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40hz:
Well...Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical has finally uttered the anticipated "drink the kool-aid" speech on his blog regarding Ubuntu's new direction. In it, he gets into where he's coming from - and where those who don't see it the same way as he does should feel free to go...

His words make for an interesting combination of hubris, begging the question, deflection, issue reframing, and historical revisionism. But I guess that's what makes so many of our modern visionaries "Modern Visionaries."

"So it goes." :-\

Some unwarranted melodrama

The sky is not falling in.

Really.

Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical’s contribution is massive. It’s simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets ‘what it wants’ more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don’t get exactly what I want. It just doesn’t work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu.

The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro’s. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That’s nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I’ve watched and participated in, the biggest meme is ‘if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting’. Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans.

If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That’s normal – there’s no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else.

It’s also the case that we’ve shifted gear to leadership rather than integration.

When we started, we said we wanted to deliver the best of open source on a cadence. It was up to KDE, GNOME, XFCE to define what that was going to look like, we would just integrate and deliver (a hard problem in itself). By 2009 I was convinced that none of the existing free software communities could create an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders, and so, if we were serious about the dream of a free software norm, we would have to lead.

The result is Unity, which is an experience that could become widely adopted across phones, tablets, PCs and other devices. Of course, that is a disruptive change, and has caused some members of existing communities to resent our work. I respect that others may prefer different experiences, so we remain willing to do a large (but not unlimited) amount of work to enable KDE, GNOME, and other DEs to thrive inside the broader Ubuntu umbrella. We also take steps to accommodate developers who want to support both Unity and another DE. But if we want to get beyond being a platform for hobbyists, we need to accelerate the work on Unity to keep up with Android, Chrome, Windows and Apple. And that’s more important than taking care of the needs of those who don’t share our goal of a free software norm.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

Everyone that I care about in open source has a shared dream: they want free software to become the norm, not the exception. And Ubuntu is the only way I can see for that to happen, which is why I spend all my time on it, and why so many other people spend huge amounts of time on it too.

I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. ‘Linux is supposed to be hard so it’s exclusive’ is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say. People being people, there are of course smart people who hold that view.

What I’m really interested in is this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a free and open platform that is THE LEADER across both consumer and enterprise computing.

With Ubuntu (and Unity) we have that. It’s amazing. Think about it – unlike years gone by, a free software platform is actually winning awards for innovative leadership in the categories that count: mobile, cloud. Investing your time and energy here might have a truly profound impact on the world. That’s worth digging into. Just roll your eyeballs at the 1337 crowd, roll up your sleeves, find something interesting to improve, and join in. To the extent that you can master a piece, you will get what you want. If you think the grand vision should follow your whims, you won’t.

If we work hard, and work together, Ubuntu will become a widespread platform for phones, tablets and PCs. You’ll have the satisfaction of designing, building and fixing tools that are used every day by millions of people. That’s meaningful. And it’s worth looking hard at our practices to ask the question: how best to achieve that goal?
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mahesh2k:
well it's canonical and not FSF and gnu. He pays the bill for the work done at that place. why he should have the same vision like FSF and GNU? I am with him on that. If you can tolerate MS, Apple and others for their corporate stuff, what's wrong if another walled garden comes into this? If you like it use it or leave it.

zridling:
Shuttleworth has long written checks his company couldn't cash on his Ubuntu claims. Forget his desktop products, which I think are mostly silly. Did get a chance to play with Ubuntu Touch (mobile) and while it's no Android killer, it's very nice. It needs work with bars disappearing too quickly and learning which type of swipe -- or tap -- opens what. But at least it's the first promising thing Canonical has offered IMO since 2006.

40hz:
what's wrong if another walled garden comes into this
-mahesh2k (March 07, 2013, 03:23 PM)
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Because, with all due respect, it's not his friggin' garden to wall in. He's building his product in top of man years of development effort and coding - and millions of lines of source - he had nothing to do with, let alone pay a dime for.

That's what. :)

mahesh2k:
No. Ubuntu products arent bad its the people who dont like changes. The nature of free and open source license offers him to do that another walled garden. Is he violating gpl? No. Is he pissing off community that hates making money and changes to traditional thinking? Yes.

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