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posted by n1 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the politics dept.

After announcing his company was abandoning Unity for GNOME, Shuttleworth posted a thank-you note to the Unity community Friday on Google Plus, but added on Saturday:

"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit."

"The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."

Shuttleworth says that "I came to be disgusted with the hate" on Canonical's display server Mir, saying it "changed my opinion of the free software community."

Full story here.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45PM (#492247)

    the whole reason UNIX died is because of fragmentation

    That sounds very retcon-ish having lived thru that era the problem was tying hardware to software (before windows all OS came from your hardware mfgr just like OSX today) and both upfront cost and support costs were milked until people hated the OS provider. Also no security patches.

    Back in the days before package managers and GNU autoconf and all that, it still wasn't all that much work to compile C from one machine on another. There was a lot of stupid address width assumptions in the old days. Also floating point was weird.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:25AM (#492566)

    Agreed. Commercial Unix died because it was FAR more expensive (SW & RISC workstation HW were tied together) than Windows and PCs, and PCs running the new Windows NT were becoming more capable. That's it.
    In the heyday of commercial Unix, software vendors happily developed their star product for only one or two Unix variants. This was back when only Unix HW & SW were up to the task.