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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:57PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:57PM (#492316)

    It absolutely *is* tribalism, on one side: the Canonical side. The irony is that Mark is accusing the community of tribalism, when it's really just him and his small cadre of followers that are exhibiting tribal behavior on this issue.

    He is right about many other issues showing tribal behavior: climate change, gun control, etc. (with varying amounts of tribalism on each side; on the climate change issue the tribalism is much heavier on the anti-AGW side since they don't have any actual evidence, and their side isn't populated by any actual scientists, but there's a certain amount of tribalism on the pro side too since not everyone there is actually a climate scientist qualified to read and interpret the data, so they just follow what the experts say. Gun control is much more tribal, with some valid arguments on both sides along with a lot of wishful thinking and dogma.)

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