Mark Shuttleworth says some free software folk are 'deeply anti-social'

Canonical made blunt claims about deficiencies in Wayland which did not exist, they even made claims that others like KDE would happily adopt Mir but those did not know about their luck and did not plan to do this. Oh and add some CLA requirement for contributions to the mix. This understandably provoked a very harsh response from the affected projects.

> What company or individual would want to publish anything new in this kind of environment?

Those who don't insult other people and their work I would say. Then everybody will either be happy about your contribution or at least don't care if your contribution is practically unusable because it's incompatible with everything.

At the time Mir was announced what I heard and what a lot of others heard was "Ubuntu's paid developer resources with relevant expertise are being diverted from Wayland".

Replacing X is sorely needed in the Linux desktop space, and it's a huge project. So big that unless it's frightfully mismanaged then it's extremely dubious what a split in development effort is going to accomplish. And what did it accomplish? I have absolutely no idea what Mir actually shipped that was usable. I have no idea what they were doing substantially differently and why that was good (something about convergence by using bionic so it ran on Android too I think?) And I do remember Canonical at the time arguing they would beat Wayland to something usable... But here we are, I'm still using X, my video payback still tears, and I can't for the life of me think how the Linux desktop has benefited.

I suppose Cinnamon got created and I now run that on top of others vanilla Ubuntu?

But it's a bit odd that once you realize that you can't build your own vision without asking for my opinion, you start throwing a tantrum saying I'm a negativist and that I don't embrace the community spirit.

No one forced Mark to shut down the project, he made the decision on his own.

Also, community and open source is all about contributions and public discussions, not _just_ code dumps.

Oh it's been that for... I dunno, 15 years now? Maybe more to be honest. It's just got worse recently.

Not that the other side doesn't exist too of course, but acceptance is hard - even for better ideas - if the community doesn't buy in.

As long as you do freedom the right way.

Well not so much a "problem" per se, but this was always something that amazed me: Unity was the last thing I was/am looking for.

I get that choices for the DE are great. Unity isn't my cup of tea, but having the option is nice. However, my main quibbles with Ubuntu lied - and still lie - totally elsewhere.

For example, I have never done a dist-upgrade with Ubuntu that didn't break everything and force me to do a new installation. This confuses me a bit, since Ubuntu is a great go-to distro for newcomers to Linux. And from that perspective I get that some people might be upset by the "NIH" of some parts of Ubuntu while others still could use more improvements overall.

That said, I like what Canonical does very much. Ubuntu is - amongst other things - a great live-system. I always make sure to have an Ubuntu Live flash drive around in case I have to save a friend's files because their Windows system kicked the bucket. And I suspect Canonical wouldn't have ended up where they are now if they didn't have the guts to go their own way on some things.

I disagree. While it's probably impossible to come to an objective consensus about any matter of public discussion, at least the vocal people all fall over themselves celebrating the death of Mir and Unity. It also seems to me the hatred toward these software packages prompted Ubuntu to abandon them in the first place, and mind you these were integral pieces that set the Ubuntu desktop apart from every other distro.

So, no, I don't think it's hyperbolic at all to come to this conclusion since we're talking about losing public support to the point of Canonical outright canceling two of their most distinguished programs.

With Wayland, we had the opportunity to present a unified, modern desktop environment to them and say "Here, support this and we'll be happy". Then Mir showed up with absolutely no substantiation or value proposition and retriggered the prospect of nightmarish half-support across a fragmented ecosystem, which tires everyone out, not just vendors.

It was a great illustration that open-source and Linux haven't changed: they're still difficult to work with, and you still don't know if the engineering effort you're dedicating is going to be flushed away due to distro infighting. NVIDIA had already said they were playing a wait and see game before committing more resources to the next-gen Linux desktop, and Canonical only proved their decision right.

Actually, that Wikipedia link is not meant as evidence against Shutterworth's comments or in defense of my own. It's provided merely as context to those who are just now hearing about this situation.

No, my comment regarding the lack of a hate parade is supported only by common sense. A position easily taken once one digs a bit deeper into this subject. You should click through some of the actual references mentioned in (and outside of) that Wikipedia article:

Matthew Garrett's comments, http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

Bradley Kuhn's comments, http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/07/07/harmony-harmful.html

Jonathan Riddell's comments, https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/26/kubuntu-wont-be-switching-m...

Aaron Seigo's comments, https://plus.google.com/+AaronSeigo/posts/76Nd9RSTZWp

Then, tell me if these opinions or the community comments they generated actually seem hateful.

In fact, the only substantial hate generated by this debacle was really in response to Canonical's unfounded swipe at Wayland, which was later retracted, and Shutterworth branding of opponents as "The Open Source Tea Party". And even that level of grandstanding only generated a modicum of hate from the community in comparison to things like systemd or SELinux.

    curl -s --head https://goo.gl/eP6sy | grep '^Location:'

Turns out that he had the impression that whenever we were in a meeting, and he presented an idea, I'd pounce on it and tear it apart. It took him a long time to recognise that I was generally presenting valid criticism, and that it was not a personal attack.

But my reason for being surprised was that my impression of it was that he was someone I respected for often coming up with good ideas.

Good ideas are worth taking the time to figure out how to improve. Bad ideas you shut down in the least amount of time possible - they're not worth spending time on.

To me, the fact that I spent time going through his ideas and finding lots of smaller flaws in them was evidence they were good ideas. All ideas have holes at first, but good ideas can be turned into great plans.

To me, investing time in his ideas was praise. But he at first saw only the criticism.

It taught me to take care to praise explicitly as well, because I could not expect people to understand my motive for spending time criticising their ideas. But I might never have realised if he wasn't the type to be willing to be abrasive enough to start that conversation, as this was how I was used to people communicating in my circles.

This culture disagreements combines with only text communications in which people can't see the body language and tone of voice of others.

You add to it that people don't care about what they say on Internet like they care on reality. Specially after "text only" communication would require orders of magnitude more effort to express yourself without misunderstandings and most people only have limited time for it.

As a result you get an ugly thing.