Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.
Have you used Gnome 3? Familiar and dated are not words I would use to describe it. The Gnome team is clearly focused on user experience and without rendering judgment as to whether or not they've succeeded (disclosure: I think they largely have), it's immediately obvious to new users of Gnome 3 (see Torvalds for the canonical case) that the product is not clinging tightly to familiar design patterns.
RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
RHEL 6.4 still uses systemv init, in fact.
[1]: https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enter...
Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.
For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
Seriously?
They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers.
Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
Mind explaining how funding the development of free software hurts free software?
Why would Apple be so allergic to GPL unless they want the ability to close stuff? If really you think Apple would stay open if they dominated the market look at the iPhone.
Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied.
A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this.
If you don't care about free software as a political goal, there is no purpose to have this discussion in the first place, as you don't care about free software being hurt.
Yes, we'd all like to maximize the amount of F/OSS software in the world. F/OSS is a Good Thing, and I founded a company based around F/OSS for a reason. But it's not this horrible tragedy / affront to humanity, if Apple (or whoever) takes a step away from a purist "Free" software position.
To put it another way: no one owes you (or me, or anybody else) a world full of all the Free software we want. And even more so when plenty of people in the world don't care about software freedom. As long as those of us who do care have the option to fork and continue development of projects, then the actual freedom remains, as far as I'm concerned.
That is exactly my point. You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future." This is a bad metric because if you eliminate all free software development, it reports "everything is okay."
It seems to me that you're turning something analog into something binary. "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future" is true, relative to any particular project, and is - as a worst case - not so horrible. But applying that to "free software culture" in general, as a comparison to the idea of ALL free software development stopping, doesn't sound reasonable to me. It's like you're suggesting that, say, Apple, moving away from GPL'd "Free" software towards BSD software (and possibly a "free core" model) automatically implies that everybody else does too. But that's just as likely to happen as your hypothetical of every Free software developer dying tomorrow.
OK, but "harmed" is a broad term. I'm harmed if I stub my toe, but I'm also "harmed" if I fall of a bridge and land on my head and crack 4 vertebrae. But there's a big difference between those things.
And anyway, my point was (at least partly) that the growth doesn't necessarily stop because of - for example - the Apple deal (or something like it) because people can always fork. And if the last GPL'd version of something that goes closed is popular enough, it gets forked. See: Nessus[1] / OpenVAS[2].
On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.
It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl.
All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless...
I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.
In what way is Ubuntu closed?
OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.