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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:16AM
Nobody in Linuxland with its fetishization of "freedom" will be part of a standardization process. That would require compromise, leadership, and organization. Thus, the competing "standards", where "standard" means a single implementation. The only reason we got Linux was because Linus and the rest had the POSIX standard to implement, and it got a GUI because X11 was already written for Unix. All it needed was some adaptation. When there was a choice, Linux has been kind of dismissive of existing standards because Linux developers think they can do better. History shows that usually they can't.