people to do these thankless, mind-numbing tasks. Support one of them, or figure out a new way(bug bounties maybe?) to motivate people to work on the broken shitter, or, you know, stop putting moral obligations on the 'FOSS community'.
I'm sorry - I know this is coming off as rude. You sound, to my ears, like an idealistic kid who points his fingers at the world but doesn't actually pitch in. Try to understand what the 'Foss community' is, and how it got to be what it is.
The 'Foss community' is many things, but it is not slave labor. It is not here to provide you with no-cost software that performs as you wish.
Re: Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.
Except that people don't agree on what the requirements are. Your requirements are not the same as mine. Even people that share requirements may not agree on what is the best solution. Your proposal will likely lead to this [xkcd.com].
Re: Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that people don't agree on what the requirements are. Your requirements are not the same as mine. Even people that share requirements may not agree on what is the best solution. Your proposal will likely lead to this [xkcd.com].
Not really. If we standardized everything ( or at least as much as humanly possible) similar to LSB it would make support of specialized distros much easier. Then it would all come down to who uses what standard modular configurations and / or provides the best support.
As an added bonus devs could not only write once but only have to worry about what particular package extension the program is packed in. If you know for a fact that lib X is going to be named exactly X and is in directory C you can just put out RPMs / DEBs that will install on any system using those types of packages.... as it is now, Ubuntu names things slightly differently than Debian / Mint / Other derivatives and you have to tweak the packages to install on each system. It would save a LOT of time if distro maintainers didn't have to customize the installs of thousands of different packages.
Re: Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
we had a standard with X11. The problem with X, is that it was holding linux in GUI space back, and it was hard to work with(makes a port harder, scare new devs), screen tearing, multi-monitor support was hard.
So some people started working on a new standard, wayland, which everyone uses but cannocial.
As for standards that help everyone, low level standards, such as TCP/IP, freedesktop.org, provide just enough compatibility between projects, while not getitng in the way with varying demands.
freedesktop.org is the reason why your settings in XFCE remain in GNOME, and KDE, etc...
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What amazes me is the amount of trouble seemingly trivial user interface issues seem to generate. I mean if you look at Gnome (2 and 3), KDE, Unity, XFCE and we can throw Windows and OS X in for good measure, how many ways are there to organize windows? Launching apps, see running apps, switching between apps and so on. Not that freaking many. It seems to me this should be trivially implemented in the same desktop environment using profiles, if you like the Gnome 2 look here's a Gnome 2 profile and stuff wi
Re: Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we'd (the Linux community) be a lot farther ahead if they got together and implemented a single solution that solved all the known requirements.
A single solution? In Linux?? You're as crazy as whoever modded you "offtopic". Mods, read the FAQ. He isn't offtopic. I disagree with him, too, but that's not a reason to downmod someone.
Nerdfest, choice is one of the best things about open source. You're wrong, Shuttleworth is wrong, and those opposed to him probably are, too.
If you want a single solution, get an Apple or a Windows machine. Leave my choice alone, I LIKE choice.
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I like choice too. We already have multiple solutions, and are creating two more. I just think the effort would be better spent creating one more.
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I think that diversity, with different choices and competing projects and ideas are healthy and desirable for users and the market. Choice is never bad. Monocultures are.
There is nothing to stop Shuttleworth and Canonical doing what they want to do and nothing to stop them from disagreeing with the opinions and actions of others.
Likewise, other people are free to their opinions and their choices.
As long as there is a Free Linux kernel and a healthy free market of competing distributions, all with their uniq
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.
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that's because it is dead simple for an idiot to use VNC.
remote using X requires a bit of thought to setup, and a continuous running stream in the back of your mind saying this window is running on "X" computer. It gets more complicated if you start running multiple windows on multiple machines.
I love network windowing with X. but I see so many people who struggle with VNC and RDP it is laughable. They don't quite understand that they are not running applications on their local machine even though it is
Re:We have. It's called the X Window System. (Score:5, Insightful)
remote using X requires a bit of thought to setup
Adding -X to the ssh command is really freaking hard.
Re:We have. It's called the X Window System. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been in IT for coming about 18 years, working with end-users to one degree or another the entire time, and I've never met anyone who didn't understand that the apps they used under Citrix, RDP, or VNC were running remotely and just being drawn locally. They may have been frustrated that they couldn't access local resources (this can be good or bad), but few if any of them thought the programs were installed locally.
It should be dead simple for most people to use a remote desktop capability without much thought on how to set it up because most people are not interested in anything other than the apps appearing on their screen. Microsoft has refined this well enough that it's used in enterprise environments large and small with enough auto-configuration that it will adapt to the local capabilities but can be overridden by a power user if so desired. Anyone who wants to see Microsoft's dominance at least challenged should accept that this is the way it needs to be.
I understand that X does its job well. But there are those who believe that the system in place does not do it well enough. Wayland's devs are in that group and are trying to address it. What concerns me is the group of people who refuse to accept that it should be done any other way and actively try to shoot down alternatives, even before they've had any real chance to use it. That contradicts the foundation of the open source community.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
People with flexible ethics are often inconvenienced by those with principles that they don't compromise.
LK
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
A healthy balance between any extreme is usually ideal.
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I would have agreed with you up until the moment I realized that literally EVERYTHING that rms tried to warn everyone about turned out to be 100% accurate in his prognostication.
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
Without people with uncompromisable principles it's the law of the jungle, and most of us will soon be reduced to serfdom again where might and money makes right.
Shut up and stop trying to sound clever without actually being it. As the last few years clearly have shown, we desperately need more inconvenient people.
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You're referring to the fact that both groups like to stick to their values? I may not agree with one of them but they both have a very good record of not switching sides in the middle of a debate.
You say that as if it's a virtue. People willing to change their stance when presented with evidence their stance is incorrect are to be valued, not shunned. Willingness to concede a point in a debate is virtuous. The alternative, sticking to your guns no matter what, is a character flaw.
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Re:Stupidity deserves to be dehumanized. (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm, no, it is not and your very post is an excellent example of why. You come across as an adolescent ranting about people who don't do things their way.
Dehumanization is done by those who don't think their idea can stand on its own. Often they are correct.
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Maybe. But KDE 4.0 was total crap, too. But it had a nice new foundation, and big ideas. with 4.2 they were usable again, with 4.4 they started taking real adavantage of their new frameworks.
akonadi and nepomuk are still both PITA despite having great concepts, but the rest works like a charm. So, doing something new is not the problem. Doing something wrong, is the problem.
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.
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.
Re:B-O-O H-O-O. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, systemd's kind of socket activaction has one use: if you run a large server bank of small customers' virtual machines whose daemons stay off a vast majority of the time. For any other use, it's useless or even actively harmful: you won't know the daemon fails to run until you actually need it.
Another part of systemd is that it cripples cgroups for any other users, forcing them to beg systemd for any action. Again, this matches Red Hat's server farm's needs, but not those of most of us.
Re:B-O-O H-O-O. (Score:5, Informative)
The irony is that by framing this in Tea Party terms, he's actually alienating a significant proportion of dedicated followers. Like it or not, but libertarians tend to favor F/OSS, and, conversely, a lot of F/OSS developers and users are libertarians. Needless to say, their perspective on Tea Party is considerably different from what Mark seems to espouse, and they will take offense at this comparison [markshuttleworth.com]. All in all, a very bad PR move.
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Not all libertarians are tea partiers. Though certainly there is a fair bit of common ground.
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Ubuntu uses upstart not systemd. Did you not even read the summary?
Love the smell of authoritAyrianism in the morning (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody not agreeing with the Ruling Class is now "Tea Party", huh?
Re:Love the smell of authoritAyrianism in the morn (Score:4, Insightful)
hey...it's always good politics to strike while iron is still hot.
the media has force-fed the "Tea Party Is The Whole Problem" narrative into gullible mouths for a few weeks now...why waste all that free brain-washing on just the federal budget?
expect a few more metaphorical comparisons before things cool down...i'm sure they are coming
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Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature. Then again, Americans who reveal widespread domestic spying by the government are called 'leakers' and 'traitors'. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
"I never thought that desire for fiscal responsibility, constitutional rule, and limited concentration of power would be masked over with such a contrived caricature."
Except that's not what it's about, the tea party are willing dupes to D&R. If they were serious they would be voting third party. Not republican. The oligarchy just steers these people into the system and keeps them confused by taking advantage of their hopes.
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
There's no good answer because people are immature and desperately uninformed. Nobody should be FOR polluting the fucking planet, but tea partiers definitely are because they don't understand historically GOVERNMENT has been the only force with the kind of power to go after serious polluters. The reason government is so bad is because it has been captured by corporate interests. Tea partiers if they had any intelligence at all would call off the stupid bs between left and right, form a coalition with others and vote both D&R out of office.
Re:Yikes (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, 'limited government' just means even more power for corporations (aka dictatorship and more corporate control of the law, less environmental regulations, more pollution, etc).
No it does not mean that. That is a lie the Democrats keeps telling to thwart the Republicans who are lying about trying to implement limited government. Limited government DISEMPOWERS corporations. It removes barriers to bring products into the market place which enables smaller cottage players into the game. We only have BIG corporations BECAUSE OF BIG GOVERNMENT. None of the mega banks would have survived the financial crisis without the BIG GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS; without BIG GOVERNMENT we would have nothing but SMALL BANKS today. Without FDIC we could never have had mega banks in the first place.
BIG Government and BIG corporations go hand in hand. Even look back in time. Which industries were most abusive: rail, mining, oil would be likely candidates and hmm which industries did the Government have the biggest roles in....
There are certainly some corner cases like shared resources "environmental regulation" where the free market alone might create some perverse and undesirable incentives, but in the vast vast majority of cases more regulation means more regulatory capture. It reduces competition making incumbent players more secure and lets them get bigger. When they get bigger they get more influence, which they in turn used to get more regulation that they might pretend not to like for public spectral but secretly support because they know it cements them in place.
Look at Amazon they are not even trying to hide it. They took advantage of the sales tax loop hole as a small org but once they go big suddenly they were for closing it because its going to make it easier for them stay on top with their specialty stores. Tax compliance is hard, unless you a big enough operation you can handle the overhead. So now its much much much harder for anyone to start up niche webstore and sell in multiple states, Amazon though just has to register a domain and change some style sheets. Funny how that works....
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
That's utter nonsense that has been extensively and repeatedly disproven. There is no government involvement that causes "economies of scale", which naturally favors big, entrenched players. Government involvement PREVENTS collusion that would lock-out smaller players. And we have ample historical references for exactly what you're proposing, and it led to giant monopolies, robber barons and the great depression.
Several big banks were well capitalized and did not need the government bail-out, UNTIL it came time to acquire some of the failing players, in which case the fed helped to cover some of the massive losses they inherited.
Standard Oil developed WITHOUT government involvement, and it was the Supreme Court ruling that broke it up. They're a good example of what a large company will do to squash all competitors, if there are no government regulations around to stop them. You should seriously read up on it, because this one company alone stands as stark proof that everything you're saying is patently false, and directly contrary to all reality.
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Absolutely not true:
"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which lea
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Cost reductions due to technological improvements and similar, still occur despite monopolies. They were probably just there at the right time to ride the wave of falling prices. They still kept the prices higher than they would have been with healthy competition.
Nop
Uh, that's easy to say now (Score:3)
Basically the reason you're against regulation is you've had the benefit of it so long you've forgotten why its there in the first place, and thanks to the third world you're enjoying the benefits of cheap electronics without the run off fr
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.
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their current position: a rabid, economically-ignorant (yet politically-involved) group
I guess you didn't read Slashdot today. http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/10/19/0021208/a-ray-of-hope-for-americans-and-scientific-literacy [slashdot.org]
Re:Yikes (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, intelligence doesn't mean sane. The Tea Party's problem is that they're crazy.
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for which the merits of an idea are trumped by whether or not their "team" endorsed it (Democrat: bad, "Republican": good.)
OK, so, how do you explain that they spent basically the entire last month fighting with establishment Republicans?
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Exactly. When the Tea Party first hit the scene circa 2009 and was basically a populist movement based on fiscal responsibility and constitutional rule I identified with them. If you look, these are basically Goldwater Republicans. Then the crazies of the party hijacked it and as soon as Sarah Palin showed up, the vast middle of the road independents left the show.
The current make up of the GOP is no longer the party of Goldwater. The last of that generation was probably the Bob Dole's of the world and
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Holding out healthcare.gov as a meme for a failure of the ACA has got to backfire, and probably pretty soon.
It's only a freaking website. The government clearly has the ability to run lots of websites that work quite well. So the only reasonable conclusion it that it's going to start working well, and pretty soon given the no doubt massive resources that are going into fixing it.
I've used it a few times, and the progress towards that is quite obvious. Week 1 was a complete disaster. Week 3 I was able to get
Ideology without pragmatism. (Score:2, Insightful)
The Tea Party suffers from the same problem that the FSF and the GNU project suffer from: a reasonable enough ideology, but a total lack of pragmatism.
Without a good amount of pragmatism to go along with their ideologies, they often come off to some as extremists or crazies.
Just look at GNU project versus the various BSDs, for example. They have a similar enough underlying ideology regarding software freedom, but take slightly different approaches to practicing this ideology. The BSD community is grounded i
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This subthread is so political that I suspect nothing of what I say will get across. That said, I'll still try - it won't be a lot of wasted effort in any case.
When Shuttleworth compares people to the Tea Party here, he's not talking about the party's ideals. That would make no sense: how could adherence to the US Constitution be relevant to open source development?
Instead, he's referring to the actions of the party. This is pretty good, really: any party can say nice words, but should really be judged by i
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Not to start an argument, but that's just unfair. You can hardly say the Tea Party types have tried to "retard legislation" (as if that's a bad thing). It's Harry Reid who for two weeks flat out refused to engage in any sort of discussion.
And in general, if a bill is unconstitutional, you can't negotiate away that fact. It's like "You wanna kill two people, I believe in not killing, so let's settle for killing just one person." It's absurd, and it invites the other party to just double their initial offerin
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I'm sorry, but the use of a CR to act as a carrier for legislative changes has ALWAYS been rejected with extreme prejudice.
What the TP tried was completely nonconstructive.
They should have, and DID get their head handed to them for these shenanigans.
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The TPublicans are also heavily astroturfed, and largely religious fanatics. Real Libertarians are as rare as hens teeth.
No fair ignoring that along with the decent bits!
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
Didn't hear any of THAT from the people who later formed the Tea Party until there was a "nigger" in the White House operating the same police state the GOP built to go after a different variety of brown people. Amusingly, Obama (who the Teapublicans consider a "Muslim") is further R
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The TP got some creds in my book because during the recent govstop/debt scaremongering lots of corp interests were hammering on them to cut out the obstructionism.
It's a small sign that there are some interests in the TP that aren't totally in corp pockets. Which would be different from the rest of US pol-world.
Of course that has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that their ideas are any good. Most of what you hear out their elected officials is pure demagoguery.
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Not paying the bills isn't fiscally responsible.
The Tea Party may have started as a grass roots movement for smaller government, but it bears little resemblance to that now. Where was it's opposition to a multi-trillion dollar war? Where was it when the NSA was spending tens of billions for domestic spying? Where was it when Wall Street was given carte blanche to crash the economy for the gains of a few?
Why are they mostly interested in cutting off food and shelter for the poor?
Aaron Seigo's retort (Score:5, Interesting)
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That would be fun to see. I still can't see any reason for the MIr split other than Canonical's contributor agreement which lets them sell the code. Does Canonical really think Redhat/Intel/etc are going to write code and then give it to Canonical so that they can resell it as closed source?
But I would much rather have one fully working graphics system than four or five half working ones. Much more interesting would be to work towards a merger between Wayland and Surfaceflinger.
Politics matter (Score:4, Insightful)
When you get to choose which country to live in, you will without a doubt check its politics. An authoritarian regime that can throw you in jail or kill you on a whim is probably not a good place to live. Likewise when choosing an OS or a desktop environment it is prudent to check the worldview and the attitude of the developers to gauge the direction in which these projects are going and decide whether that's the direction you'll want to be pulled in.
Just as moving to another country is difficult and expensive once you put down roots, have a job and a family, moving to a different OS or DE is difficult and painful as you find your favorite progams only work on what you used to use. As things stand, I have no desire to move to Mark Shuttleworth's kingdom.
Even a Tea Party can be right occsionally (Score:3, Informative)
I've done some review of Canonical's license agreements for a Debian compatible software tool. Their licensing is peculiar. While individual components are being published as GPLv3, they're requesting, and getting, written permission from some contributors to re-publish the code under alternative licenses, at Canonical's whim. That is releasing licensing rights to someone else. Even if Canonical proves trustworthy (and they've not, due to their strange browser collection data practices), that goes far beyond most open source or freeware licenses.
Paranoia about open source licensing, for authors, has repeatedly proven justified. Projects released under older licenses have had their licenses carefully skirted, and software effectively encumbered with additional requirements that prevented open development. Examples have included NVidia drivers, which proprietized the OpenGL libraries, and Sun's encumbered licensing for Java. Ubuntu is doing reasonably well riding on the shoulders of the Debian upstream developers, and have been contributing back to the open source world. But this is not the first time Mr. Shuttleworth has made licensing, clearly to Ubuntu's commercial advantage and with the potential for abuse, at the expense of the open source community's safety.
Re:Even a Tea Party can be right occsionally (Score:5, Informative)
Although I enjoy slinging mud, copyright assignments and contribution agreements are commonplace when contributing to larger free/open source projects.
Transferring copyright for example to GNU [gnu.org] is mandatory when contributing, gives the project the flexibility to relicense in case an upgrade is in order (like GPLv2->GPLv3) and avoids having to hunt down all individual contributors in case a change in license is required. Such agreements are in place with Apache and Mozilla too.
All things considered, GNU would indeed be more trustworthy in my book than Canonical (if only because GNU doesn't have a commercial motive) but regardless when an "entity" does the bulk of the work I think it's fair to allow them the flexibility to relicense when contributing.
It is a different situation when the owning "entity" drops the ball and the community does the bulk of the work, but then the option to fork is always open. LibreOffice serves as a nice reminder that being able to relicense doesn't mean much if the community decides to fork and move on.
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GNU doesn't have a profit motive now. What happens with this generation of leadership, RMS, dies in the coming years. Will those that replace him have the same motivations of purity?
Pot, Kettle, let me introduce Mr. Black Hole (Score:2)
>
By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on
Not Invented Here, eh? Tell me, where's this Mir shit coming from, and Unity? Looks like it's Ubuntu's Daddy is the one with the case of Not Invented Here syndrome. It's called projection. Get bent, Mark, you're a retard.
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I love Lennart Poettering's response:
https://plus.google.com/115547683951727699051/posts/RCfN9NwZrLN [google.com]
NIH is only a problem if you "invent" something inferior to what's already the
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Lennart is actually very clear on the technical reasons why he chose to create systemd even if Mark wants to remain ignorant of them.
Those are not "technical" reasons, those are personal.
Basicly, To surmise for the non-developers, Lennart says that he doesn't like programming events. That's pretty much all he says against the Upstart.
P.S. OK, I'm omitting the stupid part where he complains that "but upstart starts everything!", apparently displaying lack of knowledge what the SysV init scripts do (for which Upstart is the replacement).
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Like systemd or not, equating systemd and upstart as equivalent is either ignorant or dishonest [gentoo.org].
I guess saying such a thing will get me labelled an extremist in Ubuntu circles. It's no surprise to me that the gentoo guys do the best job comparing the available choices.
No Mark, Canonical the tea party assholes (Score:2)
with the crap UI that is shit for all the same reasons the windows 8 one is you are driving people away and doing damage to desktop linux. siding with the gnome3 mentality of screwing the users and saying "it's my way or the highway". Mark, you are the tea bagger of open source
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I've said it before and I'l say it again: a desktop system must be really fucked up if one needs to compare it to windows 8 metro to make it look usable.
but the gripe about unity and their approach is that it is geared towards you typing in words to send to ubuntu hq. for value. monetary value.
win8 is fucked up for the same reason in different way, the only reason for metros existence is so that they can get people to sign up for ms accounts and to get their software through the sw market. that goal was so
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nonsense, Metro violates the four principles of good UI design. what an abomination. proof that it is horrible is seen by market rejection of it, Microsoft is forcing it on people
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.
Tea Party and Science (Score:2)
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I wonder if "open source tea party" members know more about computer science than non open source tea party members.
Well said!
Bad analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
This "Tea Party" isn't getting funding from the execs of the top closed-source megacorps, are they?
Shuttleworth = Tea Party (Score:2)
Loud extremist uttering nonsense which has seduced a small but influential minority of idiots, dragging everyone e;se in the wrong direction and making things a lot worse.
It's what Microsoft would have wanted.
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It takes an extremist to abbreviate "my minority interpretation of the law" to "the law".
And while "should follow the law" isn't per se an opinion associated with extremism, a passionate follower of a e.g. the Ayatollah or Pol Pot would in global context be identified as an extremist, but is from a local standpoint merely keen to uphold the law.
I recently installed a computer newbie (Score:2)
Debian.
Works stable out of the box, printer was usable without even configuring it (i wanted to add it, just to see that its already a registerted printer), everything works. Nice stable versions, with a new release "when it's ready", which does not need to "wait for .1 of it for a stable version".
SysV-init still runs nice on Debian, and they will continue to use Xorg/Wayland.
So, seems a good choice for DAUs, and for experts, too.
Let's pray Lucas Nussbaum is as prud of you too (Score:2)
Shuttleworth: "'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 â" from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today.'"
Read: http://www.debian.org/intro/organization [debian.org]
Debian's Organizational Structure
Occasionally people need to contact someone about a particular aspect of Debian. The following is a list of different jobs and the e-mail addresses to
Some days it seems nothing really changes (Score:2)
Linux vs Hurd vs *BSD
Gnome vs KDE
MySQL vs PostgresSQL
Ruby vs Python ... and any rant that complains that some piece of software isn't really "free" because it doesn't use the ranters favorite license.
Ubuntu is meh... (Score:2)
If I have to admin the thing I use SuSE/OpenSuSE. Why? Because since 2000 it's been the most reliable for me to get up and running out of the box with the least hassle.
Currently we're running Ubuntu on AWS for our test servers building a prototype with plans to run Debian on production. That's what the sysadmin for that project is most familiar with. As long as it's REHL/CentOS, SuSE/OpenSuSE, or Debian or it could be Solaris or FreeBSD as far as I care. So long as it runs PostgreSQL & Node.
So much ego! (Score:2)
I don't care what technologies Mark or the Ubuntu project chooses to use or promote. Their projects, their time, their rules. No one else has any obligation to adopt any of it, or tailor their work to fit with Ubuntu's goals or needs.
I've read the Wayland versus Mir threads, the GNOME3 versus Unity threads, the systemd versus upstart threads, the Ubuntu versus Debian threads. Canonical's rough MO appears to be:
1. Look a project over, participate a bit
2. Integrate it into Ubuntu, sometimes poorly
3. Decide t
Has Slashdot ... (Score:2)
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Re:$$ for software (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I agree with you in concept, but how does Windows 8 fit in with that world view?
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I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.
I like your idea, but how do you manage to avoid Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle in your process?
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Remarkably naive.
That attitude works right up to the point where the people who make your vertical market apps decide, you have to much time and effort invested in data and training to go elsewhere. Then they own your business.
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Re:I know I will get modded down but... (Score:5, Informative)
Then you have been out of the loop for about half a decade. Fedora and Suse are literally just as user friendly as Ubuntu is.
There is literally no configuration necessary through the device auto detection, partitioning, they have auto updates as well and fantastic package managers.
They are also much much more closely related to the enterprise distributions making them a better fit for anyone seeking to move in to administration from a professional standpoint.
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Au contraire. Fedora's installer makes me want to tear my hair out, and virtually every time I've installed it I get some sort of SELinux error. This is one reason I'm split down the middle on Ubuntu and usually go for one of the derivatives - I don't really like Unity and the Mir split annoys me, but they still offer the best setup and default configuration out there.
I just wish the derivatives would stop fucking up the UEFI installs.
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Re:So (Score:4, Funny)
Its a german personal pronoun.
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because shuttleworth took debian, made it easy to install(add pretty graphic installer with pretty graphics and claim it was easy to install) an claimed it as his own invention - added his own invention of pure shitunity - and then called him a teepiier for disagreeing with sending every local search to ubuntu so ubuntu can sell it.
oh and don't get me started on pulseaudio etc. shitworth has caused more time wasted on linux support than anyone and will continue to do so.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. What we've had (and loved) for decades is a clusterfuck. How enlightening. Don't complain about dependencies -why the hell would you want to choose your own system logger or cron daemon. Idiocy!
Also, no one reinvent anything ever okay? Unless your name is Lennart and you want to replace all that modularity and flexibility with one big thing.
Hey, lets have a registry while we're at it okay? /sarcasm
Language like yours typifies pretty much every pro systemd statement you can find.