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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: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:49AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:49AM (#492069)

    Yes, it's very strange that free software advocates would dislike non-free proprietary user-subjugating software like Windows, and be upset that Ubuntu comes with proprietary software. This guy is probably just an "open source" proponent who doesn't care much about the ethical aspect of the matter, which would explain his confusion.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51AM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51AM (#492070)
    Mir is GPLv3, which is about as non-proprietary as it gets.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:08AM (6 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:08AM (#492102)

      Except I wasn't talking about Mir, but Ubuntu in general. Ubuntu tolerates proprietary software and includes it. You know, since he spoke about how Windows and Canonical got hate once they went mainstream, as if that's the actual reason. But ignore that part.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM (#492110)
        You can rip all of the proprietary software out of Ubuntu and still have a very much usable system if your hardware does not require any non-Free drivers.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:28AM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:28AM (#492111)

          Irrelevant. It's bad enough that they include proprietary software; they have to set an example by not doing so. By tolerating non-free software, they show that they are not truly opposed to it and therefore are not friends to the free software community. Just being better than Microsoft and their ilk is not enough.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:15AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:15AM (#492124)

            Not friends to RMS, you mean.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:56AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:56AM (#492149)

              No, to the free software community. Free software advocates see proprietary software as unethical. For "open source" advocates, that may or may not be the case. That's the main reason for using the term "free software".

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:19PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:19PM (#492366) Journal

            Even Debian tolerates non-free software. They may discourage it, but they still tolerate it. And, depending on your precise definition of free, they even have some in their repositories.

            --
            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by EETech1 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:05AM

          by EETech1 (957) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:05AM (#492143)

          Debian?

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:20AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:20AM (#492078)

    -1 Stupid. Mir wasn't proprietary, it was GPL and just as open-source and FOSS as anything else.

    The objection was that it was contributing to Linux fragmentation for a critical low-level infrastructural component, and creating more unnecessary work for downstream projects such as KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ which need to talk to the display server.