This one probably won't be of interest to anyone other than the people (i.e. Deo) who read my last post here. 
Here we have KDE president and FOSS developer Aaron Seigo calling Canonical out on some of the reality warping that seems to be going on with Ubuntu lately.
A couple of highlights from his post:
Love it.
Those contemplating getting involved with or exploring Linux (as opposed to Ubuntu) had best start looking elsewhere. Because it's becoming increasingly clear that Ubuntu does not consider itself to be a part of the established GNU/Linux community any more. Assuming (in the light of their current reality warping) they ever really did.
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Here we have KDE president and FOSS developer Aaron Seigo calling Canonical out on some of the reality warping that seems to be going on with Ubuntu lately.
A couple of highlights from his post:
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The biggest issue I see is that they are going it on their own and diverging from the rest of the Free software ecosystem with a software stack they have been developing behind closed doors and which will require you to sign over your copyright in order for you to contribute to it.
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So perhaps in a year's time (probably more) they will have delivered what they have said they are doing right now, and my objection will then be erase. If that happens, it will be at the cost of becoming another "not really Linux" Linux that lives in its own universe. It will be Android minus Google.
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the practice of changing the names on everything they use that could remotely be traced back to others says something about the thought processes. See, they don't use Status Notifiers .. no, they have Application Indicators. They don't do "device spectrum" they do "device convergence", etc. It would be understandable if they were the first to any of these ideas, but they aren't; and it makes having conversations about these issues so much more complex than it needs to be.
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The truly crazy part is that they are writing their own display manager to accomplish this. They dismiss Wayland, though it has pretty much the same design. The main differences are that Canonical doesn't control Wayland development and Canonical's system will weld everything into one process: display manager, desktop shell, window management, output management, input event handling ... It's an interesting approach. Not one I'd take for technical reasons, but hey ..
The biggest issue I see is that they are going it on their own and diverging from the rest of the Free software ecosystem with a software stack they have been developing behind closed doors and which will require you to sign over your copyright in order for you to contribute to it.
They have effectively sealed themselves off from the rest of the Free software world. They will shoulder porting and maintaining Qt, Gtk+, XUL, etc. to their system. They will shoulder porting applications to the integration points (most of which will be delivered in Qt apps). They will not be sharing desktop shell infrastructure with anyone else, and using their Free software on other platforms will become increasingly more difficult.
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Before closing, I would like to point out that Canonical is once again trying to rewrite the present as well as history as can be seen in the intro of the UnityNextSpec: "From the very beginning, Unity's concepts were tailored with a converged world in mind, where the overall system including the UI/UX scales across and adapts to a wide variety of different form factors." Looking at the very beginning of Unity right up until today, this is obvious nonsense. The rest of the spec spends its time explaining why none of the original design decisions in Unity will also translate other than it being a shell "a shell, with a launcher, indicators, switcher, dash etc.". Well .. yeah.
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What is perhaps a more accurate statement is that Canonical fumbled through various ideas and technologies iteratively until they landed on the current concepts, dictated in part by technology and in part by business. There is nothing wrong with this, it's often how creativity happens. It is not, however, the 6 year prescience being claimed .. especially as we're still at least one year away from possibly seeing the current vision being achievable in practice.
So we have a new separate silo competing with the rest of the silos plus the open efforts (e.g. Wayland) while we are asked to accept a rewrite to a history Canonical is evidently not proud of ... "but this time it will be different, guys!"
Love it.
Those contemplating getting involved with or exploring Linux (as opposed to Ubuntu) had best start looking elsewhere. Because it's becoming increasingly clear that Ubuntu does not consider itself to be a part of the established GNU/Linux community any more. Assuming (in the light of their current reality warping) they ever really did.
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) is nice.
