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Comment by hmo09 | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the technical considerations, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of many different companies co-operating on core software. Canonical's philosophy seems to fly directly against that - so far we have:

Launchpad / Upstart / Unity / Mir

Launchpad is free-software by name only, and Canonical actively discourage you to setup your own instance.

Upstart hasn't been widely adopted outside of Ubuntu, and has been replaced by the technically superior systemd.

Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view, and now we have Mir. So past history isn't filling me with confidence. Their philosophy seems to be "patch first, ask questions later".

I'm amazed how Canonical has the resources to keep branching out so much while producing a distribution every 6 months. I was under the impression they weren't yet making a profit.

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Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?

Unity is the same way: it is open source. If you don't like it, fork it and fix it. Or use one of the alternatives. This is not Windows or OS X. Vote with your feet and move over to Gnome 3, Xfce, LXDE, or another DE. If enough people do, Canonical will see the effects and stop putting effort into Unity.

IMHO, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of everyone trying to pull it into their own direction. Companies are often forced to cooperate when they don't have another choice, but if they did, they would push their own ideas of what the infrastructure should be on everyone else.

I'm an Arch user. I love pacman. So easy to use.

But I would personally much rather see pacman (and every other distro-locked package distribution format) dropped where everyone adopted debs or rpms.

What I would like the most, though, is that the most logically technically advanced and easy to use package manager win, and everyone just adopt that. I know that pacman makes building package builds insanely easy, compared to debs or rpms.

> Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?

A couple of points:

- one example does not plenty make

- Nix has a really interesting technical design. However, it trades the ability to patch security holes across your entire system for the ability to install multiple packages side by side and have atomic upgrades.

More importantly (I was lying about the two points), the package manager is tied intimately to the guts of the distro, it's much less shocking than having Ubuntu implement Unity.

Now, we'll see what becomes of Mir. Whatever mindshare Upstart had went straight to systemd as soon as it came out. If Mir is primarily an expression of hubris, I expect it will follow Upstart in obscurity. If Canonical manage to convince enough developers in the community, they may get something going.

It's not the same. Unity heavily relies on Ubuntu specific patches. There was quite some effort to get unity running under arch Linux

"better" is generally subjective. there's a reason why nixos, upstart, etc, don't catch on.

For pacman vs nix, well, pacman is extremely simple. Extremely reliable. Nix has some design advantages, but that don't translate all that well in the practical world right now. Maybe in the future.

Upstart was used because it was better than traditional init, and was used by Fedora as well. Then again, Linux could have had a much better init system many years ago, but the GPL zealots wouldn't hear of having launchd, and its less restrictive license, be used.

I don't think that's the reason. Apple even relicensed launchd to make it easier to use. It still didn't get adopted.

To clarify, my comment was that even before relicensing, launchd was under a less restrictive license than the GPL -- the APSL allows for binary linking -- but had clauses that didn't allow people to GPL their code. By the time launchd was relicensed, ubuntu had already released upstart, and another init replacement so quickly would have alienated people.

I don't see the problem in wanting to keep the guts of the OS forced-free by license. If any of the deepest components of the Linux stack were MIT or BSD licensed, it wouldn't take long for some business to fork it into a proprietary blob they push for market adoption and you lose the freedom deep in the OS.

With something like init, I would have to disagree. The biggest problem with this decision is that they ended up with an inferior project that wasn't nearly as flexible as the open options. While there are certain areas where keeping things under a restrictive license like the GPL may be useful, the init system is one where I can't see of any way how a closed system would offer any sort of competitive advantage.

> Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view

Has it? Do you have numbers?

Because I see a small number of people who complain very loudly, and often make sweeping claims about how unpopular it is without any evidence, who always get followed by responses from people (like me) who love it...

upstart is used by the current release of RHEL, but it's true that Red Hat has signaled that systemd will come to RHEL as well (Fedora now comes with systemd as far as I know).

I don't see the problem with then using whatever they want, if it provides a good solution, when upstart was developed systemd wasn't even a viable alternative, for me it still is not if stability is what you want and run on a non-desktop system.

Exploring Android internals I much SurfaceFlinger than X in my understanding of its architecture.

"Launchpad is free-software by name only". No, it is actually free as in freedom software. I think you meant to say that it's free by license only.

Don't forget the copyright assignments required by Canonical. Open source, but we get to own your source" is a thin model of open source.

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