Martin refers to http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295, I think. He wrote about it in http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/10/thoughts-about.... It is about the Mir-Support of KWin/KDE (Martin is the current KWin developer) - while KDE doesn't want to support Mir right now, and says it is about technical reasons, Shuttleworth suggested it is a political thing, which Martin didn't like at all.
Seems like after his post there were some not so nice reactions. Though the comments on his blog seem to be nice enough, at first glance.
I think the short of it is that Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu, wrote an article in which he ad hominem attacks criticizers of the Mir project.
The weirdest part of this attack is that he specifically mentions certain toolkits as 'competitors' who do not support Mir but do support Windows.
When superficially reading this someone who has followed recent events might think this is about Intel, who has recently refused a patch to their graphics card drivers and are rather big in their opposition of Mir.
But when reading more carefully, it does not really make sense to call Intel a competitor of Ubuntu in any sense. And the Intel linux graphics driver project obviously does not really support Windows.
The only project that comes to mind that does fit these criteria is KWin. Why would Mark single out KWin? I don't know, but obviously Martin is rather upset about it.
I get the feeling that maybe Mark just sort of jumbled some characteristics of Mir opponents together, and the jumble accidentally fit KWin perfectly.
Whether it was intentional or not, Mark should really apologize for causing Martin to feel this way.
I don't know. I am not sure what to think about that situation.
The attacks were not really that ad hominem. While I see Martins point with the technical reasons and why that annoys him if political reasoning gets accused, his technical reasons are more grounded on policy, and the step from (technically founded) policy to politics is not that far, especially if you are someone who is convinced that your new solutions for something is great and want to see it adopted, which could be Shuttleworths position. And reactions like Intels sabotage is probably not something that is easy to accept with a smile.
And I don't think that you have to apologize for the effect of your actions, but for your mistakes. So it's not necessarily about how Martin feels, but about what Mark said - if that was indeed wrong, for every aspect of wrong. I didn't like his language comment, that was harsh and targeted against foreign speakers.
Also, there were always clashes between Ubuntu/Canonical and Kubuntu/KDE. I don't see behind the curtains, I have no overview who behaves how when they interact directly. But the language barrier and the cultural differences (isn't KDE still a bit german influenced?), and the question who holds the power, makes the situation probably prone to issues like these.
Finally, I don't think it is possible to judge about the technical aspect of the whole discussion without being familiar with the code of those projects, so it's hard to take sides based on that.
I should probably add: I was a team member ubuntuusers.de, the german ubuntu support forum Martin mentions in his post, and remember him a bit from then. This leads to a bit of sympathy, but that was years ago and details are gone, and I parted on bad terms with that team (I hope that expression fits here). So I am always not sure in which direction my history with the Ubuntu community influences my judgement of such situations. Grain of Salt and stuff.
"I think the short of it is that Mark Shuttleworth, leader of Ubuntu, wrote an article in which he ad hominem attacks criticizers of the Mir project."
As someone who read that blog post for the first time today and with no context - all I can say is that it didn't come across that way to me. What I got was grousing about political motivations for a paragraph - nobody was named or called out and it was only a few sentences worth of commentary.
Now I understand that there was subtext there that I - as someone not involved in that community - undoubtedly missed. But when I read the OP then read the Shuttleworth post, I could only see it in the most oblique fashion.
Regardless of what the people involved say or write publicly, this conflict and others like it are really about power.
With several dozen million Ubuntu desktop users worldwide[1], Canonical has become the gravitational center of the FLOSS desktop and a promising platform for other form factors. No other FLOSS desktop comes even remotely close in terms of mass adoption.
As a consequence, many other FLOSS projects that historically have perceived themselves as more important "upstream projects" to the Ubuntu desktop have now become, effectively, contributing projects to Ubuntu. It is now they who depend on Canonical to reach and interact with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.
For the individuals who identify themselves with those other projects, this tectonic shift in power has not been enjoyable. More and more of them are gradually realizing that if they want to continue working with Canonical, it will have to be on Canonical's terms.
How does KDE depend on Ubuntu? It's not like KDE will cease to exist if KDE is not included in Ubuntu. And besides, Canonical is more than welcome manage their patches for KWin (or fork KWin) if they really want it to be included in their distribution with their own unique Windowing stack (Mir).
I think the problem here is the attitude coming from Mark Shuttleworth which is a terrible example for the rest of the Ubuntu community. Regardless of what Shuttleworth believes, KDE is a own standalone open source project and does not owe anything to Canonical/Ubuntu.
KDE has been around a lot longer than Ubuntu and will continue to exist for a lot longer. You mention the word "spiral" but I would say KDE has a lot more legs than you give it credit for.
I wonder if this is not a positive thing after all, for a mature project. I do not think KDE should add new features at 200 mph speed. I think Ubuntu is actually going too fast.
Nobody lobbied hard. Somebody sent somebody some mails and all of a sudden it's made out as if canonical was lobbying very hard and putting major pressure.
I refuse to believe there was major lobbying until I see actual emails (and the number of emails).
It wasn't just "someone", it was Mark Shuttleworth taking time out of his day to attack the person in a public blog post. That's pretty major no matter which way you look at it.
Because they don't want to break functionality and get blamed for things. If people refuse to support them though, that's another issue. And it IS ridiculous that KDE continues to support Windows but won't support Mir..
Because KDE is still relevant in terms of desktop market share/adoption %. They should not give that share up without a "fight", although they may prefer to use a word like "trying".
> There were over 25 million Ubuntu users at last count
And Ubuntu and Unity are still a bug ridden mess. I know it's about money and manpower and it's hard to fix sometimes complicated bugs but I've switched to KDE recently just because of the annoying bugs in 13.10.
Some examples:
- No Menu on Eclipse Kepler (it's only the most used FOSS IDE) - there is a workaround on askubuntu through.
- While moving a lot of files with nautilus my system starts grinding - turns out gvsd-metadata occopius 4GB memory and one cpu core. Nautilus uses 1GB memory and and another CPU core.
- indicator-application uses 100% CPU randomly
- Firefox colors are pale after switching windows
- Random artifacts on GUI elements while working with the system for a longer time.
- Drag and Drop does not work reliably.
- Switching Windows and Workspaces does not work reliable.
- I can start Firefox in Lightdm without beeing logged in. Just add an event then Evolution starts up. Let's you also happily sends Mail through the lightdm user.
- Without Evolution adding an event does nothing. Just does not work.
> I can start Firefox in Lightdm
without beeing logged in. Just add
an event then Evolution starts up.
Let's you also happily sends Mail
through the lightdm user.
That's pretty darn bad. You have reported this, right?
Some of these issues are also happening in 12.04 LTS. We use Unity and 12.04 LTS on 40 workstations at my university. I'm at the moment the student admin so I'm seeing maybe more bugs than others. All of these issues are on launchpad but nobody cares. My professor - after switching from 8.09 to 12.04 could reliable reproduce several unity bugs in the window switching and icon handle code.
If Unity and Ubuntu would be more stable and more polished (e.g. good support for legacy apps like ghostview and emacs/xemacs in Unity) and stable file management, few memory leaks - it would be an fantastic system. I really like Unity and the ideas behind it but sometimes you can't really work the system.
> I cannot remember that I have ever been insulted in public, in fact I'm not used to getting insulted at all. And if people normally are able to say sorry. I and many others asked Mark to withdraw his comment and post an apology instead.
Ok, see here's the problem. The developer community, and especially the FOSS portion of the developer community, love to tout the fact that the community is a "meritocracy". But what does that mean? Certainly, insulting individuals (as opposed to their work product) is not in the spirit of a meritocracy.
...but neither is asking for an apology.
Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have made a technical decision. If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, the fate of their products will be determined by the merit of those decisions. That they also spilled so many vitriolic words in the direction of the "competition" should matter not at all.
If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, then the appropriate reaction would be to continue making the best decisions possible, producing the best products possible, and ignoring anything anyone says that does not speak to the merits of those decisions or products.
...if this is a meritocracy.
Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.
It's a little ironic to see this guy complaining about people insulting him. In porting Google Chrome to Linux we encountered a bug running under kwin, and my colleagues tracked the issue down to a bug in kwin and even wrote a patch that fixed the bug only to be met by rudeness from him.
(To be clear, it's fine with me if someone disagrees with some other software's UI decisions, but it's another thing to call those other people "stupid" when those decisions are to make use of an API you explicitly implemented, or call their code "broken" when the bug is demonstrably yours. Quoted words are his.)
"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."
Saying that a program and its behavior is stupid, is not a personal insult. For example, I think my gnome3 fallback menu bar is stupid for crashing when loading its icons for a particular sub menu (running unstable). I do not however think that gnome3 developers are stupid.
No I have not. On Debian Unstable, I always give the bugs a few months to sort themselves out. Could be a problem in the packages recent dependencies, graphic driver regression, or who knows.
I also want to do some preliminary debugging of the issue before sending in a bug report.
I know people are prone to take such remarks personally, but it's directed at the action, not the person. "You did something stupid" is not "You are stupid".
> I just have to use Chrom* because Opera committed suicide.
12.16 still works nicely (apart from Google+, which takes up unreasonable amounts of CPU time, but unfortunately there are some people there worth reading).
Being really clear that some suggestion is not right at all is totally different than getting personal. He's German and really direct regarding technical suggestions. Doesn't make him personal or rude.
"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."
Recommending that they should not do their own stupid things describes the things that they are doing as stupid. I am not interesting in debating how many angels can dance on the head of this particular pin any further, I don't even have a dog in this bloody fight.
It's true for KDE in general. When KDE4 was being made, many many users implored them not to break things for the heck of it. But they went ahead and did it anyway. This ended in them calling their users are stupid and having no clue.
TBH, most people have moved away from KDE. There are very few people using KDE. Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity. They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.
> Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity.
> They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
I'm surprised that people who prefer Ubuntu would dislike a desktop environment that is highly configurable and allows knowledgeable users to take greater control of their computing experience.
> Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.
I'm one of the people that moved from KDE to Gnome after the fuck-ups with KDE 4.x. Plasma taskbar became unreadable after a few hours use and they kept blaming nvidia drivers when in fact plasma had a pixmap leak. I moved on and never looked back.
I would be interested in empirical evidence of the contrary too.
It seems likely that the percentage of linux users using KDE has shrank, while probably the total number went up, but I'd be very curious to get hard data.
KDE 4.0 was released almost 6 years ago, and I wish people would get over it. 4.11 is not the same software. It's very fast and stable, and if you develop for it, you can count on long-term compatibility. It's GNOME and Unity that break backward compatibility with new releases now. They certainly have the right to do that, and I respect their desire to move their desktop forward, but it means software like qtcurve no longer works for GTK because some developers don't want to have to rewrite for every GNOME release.
Well, it was very fast and stable. For the last few KDE major releases plasma-desktop has been segfaulting on a regular basis for me. I looked up the backtrace a few versions back and found a bugreport where a lot of people were experiencing the same issue; the developers confirmed it and reckoned that it was probably a bug in some new Qt functionality they'd moved to that they couldn't do much about.
Looks like it was fixed on 10/28, which is definitely a long turnaround since it was first posted 10 months ago. I suppose it took so long because it was a pretty specific situation (removing a notification while inserting one while hitting a 10 minute timer) but still, that just goes to show two things: the latest KDE has fixed a ton of bugs, even unusual ones like that, and KDE still needs more people looking at bugs so things like this can get a faster turnaround in the future.
If anyone does find something like this that isn't getting enough attention on the official bug reports, I'd suggest just mentioning it to a developer friend who uses KDE.
Funny thing that I actually moved away from ubuntu several years ago, and from gnome a little bit before that and
I wonder where you got your data, the 2013 /r/linux survey found out: "Just like last year, there is a lot of variety in what /r/Linux is using as it's graphical environment of choice with "Other" being the top category. The top three are KDE 4, Gnome 3, and XFCE. (...)
KDE 4.x was third last year. This year it moved up to first place.
For the second year in a row Unity wins "Most Hated Environment" of /r/Linux, followed by GNOME 3, KDE 4, and then KDE 3.
And gnome is well known for telling their users they're stupid and clueless, but I don't remember reading such a thing from kde in the ten years I've been using it.
> Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.
A thousand times this. Being a participant in various FOSS things and other projects I have come to learn that the idea of a meritocracy is a thought terminating cliche. It is perpetuated by the nerd culture around FOSS that can program beautiful stuff day in and day out but has a chronic deficiency in social ability.
I know it's kind of a worn-out point by now and I will probably gather downvotes for it, but that's the sad truth of the matter. As nerds, we like to reduce our reality to technicalities, those pesky old meat space constraints only hold us back! And that works well for a couple of years when one quarter of the community awakens to their social core, realizing the community around them in horror while another quarter of the community doubles down and goes borderline sociopathic. Then those two sides fight a bitter fight and the whole community suffers.
To me, all this comes down to one problem: centralization. If you don't reduce your scope and humble your ambition, you will fall by it. Happens. Every. Time. Canonical always aspired to be the Linux distro but to achieve that, it had to accept a cost to the community in form of collateral damage.
It's human constraints holding back FOSS. Ambition in the misguided few (sadly, mostly people who aspire to and assume leadership positions), carelessness and sheep behavior in the idealistic many.
There is no technical solution to this and technical solutions is what the majority of FOSS participants come in for. Only to find that - surprise! - the FOSS community has the same meat space constraints as every other goddamn thing on this planet. Until we put more emphasis on not letting social skills atrophy in this atrophy-enabling climate, this history will simply keep on repeating itself.
KDE and Ubuntu are different projects, with different objectives and managed by different people. Besides they have a very specific relationship: KDE is upstream and Ubuntu is downstream. I can't really see why there's a problem with meritocracy here as we're talking about different communities.
To put it simple: Canonical proposed a patch for KWin and KWin didn't accept it. Now Canonical can maintain that patch or not. End of the story.
That's why forks happen and that's one of the beautiful things of open source (if KWin doesn't meet Ubuntu needs: customize it!).
I think this post is about communication between upstream and downstream. If you ask me, I wish there was more Jono and less Mark. Canonical is trying to influence some external projects and it doesn't look like things are working as smooth as they could. "Open Source Tea Party"?
That's not how you make upstream accept your changes.
At the end I think Canonical will maintain any patch that upstream can't or doesn't want to accept, say KWin, Intel, or whatever. Eventually, if MIR is the future of Linux desktop, upstream projects will include support for it.
There sort of is. We're talking about a meritocracy regarding things that aren't done yet. X.org vs Wayland vs Mir... You tell me which one has better merits; other than X, I've only read blogs and seen some screenshots and block diagrams.
You could maybe base the merit on the process, but I think they'd all lose.
Feelings don't preclude a meritocracy, but the snippet I quoted implies that Martin's decision to disavow Ubuntu is (at least in part) a reaction to the lack of an apology. That is, he has made a decision based not on the merits of any technology or decision, but rather based on emotion. Hence, not a meritocracy...
Why? He's kwin maintainer based on merit. He'll continue to make decisions the way he did before.
What you're suggesting is that insults are acceptable. And if you read his posts correctly, he already explained that his decisions were based on technical merit. However, if the other side totally fails to be able to handle being judged on technical merit, then too bad for them.
My theory is that, with all the low hanging fruit already picked, technology gathering bigger crowds, innovation slowing down, the community is increasingly guided by politics. Maybe developers are tomorrow's lawyers.
What a lot of people (surprisingly) miss is that Open Source in general has several distinct camps:
- the ethically politically motivated: there are many sides of the spectrum here. Copyleft GNU advocates are a good example. Writing GPLv3/v2 is an issue of freedom and the code the write is a political statement
- the open source as a business model types: another category with different sides of the spectrum. Companies that dual-license as a restriction mechanism is another example. One license model allows anyone to use it with a GPLv3 license, while the author company really expects to make money of the consuming companies that do not want (or cannot) use that license. The consuming company has to buy another "commercial" license that does not require them to GPL anything.
- the I-just-want-to-build-cool-stuff camp: I found it on GitHub, so I just fork and use it. Often, they don't really understand licensing restrictions (or care). It is about hacking.
- the I-want-this camp: They may be seriously fed up with a particular piece of software. So much, that they are starting a new Open Source software and putting a lot of intellectual (and emotional) effort to build something they envision. Criticisms to the project are direct criticisms to the person. After all, the motivation for creating the project was personal.
- etc
The point of this, is that it is easy to forget that the motivation for using and creating Open Source for all these camps is drastically different. It is easy to get political, be attacked by zealots, get personal, or emotionally offensive.
> I had to learn that it is no longer possible to criticize Ubuntu/Canonical for their technical decisions and to disagree with them. There are many users who seem to think that Ubuntu is a religion and Canonical without fail. If you criticize technical decision you are a heretic and the holy inquisition is coming after you to burn you. Ubuntu has lost it's meaning. There is no human kindness in this community any more.
People criticise Ubuntu and Canonical all the time. There are countless posts and comments about the Amazon lens, and many on their decision to go with Mir over Wayland.
Of course it is possible to criticize Ubuntu or Canonical.
What he means is that it's impossible for a prominent developer to criticize their technical decisions without facing a ton of hateful backlash from Ubuntu fans and Mark Shuttleworth himself. Which he knows, from experience, because he did just that, criticized the design of Mir and said that he wouldn't support it, and he got exactly that backlash.
Be respectful
Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work
together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and
do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don't allow
frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community
where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a
productive one.
Calling people "the Open Source Tea Party", "purely political", "outraged individuals" who have "NIH'd just about every important piece of the stack" is pretty much in pure opposition to the Ubuntu code of conduct; but since Mark does this, other people feel like this kind of behavior is acceptable and pile on the attack.
I thought that was so childish and crass of him. I really dislike the term "Open Source Tea Party". It's just so infuriating on so many levels.
First of all, it's a lazy insult - it's just applying a label (also known as name calling) to put people down without any context. It implies that these people are irrational, inflexible and idealistic, but with a bad connotation. He could have argued that those things are true in a more diplomatic way, and more importantly, by using evidence other than just claiming that mir is "important" or "a huge leap forward for gaming performance...". Instead, he just labels the people who happen to disagree with him as the tea party. Great.
Secondly, I think it's fair to be concerned about what's going on with mir. Maybe he's telling the truth that they just want the best solution... I think everyone, whether you want Wayland or not, would like to move away from X. So maybe mir is the right way to go. However, they failed to make the case for this in a typical open source way. Why not improve Wayland instead of going off and doing your own thing? If the direction of Wayland is awful or wrong, why not point that out? And instead of just claiming that's the case, why not try to use evidence to prove that it's the case? I have been following this closely, but have no idea what the advantages of the two proposed systems is better... but it certainly seems that almost everyone other than Canonical is rooting for and working on Wayland, which isn't really a good sign...
It's very easy to be skeptical because of all the good will they sacrificed by sticking Amazon adds in my god-damned desktop. Honestly, that seems like such a shameless land-grab for clueless users' personal data which really damages their privacy. It wouldn't even have been an issue if it was simply opt in. So, because they made that poor decision, people are skeptical, critical, maybe even a bit irrational. But that shouldn't be surprising. And even if you're being personally attacked yourself, it doesn't make it right to attack other people - many of whom aren't trying to make their contributions a business and are doing their work with pure intentions - unlike Canonical and Mark who clearly have a business angle in all this (which, in and of itself, is totally fine).
Sorry for the rant, guys. I mean, do people really think "open source tea party" is at all fair?
"Sorry for the rant, guys. I mean, do people really think "open source tea party" is at all fair?"
No. If nothing else, it is an insult to the original (Boston) Tea Party. One might remember that those individuals were protesting irrational decisions made by a king who was far isolated from said subjects.
The King had a very rational reason for wanting those taxes. It went quite a bit deeper on the colonial side since they had no say in the matter and expected all the rights of a British citizen.
The implementation of those taxes by using troops and "general warrants" was a problem. Sadly, the formation of thought on that is once again back with us and not imposed by a ruler across the ocean.
As to the modern Tea Party, I guess it depends who you talk to on if they think its an insult.
I think everyone, whether you want Wayland or not, would like to move away from X.
I'm not terribly eager to move away from X. I'll switch if there's something that runs all my programs, and does everything X does but cleaner and better. A POSIXy version of rio from Plan 9 would be a good start.
But Wayland isn't that and I'm not eager to adopt Wayland. Let alone fucking Mir.
Yeah I guess I don't really know what I'm talking about... but having had to open Xorg.conf a couple of times over the past few months I'd be happy to leave X behind.
I am very much rooting for Wayland. It is going to bring features like screen/tmux to graphical programs. Nothing like going to work at home mid day and attaching to the individual programs that you had running on your other machine. This is the reason I currently use terminal programs instead of X ones. Doesn't sound like Mir is providing more over Wayland than just including input, which arguably could be provided outside of the server itself.
Wayland probably isn't going to provide remote display capability, let alone anything like that.
All Wayland really does is hand out framebuffers in local RAM. The Wayland devs consider app display remoting to be a special case used by relatively few users, and outside the scope of the core project.
Yeah, and the nice thing about Wayland barely doing anything is that almost all issues are someone else's problem. The rendering libraries the Wayland developers suggest applications used are totally broken? Not part of Wayland, stop blaming them. XWayland is in a completely unusable state? Not part of Wayland, stop spreading FUD. I remember both of these actually happening.
I do not believe that Wayland would provide this functionality, rather that it would provide separation to enable this functionality. This functionality would be implemented in a compositor for Wayland. There is something similar for X, called Xpra. They list porting to Wayland as one of their "project ideas."
Canonical and the Ubuntu legion have alienated the rest of the FOSS community. It's a shame to see the distro that introduced many of us to GNU/Linux fall so far. Martin has made the right move for his personal sanity.
Came to say this. As a poor Supply Chain student with a sluggish windows desktop, I installed Ubuntu in my desperation to finish a paper I was writing. It introduced me to the world of Linux, Free Software, and programming in general (starting with R in my first job as a supply chain analyst).
I just installed Arch. It pains me to say it, but I can't put up with Ubuntu's "My way or the highway" antics any more. It is a shame.
> We considered and spoke with several proprietary options, on the basis that they might be persuaded to open source their work for a new push, and we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.
I still don't understand what made him change his mind completely and disregard all the problems, which the rift created by Mir would cause.
Bothering others to support Mir would be a common occurrence now and a direct consequence of this completely unnecessary "hard split". And it's unacceptable to bug people constantly when they say they aren't interested in that support.
While I very much dislike the direction of Ubuntu, and am irritated by the paranoid management style of Shuttleworth - this seems a very emotional response to a very vague, very mild criticism.
Of course, nobody needs an excuse to stop working for Ubuntu for free, so if it bothers him so much this is the best decision.
I've not followed any of the goings on in the Ubuntu community for a while. Reading this, I get the feeling that I missed something. Did Mark Shuttleworth chew out someone in a way that makes Linus look gentle and nice, or something?
Nice move by Mark to accuse others of full NIH (and "open source tea-partying" no less), when they announced and started working on Mir long after Wayland was already gaining traction.
Ubuntu does lots of things right (being overly decisive being one of them), but this whole Mir-affair just strikes me as plain absurd.
> If I as a developer feel personally attacked (and I did that) the
chances that I with the maintainer hat on will revert my patch goes down and
not up
I had similar experience proposing patches and people feeling offended because I criticized their "sacred" selected options. People identify with their work, so if you criticize their work, they fell criticized.
"Trust me on this one, I am the one right because it is me and I have so much experience than anybody else..."
It seems at the end of the day FOSS is not different than other organizations in the power fights area.
Am I the only one here who thinks Martin (and others) are being way too sensitive?
Here is Mark's comment that (I believe) Martin is so upset about:
> Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)
I don't know the specifics, but most of the backlash against Mir is political (and rightly deserved). Canonical had originally stated they were going to support wayland, like most other distros, but were suddenly overcome with a huge case of NIH and decided to make their own. While in the early stages of development Canonical released some "technical information" which basically blatantly lied about wayland and it's capabilities.
Mostly Mir exists because Canonical had a huge case of NIH.
For completeness: Canonical still claims that they couldn't do what they wanted, especially with mobile devices, using Wayland. Or at least, they would have needed to write various non-standard extensions to the Wayland protocol which would make it incompatible with vanilla Wayland. The best source for this is this blog by someone working at Canonical: http://blog.cooperteam.net/search/label/mir
I don't understand graphics systems enough to evaluate their claims, and I've yet to hear an impartial analysis of them. Possibly no-one who can evaluate them is impartial.
Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors
attack a project on purely political grounds, you have
to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who
belongs to the Open Source Tea Party And to put all
the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for
approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think
about shell development. Every app developer will
consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those
same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every
important piece of the stack they can get their hands
on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and
hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to
Canonical torture the English language in their efforts
to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but
not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.
In context, this was written shortly after Martin Gräßlin had said that he would not support Mir in KWin. KWin is the KDE window manager/shell; he is one of those "1% of all developers" for whom the display server really matters. And unlike what Mark claims, KWin does not support Windows (other parts of the Qt and KDE stack do, but not KWin).
So, he sees this as his time essentially being volunteered for him by Mark, to support a display server with an architecture he doesn't agree with, after he's already put the effort in to support the display server that pretty much everyone else in the desktop Linux ecosystem have been targeting. And if you don't agree with Mark, or the technical decisions made leading to Mir, you get branded as "the Open Source Tea Party", "purely political", an "outraged individual" who has "NIH'd just about every piece of the stack."
Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here, but if you're going to call out a project like systemd that is headed in the direction of being the de facto standard in all the other serious Linux distributions, you probably should have looked at the project closely enough to have seen the big deal they make of the correct spelling on their homepage (i.e. systemd vs SystemD). Actually, I'm definitely being overly pedantic here, but his completely dismissive attitude towards systemd makes this KWin post make a bit more sense. Certainly sways me in the direction of agreeing.
No I get that, and I'm not it's biggest fan either, but it's a pretty core component to take the decision lightly. Most of the arguments I see against systemd are very well informed and well reasoned. That's why I categorized his as "dismissive" - and it seems consistent with the accusation that he isn't reasonable, but just doesn't like people disagreeing with him.
seems to imply that the Ubuntu developers will either be the ones to get KDE working on their stack, or go their own way with or without kDE support. It doesn't look like Shuttleworth is insisting through this that Gräßlin devote his time to their project.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of it without extra porting work?
There were people announcing that our software will work
just fine on top of their technical stack, others posted
videos showing our software working somewhat on top of
an (IMHO idiotic) hack. It was decided on a mailinglist
I'm not subscribed to that I would walk people through
the KWin code base in a telco for adjusting KWin for
their technical stack. All of that without ever asking
whether we are interested at all. In case of the telco I
was not even asked whether I would want to participate
and whether I have time for that. I experienced this as
a constant pressure and a disrespect to our own
decisions.
It sounds an awful lot like Canonical expecting Gräßlin to spend his time on this project despite the fact that he's not interested in it at all.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer
anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of
it without extra porting work?
I believe the XMir compatibility is supposed to be at the application level, not the window manager/compositor level.
KWin is a window manager and compositor, which is fairly specific to the precise graphics stack underneath it.
Most likely the "open source tea party" post wherein Mr. Shuttleworth collectivized and dismissed any and all critics as irrational haters with nothing of substance to say.
I think alot of people have unrealistic expectations of open-source in general. Open source has nothing to do with community, merit, etc... Open source has little to nothing to do with collaboration.
What open source IS, is a Darwinian paradigm for software. Software is made, released into the wild. It succeeds, or it doesn't. If you don't like it, you fork it, release back into the wild, and whichever version is better lives on. Linus, Mark Shuttleworth, RMS, etc... - they don't owe shit to anyone.
People used to rag on SUSE for their deal with Microsoft, and now they rag on Canonical. But guess what - SUSE survived and is still a billion dollar business (it was sold to Attachmate recently for 2.2 billion), and Canonical is making the most popular desktop distro, and the only desktop vendor with the balls to take on the mobile space.
BTW, I fully support Martin's decision to abandon Ubuntu if he wants to. Ubuntu is obviously going ahead with Mir and Unity, if it becomes difficult to support, switch to SUSE, or Debian, or fork Ubuntu...
I would like to make a small connection. Novell bought SUSE in 2003 when they were losing business. They continued lose business while SUSE grew, so they tried to squeeze maximum profits out of SUSE by laying off a lot of their staff and making a marketing/patent deal with Microsoft. They still ended up having to sell out. SUSE is still going strong thanks to a great community.
> SUSE is still going strong thanks to a great community.
And $225 million in yearly revenue doesn't hurt...
Personally, openSUSE has always been my favourite distro. A bit sentimental perhaps, my first Linux was SUSE 6 back in the day, running 13.1 now. So fast and so flexible...
SUSE has done a great job maintaining its projects, and I especially like how they focus on building things that are useful to anyone rather than just themselves. With the recent troubles between Ubuntu and KDE, I wonder if Kubuntu will be able to maintain its status as the leading KDE distribution.
Yup. SUSE Build Service is IMO the best app of it's kind, I love SUSE Studio, and SUSE's Imagewriter is by far the best utility for writing bootable USB sticks...
Honestly, if Kubuntu disappeared tomorrow I don't think it would be a bad thing, KDE users still have SUSE, Archlinux, etc...
Edit - And of course SUSE is amongst the top contributors towards KDE, Gnome, Libre Office, and many other open-source projects, certainly contributing more than Canonical and often more than Red Hat...
I have used openSUSE on my desktop before, and I am running it in a VM again. 13.1 looks great. I love how they cater their GUI to power users and include quick access to things like virtualization. They also include FreeType 2.5, which I otherwise have to install manually. So far it isn't better enough than my own customized desktop to switch, but if things get worse between KDE and Canonical, I'll definitely switch my laptop OS.
That's a bummer. It sucks when someone is driven out
of a community by the behavior of others. :-(
Sadly, this isn't unheard of in the F/OSS world, and this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Even more sadly, it probably won't be the last.
I could not disagree more. Nothing about being part of the FOSS world mandates acting like a dick.
FOSS is about freedom. One can do whatever they want.
Just because you are free to do something, doesn't mean that you should do it, or that you're not an asshole for doing it. I'm not in any way suggesting that Mark or anybody else should be denied their right to free speech. But verbally abusing somebody else for having a different belief is still being a dick, even so.
I don't see what is sad about this.
OK, tell me this... who benefits from this outcome? As far as I can tell, the answer is "nobody". OTOH, who suffers? Well, potentially everybody who's part of the KDE on Ubuntu ecosystem. And the person who's being bullied and abused into walking away from something that he would probably prefer to remain involved in, IF it weren't for the asshole'ish behavior.
The drama is what is nonsensical
I don't see it. If somebody is being a dick, calling them out for their behavior is hardly "nonsensical drama". It's just being forthright and honest.
Learned something new today. SABDFL: Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for life. That initialism actually goes to his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABDFL.
I want to say fuck fuck fuck Unity! just let gnome-classic back, it's so perfect, so easy to use & do customization.
Ubuntu should keep simple & easy to use, that's why ubuntu is popular.
You ubuntu people waste time to develop unity for years, the result is that you fucked the users up, and now you continue want to do that endlessly, ubuntu is come less & less popular.
You know what, I installed ubuntu12.04 while it come out, but I am very disappointed, I wasted a whole day try to make it easy to use, but I give up finally, and re-installed the ubuntu10.04 instead.
When ubuntu 13.04 come out, I did this again, and changed back to ubuntu 10.04 again.
Now ubuntu 13.10 come out, I just want to say, fuck off, I will never install it.
You know what, you have been waste time for years to do negative work to make ubuntu worse.
What's wrong with you people, I just don't get it ...
I still like ubuntu, but I am already start to try other linux distribution out, like Mint,
I want to say that, if ubuntu keep in this direction, I probably will say good by to Ubuntu which I have used for 7 years, since ubuntu 7.10 when I was still in collage.
Maybe you think I am a little impolite, I do loved ubuntu, I am just expressing my disappointment about what you ubuntu people have done to this lovely os for recent years!
It is at present, and I expect it will be possible to use other desktops for 14.04, which is important as it is a Long Term Support release with support for 5 years.
I'm a bit hazy about what happens when Mir replaces X. I gather that this particular argument is about ensuring that the compositor for KDE will work with Mir, or, more accurately, who does the work to ensure that KWin will work on Mir.
Look into the MATE Desktop Environment. [1] "MATE is a fork of GNOME 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for Linux…"
This is a cautionary tale. It's unwise to burn bridges after a conflict, because you never know what the future may hold. Justified or not, leaving a stink bomb in your wake is a bad resume builder. It makes people more wary, not more confident.
The pain from interpersonal conflicts is real and powerful. But how we handle ourselves during conflict says more about us than any amount of code we'll ever write.
I do hope KDE will keep working on Ubuntu? I have to use Ubuntu on some workstation, having KDE on it makes it reasonable (the default UI is an immediate dismiss for me, I'm clearly not the target audience of that one).
To me Ubuntu is to other Linuxes, what Apple is to PC. The more closed, independent, "simple but beautiful" (noting that "simple" is not my own style and preference) variant.
KDE has always been a second-class citizen on Ubuntu in terms of support, testing etc. (and this is Ubuntu policy - they provide a more streamlined linux and emphasise consistency over user choice. Thus any non-default desktop is less well supported than the default, and KDE's philosophy is particularly inimical to theirs). With Ubuntu moving to its own ubuntu-only display driver stack, it will be a lot more effort to support KDE on Ubuntu.
If enough people care enough and step up to the plate then KDE will continue to work on Ubuntu, but I wouldn't count on that happening.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. OS X doesn't rely on Windows developers to make it better, Ubuntu needs other developers from across the Linux community to get better.
You can't really do "closed" Linux, because you (the closer) need everyone else. And, as seen with Intel's rejection of a mir patch, everyone else can shut you out.
Concerning crappy Ubuntu UI, try Linux Mint. I prefer it to both Windows and OSX (best of both) after minimal customization, ie vertical maximize on title dblclick.
I use Ubuntu on my desktop and have sent a number of patches to them and their upstreams when I encountered problems.
One thing about Ubuntu is that, if you put Android to one side (Android basically uses the Linux kernel, but does not use things such as libc etc.), Ubuntu is the largest Linux desktop by far. Wikipedia web logs show them coming at 77 times the number of their nearest competitor, Fedora ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ).
Combine this massive user base, which often is not of the traditional Unix user background, with its automated bug report tools like apport, and traditional bug reporting trouble ticket web sites like Launchpad, and you have a massive exposure of the traditional Linux/X/fdo/Gnome ecosystem to users. Which means many of the "eyeballs for bugs" can, and sometimes does, come from Ubuntu. I have mostly looked at the evince/poppler/cairo applications and dependencies, and it seems to me that far more bugs are discovered on Ubuntu than in any of the other distro bug trouble ticket systems. If apport reports were more carefully maintained, that number would increase by some multiple.
I have also noticed that Canonical is good for patching bugs reported anywhere on Ubuntu. For example, if a patch or bug report is languishing in the Debian trouble ticket system, Ubuntu will sometimes grab it and apply it to Ubuntu. So reported unfixed bugs in Debian, with patches languishing in its trouble ticket system, will be patched in Ubuntu. For example, this ( http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570904 ) bug report was never touched by any Debian developer, but it was patched downstream on Ubuntu.
The thing about Ubuntu is it seems to have bad relations with so many of its upstreams in the FLOSS community. Linux. X. Gnome. Debian. Banshee. And I guess in this specific case KDE.
It is too bad that things are not working more smoothly, where the massive user base exposing bugs is not flowing upstream more smoothly, and making Linux, Debian, Gnome better products. However much Ubuntu forks things, it is still very dependent on these upstreams, Gnome included. Yes, Gnome included - take a close look, Unity changes some things, but there are still tons of dependencies on Gnome.
And Ubuntu really is dependent on the FLOSS community. When Ubuntu finds a massive fd.o or Gnome bug, it tends to get patched quickly. The entire ecosystem of all distros is looking at it. I have seen a lot of Unity only bugs languish. Basically, 99% of them have to be fixed by a Canonical engineer. Usually this does not happen, even if it is a major bug you sometimes have to wait a long time. Ubuntu has the user base but it does not have the developer base.
The bug was reported in February 2010 to the Debian bug tracker, where it was forever ignored, although the fix was trivial (replace the vol_id comment with blkid). In May 2010 Ubuntu downstream is syncing with Debian ( https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-target/67ubuntu... ), sees the bug report and fixes it in Ubuntu. Then in February 2011, a duplicate of the original bug is reported and gets fixed in Debian.
I was impressed by the fact that Ubuntu fixed this within three months even though the bug report was in the upstream ticket system, where it had not been fixed. Debian fixed it nine months after Ubuntu.
I appreciate the fact that Canonical has done things which help Ubuntu which sometimes, inadvertently or not, hurt Debian. For example, Canonical hiring so many Debian developers helped make the sarge release late. As I said in my post, Ubuntu is not that good about sending patches upstream. For a while, I was of the mind that Ubuntu was a mixed bag that in some ways helped and in some ways hurt the FLOSS community. Although over the past year or two, it seems the trend has been more toward the latter way.
wikipedia user agent based logs are not a reliable source, and from this source it seems to me the closest competitor is linux other with 4 times more hits than ubuntu.
Funny that distrowatch stopped being used as reference by ubuntu followers since ubuntu fell from the top to make room for mint and debian, /r/linux survey data doesn't corroborate wikipedia data either.
Does anyone know why clicking the link to this page in Firefox/Ubuntu makes the active light on my webcam come on for a second just as the page finishes loading?
> All of that without ever asking whether we are interested at all. In case of the telco I was not even asked whether I would want to participate and whether I have time for that. I experienced this as a constant pressure and a disrespect to our own decisions.
This is one of the reasons that demotivated me from developing FLOSS, the constant pressure and lack of respect towards the taken decisions.
That conclusion is absurd and totally wrong on so many levels. It's the same as saying:
"This is one of the reasons that demotivated me from developing commercial software, the constant pressure and lack of respect towards the taken decisions."
I can presume that you didn't even understand the context before jumping into your conclusion. My conclusion is not towards FLOSS, but towards the hostility of people behind FLOSS...
Since Ubuntu is just "let's sync repos from debian testing every 6 months and add our own crap" just use debian testing. You even get rolling release.
Btw, I know nobody who uses standard Ubuntu. Everyone uses some variant like Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc. which are really well put together distros for the average user.
Your incessant whoring for Canonical in this discussion is the precise behavior that many in the Linux community hate about vocal proponents of Ubuntu. The fact that you just implied that the developers of other distros (which includes Debian!) are not good and competent is disgusting.
It's people like you to whom Martin was referring when he wrote, "There are many users who seem to think that Ubuntu is a religion and Canonical without fail. If you criticize technical decision you are a heretic and the holy inquisition is coming after you to burn you."
Hyper-sensitive people like you are exactly the problem we have. I said something good about Ubuntu and you guys are off assuming that I said that the rest is not good and competent. Why do people assume that?
X is good doesn't mean Y is bad. If I say, trust me, you will get back to using X does not mean Y is bad. It means X is that good.
In idiomatic English, "actually" in the context you used it suggests a contrast to something else. "I'm considering asking Bob to do this job." "You should ask Sally, she actually knows what she's doing."
I loved my debian and I still do. But the last hdd fail prompted me to try something new and I was very busy at the time. Naturally I wanted the OS to work 'just outside the box'. I'm reasonably satisfied with the Mint now.
Try reading the article again. He states that Canonical put pressure on him to make Mir specific changes to KWin. And, bizarrely, got him to do a walk through of the KWin codebase, without telling him!!!
"a community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system."
I wish bloggers can find a better term for referring to something specific to software development. An ecosystem is a specific term in ecology.
