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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:59AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:59AM (#492097)

    You know, it doesn't really matter why the haters hated Mir.
    Mir is dead. And I don't think the haters killed it, I think it just wasn't valuable enough to achieve escape velocity.
    So he's kinda touchy about having to kill Mir. I won't begrudge him that, he did put his own money into it, he earned the right to feel bad about having to kill it, even if the blame is (or is not) misplaced.

    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).

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:18AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:18AM (#492106)

    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).

    Not so much. I'm not sure why he was so touchy about Mir; no one really wanted Mir, but lots of people wanted Unity, and are angry that he's abandoning that. But now, he's abandoning everything, and Ubuntu will be nothing more than a me-too look-alike Gnome3 distro. Remember, Gnome3 infamously eschews customization, so his distro's Gnome3 is going to look exactly like all the others, meaning there won't be much of a reason to use Ubuntu. He should have stuck with Unity, or perhaps adopted KDE and made a custom version of that with the Unity design. As it is, it seems like he's really just abandoning desktop Linux altogether, which I think is the absolute wrong action.

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51PM (#492252)

    So he's kinda touchy about having to kill Mir. I won't begrudge him that, he did put his own money into it, he earned the right to feel bad about having to kill it, even if the blame is (or is not) misplaced.

    That's fairly insightful that the entire story boils down to "waaah the systemd guys at redhat successfully product-tied themselves into every distro for later submarine patent reasons or pure hubris or maybe stupidity it don't matter the point is why can't I join in and force everyone to bend to my will too, waaaah"

    Followed by a bunch of idiocy about it "obviously" being a right wing conspiracy because in the current year thats the easy way out. Hillary didn't lose because she sucked and her political ideas are obsolete, its, um, the Russian hackers yeah thats it. Everyone loved Hillary and 60s hippie BS but the hackers stole the election. So obviously its the same thing with Mir, we can't discuss the real problem so we'll just blame the whole thing on gun nuts and climate denial and white males.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:08PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:08PM (#492325) Journal

    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.