Shuttleworth: Free software zealots are antisocial muppets who love to hate | Hacker News Reader

Shuttleworth: Free software zealots are antisocial muppets who love to hate

zdnet.com

15 pointsailideex12 comments

Oy vey, what to say about this. On one hand, the "people who don't like my stuff are crazy loons with an agenda" sounds like something you might hear from a fringe politician (or a mainstream one these days). It's just a bad way of putting it and the paternal condescension it indicates is part of the reason people hated on Ubuntu projects.

On the other, I'm brought to mind of when Tollef Fog Heen left the Debian project. He complained that the community had forgotten its important creed "assume good faith". And I'm inclined to agree with him, the amount of vitriol surrounding systemd was way out of proportion to its actual impact. The amount of shit thrown at Ubuntu for simply writing software is uncanny. If you don't like it, don't use it, even express your criticism; but Ubuntu comes in for criticism for experimenting and trying to move software forward, and that's unfair. Ubuntu and Canonical are willing to take risks. I don't always like them (I don't use Ubuntu), but I can respect them for trying.

EDIT: Here's the post from Tollef: https://hackerfall.com/story/resigning-as-a-debian-systemd-m...

I think he puts the same sentiment in a much more diplomatic way.

This is flamebait. There's nothing actionable here, just a rant. The only takeaway I can see is that I should avoid Ubuntu because its founder no longer believes in its core mission.

Here is the full quote that the author is taking these quotes from:

> +Martin Kozub we have lots of IoT projects using Mir as a compositor so that code continues to receive investment. I agree, it's a very fast, clean and powerful graphics composition engine, and smart people love it for that.

> 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.

> I came to be disgusted with the hate on Mir. Really, it changed my opinion of the free software community.

> 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 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.

He seems to imply iOS/Andoid competition and compositing/convergence have something to do with each other. Neither iOS or Android have it. Windows 10 Phone has it, but no one is buying those, so it's obviously not the killer feature he thinks it is. The complaint is that a ton of resources are being wasted around a feature no one asked for. Phone sized computer with a blob of icons that runs 1 application at a time, without the walled garden, make sure C/C++ code can be utilized, that's all anyone is asking for. Developers will deal with having to redo the UI for their application, it's not a problem that needs solving anytime soon. No walled garden is the feature that would set Canonical apart, there's no need for a silly gimmick to entice potential buyers.

I really don't understand this stance. I try to keep current on Wayland implementation work and was around when the Mir debacle was originally going down (and prior to it, when Canonical stated they would contribute to and use Wayland!).

Writing a competing implementation when you could simply (and announced you would!) contribute to an existing open-source project, then publishing articles with misleading and vague FUD (about the Wayland input stack, which is really just the upstream Linux input stack), when the only reason not to collaborate is to shipping your phone spin quicker while reusing closed-source drivers... is plenty to deserve the response Mir got. It reeks of a get-rich-quick scheme that will divide the graphics infrastructure work on Linux in half while introducing unmaintainable code stuck to an old, frozen, unfixable design. Letting closed-source blobs dictate the design decisions of open-source products results in crippled products and unresolvable technical debt.

If Canonical did not have any intent to profit from deploying Mir, they could have taken the time to work out with the Wayland developers exactly how to make Wayland flexible enough to suit everyone's needs. I'm still not convinced that it isn't, but I'm not an expert on Android graphics infrastructure and there may be some technical hitches. In particular, see the following (in rough reverse chronological order):

This statement of technical reasons it isn't possible to correctly (every pixel in every frame on screen is deterministic) implement a Wayland environment on top of libhybris: http://web.archive.org/web/20141203070549/http://www.jlekstr...

Articles and demonstrations about Wayland compositors running atop libhybris: https://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-a... http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/search/label/android

I guess Mir just gives up on the goal that "every frame is perfect". The right thing for Canonical to do would have been to pour some of its significant capital into funding reverse-engineering efforts to develop open-source drivers for Android hardware. This would benefit the GNU/Linux ecosystem, the Android ecosystem, and device vendors (who wouldn't have to act as middle-men between GPU vendors and consumers for software updates). And we'd get features that are considered impossible today.

But the huge cost of GPU reverse-engineering wouldn't have helped Canonical's bottom line.

Reporting of this by The Register was headlined yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14077029 . It is interesting how the ZDNet headline manages to be more tabloidesque than The Register's.

"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. F* that s*."

Sure Mark, if you want to pretend all the criticism of Canonical was just because it "was investing in (free software)", you go ahead and do that. Just be aware it's still pretending by burying your head in the sand, and ignoring the very real and well reasoned criticisms.

https://plus.google.com/+MarkShuttleworthCanonical/posts/7LY...

That's the post, either it has been edited or he doesn't say anything like that or that quote came from some other interview that I can't find a source for (but which seems to be widely cited in various news items so you'd expect there to be an original somewhere).

It's in the comments of the post.

Ah right, found it, those are by default collapsed and search doesn't find them on the page. Thank you.

Very misleading title.

I'll openly admit that I'm a Free Software zealot, but Mark's characterisation of zealotry doesn't quite apply to my way of thinking:

> 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.

I hate on, and have no respect for, Windows for precisely one reason: it's proprietary. My zealotry is so fierce, that I don't consider Windows to do anything well; because whatever it does, it does unethically. Of course, I acknowledge that if we ignore the ethics, then it may have some good solutions to various things, but I consider the ethics to be so important that there's no way for any other aspect to make up for it. I basically consider Windows to be a fancy tech demo, like Duke Nukem Forever, which so far has still failed to ship anything useful (where "shipping something useful" == "contributing software to the public good").

On the other hand, Canonical have shipped an awful lot of useful stuff, which I respect them for. They've also shipped stuff that I may not find useful, but still thank them for. They've also failed to ship some stuff too, like the server software for UbuntuOne, which remained in the tech demo stage (i.e. proprietary) until it was discontinued.

My opinion of Canonical has never depended on whether they're "mainstream".

> 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. F* that s.

iOS is only a tech preview, so I'll focus on Android.

Android ships a fair amount of stuff, which I respect. I understand that many copies of Android also throw some unethical components into the mix too, which is a shame. It's also a shame that many mobile phone manufacturers are shipping tech previews rather than user-controlled general-purpose computers.

Based on my own usage of Android (I built it from git for my OpenMoko in 2008), it was nice but sluggish. The fact it exists at all is enough to satisfy my ethical concerns about FOSS mobile software: whether or not it gets bundled with proprietary stuff, on crippled remotely-operated spying devices, is a different (but important!) concern that may or may not benefit from competition. On desktops we have Linux, the BSDs, Haiku, FreeDOS, etc. yet many machines still come bundled with Windows and OS X; having many FOSS options didn't neccessarily help FOSS adoption.

Regarding Unity: I see the point of it, as a very user-visible way for Canonical to differentiate themselves from being a "mere vendor" (like, say, Debian). Yes, it's "non-standard", but that's part of the point. I don't actually use it, or GNOME, XFCE, etc. (I use xmonad with no DE) but I've run across it and didn't have any problems.

As for Mir, it could* be a differentiating factor, but it's mostly hidden from the user. It's one of those situations where nobody notices it unless it goes wrong. The same goes for Wayland, and Xorg. For that reason, it's probably better to pool resources into a common, "works everywhere" graphics implementation. Wayland seems to have won the developer mindshare at this point.

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