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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:33AM (3 children)
The solution, I think, is to accept the fact that plays like this are going to face criticism. If the play is in fact a good one, then arguments or experiments should show it. Don't forget this is Mark Shuttleworth, who has a history of responding poorly to criticism. It may be that his problem is he can't separate the rational criticism from the insults. Or he may be incapable of dealing with criticism.
I think Mir would have been bad for the community if it caught on the way PulseAudio (aka ESD¹) did. It was fine until people started targeting PA, which we're stuck with now. Mir also had some worrying aspects, I forget what now, but if it was a requirement I think we'd be in a worse world than the one where Wayland is an option.
1. Yes, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, the one everyone hated because the latency was bad. They changed the name, the latency is still bad.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:03AM (1 child)
> PulseAudio (aka ESD
I think you're mistaken. Pulseaudio was written by Lennart Poettering. Check the README file. It was intended to replace ESD; that doesn't mean it was ESD. Check the README:
Copyright 2004 Lennart Poettering <mzcbylcnhqvb (at) 0pointer (dot)
de>
[...]
It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the
[11]Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND).
[...]
Acknowledgements
Eric B. Mitchell for writing ESOUND
-- http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/releases/polypaudio-0.1.tar.gz [freedesktop.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:34AM
The code is not ESD, but the problems, the performance and the difficulties getting rid of it is pretty much the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:47PM
It is incredibly easy to avoid running pulseaudio today if you do not want to use it. Hardly anybody actually writes applications which call audio output APIs directly, it is much more common to use something like libsdl or libao or openal which support many different audio drivers.
One thing to watch out for is distros installing an ALSA default pcm that automatically spawns pulseaudio and directs output to that. Such configuration can be deleted.