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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:08PM
I'm glad he's still ought there trying. Ubuntu is a major accomplishment and even though its the collaborative product of tens of thousands of people it wouldn't exist without him. So he deserves slack (aka love).
Personally, my view of him went down significantly went he tried to defend the marketing/commercial stuff in Ubuntu (particularly the Amazon "home lens" integration). I'll give him praise for leading the project in the beginning, and I'll give the Ubuntu model credit for its role in creating standardized release cycles and pushing the Linux desktop experience to be usable for a mainstream audience. There were bumps along the way, but there was a lot of good there. I'd even be okay with some of his decisions over the years to try to force users into the Unity model or whatever. I may personally disagree with that model, but I can't fault him for trying. (And there always were alternative official derivatives for those who disliked that.)
I can, however, fault him for going against his own Ubuntu philosophy in basically turning part of his OS into a commercial adspace (which also had privacy implications). If I remember correctly, it took about 18 months to get the project to agree to change this "feature" to "opt-in." I understand Shuttleworth is a businessman and Canonical is a business, but such a stark violation of the core philosophy of his project will cause me to distrust Shuttleworth for a long time. This is the same project that I remember jumping through several hoops to install proprietary codecs, drivers, etc. back in the day because it wanted to maintain a more strict separation from commercial influence. And it was now running Amazon ads on your searches of your own computer and sharing your data with 3rd parties by default.
Sorry -- I had moved on from Ubuntu before that happened, but that was a significant betrayal. It's hard to trust what he says since then.