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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 mth on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:03AM
So, what's the alternative? Should everyone just settle for whoever has the first-mover advantage in low-level software, regardless of the relative merits of each solution? Should all FOSS projects be equal, though some more equal than others?
The merit of Mir was never clear. It was trying to solve the same problem as Wayland, in a similar but incompatible way. To be able to justify the extra effort needed to support it, it would have to be significantly different or better than Wayland.
I would not want to see Mir ditched just because it will make things hard for a few people for a while. I'd rather it lives or dies on its own merits. If it's a better solution, then the FOSS ecosystem as a whole will be ultimately better off for it.
It was making things hard for parts of the system that were already understaffed. So when Canonical decides to throw money at creating more work for the developers rather than helping them out, I can understand why they're not lining up to support Mir.