Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not 'your whims'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/07/shuttleworth_ubuntu_leadership/

by copyninja • 13 years ago

73 79 13 years ago

theregister.co.uk

raldi• 13 years ago

Then I suppose my whims are leading me away from Ubuntu.

Lashawndazqd3• 13 years ago

That's ok, apparently they have all the developers they need. That must be why the bug list is empty now.

nilved• 13 years ago

Just in case anybody was still on the fence, Ubuntu has now officially jumped the shark.

JeremyMorgan8• 13 years ago

Said it before, I'll say it again. They jumped it at 10.04. That was their last best, and the version I still often use if I do use Ubuntu.

ameen2• 13 years ago

While the community is ready to dismiss anything Canonical does, they also seem to overlook the work Canonical has done. Unity is far from perfect, but it is functional.

Also, the whole issue of inclusion of Amazon links could be solved with a single command, "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping".

And it's ridiculous that Canonical gets flak for trying out a new revenue stream (one that can easily be removed if its bothersome), while ChromeOS is championed (which essentially makes revenue off of your web usage, targeting ads, etc.)

If the community tried to be a little less abrasive and actually held reasonable level-headed discussions instead of being dismissive we could actually get somewhere.

Infact I'd argue that it's Canonical's leadership is helping since it has succeeded in bringing generally non-Linux businesses over to Ubuntu - Valve bringing over Steam, Spotify alpha, Rdio, etc.

gabipurcaru• 13 years ago

"I don't like X about Ubuntu" -- Response from Ubuntu user: "It's easy; all you have to do is apt-get ..."

"I don't like Amazon lens about Ubuntu" -- Response from fellow Ubuntu user: "Yea, this sucks, I think I'm not going to use Ubuntu anymore"

I don't like Amazon lens either (there isn't even an Amazon.ro so it's mostly unusable for me), but they have to make money somehow.

macspoofing3• 13 years ago

>I don't like Amazon lens either (there isn't even an Amazon.ro so it's mostly unusable for me), but they have to make money somehow.

Find another business model, this one sucks.

macspoofing3• 13 years ago

>Unity is far from perfect, but it is functional.

If that's the best you can say about it, then Canonical failed.

JasonFruit2• 13 years ago

Unity is functional — you can use it. Its problem is that it's designed to meet the needs of a mostly hypothetical group of people that Canonical hopes will want to use it someday. That's a long-term proposition, and a valid gamble to take — but I don't think it's going to succeed. More importantly for me, I don't care whether it does or not, because I'm neither Unity's nor Ubuntu's target market any more.

ameen2• 13 years ago

It's leagues better than the train-wreck that is Gnome 3. It's functional and doesn't get in the way of my work. What more do I need it for?

donniezazen• 13 years ago

There is no way anyone could justify inclusion of Amazon ads. Creating backdoor for direct snooping by Amazon is just atrocious. That being said. In my personal experience Ubuntu has not been a community driven distribution for at least half a decade. Most community members spend their time justifying actions of Canonical and community leaders explaining and backing Canonical instead of representing community. I also think Mark Shuttleworth is a strong leader and visionary and while we discuss merits and demerits he might actually succeed in what he set out to be. At the end of the day, if we want to take Linux mainstream we have to start treating it as a product.

desas2• 13 years ago

There's no Amazon back door. The search string gets sent to Canonical, they search amazon using that string and return results with their snazin affiliate link.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

How is it unreasonable to propose making the Amazon ads opt-in? Sure it ruins their dreams of guaranteed revenue streams but at least it'll be a compromise.

JasonFruit2• 13 years ago

This bit annoys me:

  "There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, 
   frustration, venality and disappointment," he wrote.

They may be full of those things, sure, but at their best they also have quality, usability, flexibility, power, and beauty. I hope Canonical succeeds in making Ubuntu useful to people who would never have used it before, but I'm sad that that success — if it ever comes — requires abandoning and insulting people who helped make Ubuntu as prominent as it has been.

jff• 13 years ago

And without one of those spite-filled, frustrated, venal, political distributions, Debian, they could never have created Ubuntu.

res0nat0r5• 13 years ago

And because of some of those verbs above is why Ubuntu exists in the first place. A distro that isn't paralyzed by too many cooks in the kitchen and that can be nimble.

aroman• 13 years ago

As someone who has been an active contributor to desktop Linux in the past, and particularly very close to Ubuntu (I was sponsored to attend UDS-O), I have to say that I am happy Shuttleworth is finally taking this much needed stand.

I can absolutely understand the blowback to his sentiments, because really, the diversity of use and mindset in the Linux community is one of its defining characteristics. But frankly, he's right -- if Ubuntu isn't the platform you're looking for, either go find the one that is, or start it.

I don't see Shuttleworth's stance, or indeed the negative feedback from a vocally inflamed (though not majority) userbase, as a sign of Ubuntu's decline. I see it as Ubuntu finally having the balls to do what no other desktop Linux platform has done before -- move ahead with their grand vision on bringing free software to the masses, not just the ones that demand it the most.

GhotiFish3• 13 years ago

That's basically saying the linux community and their mindset are antithetical to modern computing.

What a massively backhanded insult. Yet also a tragically true statement.

The world is flying towards Sim City always on DRM with open arms, and mark shuttleworth wants to lead the charge? Fine. Coddled computing for everyone.

For god sakes, A pox on the people who actually choose to use Amazon Linux.

mikevm2• 13 years ago

No one's forcing you to use Ubuntu. Don't like it? Move along.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

The problem is secrecy and authoritarianism run directly contrary to the spirit of open source software, and if we're going to go down that road then we need to stop calling it a community-driven Linux distribution.

Where will we be when Amazon et al start leaning more heavily on Canonical for more invasive features? What recourse will the existing user-base have other than being callously told to "fuck off if you don't like it, or buy some lube and start grabbing your ankles"?

mikevm2• 13 years ago

>Where will we be when Amazon et al start leaning more heavily on Canonical for more invasive features?

You'll be on a different Linux distro.

coldtea• 13 years ago

>if we're going to go down that road then we need to stop calling it a community-driven Linux distribution.

It's not like "community-driven Linux distribution" is such a badge of honor.

flomo• 13 years ago

> I see it as Ubuntu finally having the balls to .. move ahead with their grand vision on bringing free software to the masses

Actually, I don't see that at all. Where's the marketing initiative? Where's the retail channel? Where's the Linux Genius Bar/Geek Squad? Who really desires/wants/needs Linux and why can't they obtain it?

This is all Open Source development politics where nerds project their prejudicial ideas of what "normal people" want in some sort of bizarre appeal to popularity. None of this is backed up by serious UI research. None of this is actually trying to solve a real market problem, even assuming they had the resources to do so.

Eventually, I hope that people will let Linux be Linux. It should be just an environment focused on the needs of Programmers and Free-Software lovers. It should stop trying to be a totally baseless appeal to the "the masses".

Flimm• 13 years ago

This is actually a response to some Ubuntu contributors very publicly leaving the project, and not to criticism from users. This is the blog post that started it off:

http://doctormo.org/2013/03/06/ubuntu-membership-2/

And here some the many responses in the past two days (remember, these are Ubuntu members, not random users), many of them agree that there's something wrong with the Ubuntu community of contributors:

http://randall.executiv.es/ubuntu-stage-next

http://blog.pault.ag/post/44821301540/ubuntu-the-community

http://www.jonobacon.org/2013/03/08/thoughts-on-recent-commu...

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1235

http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/divisive-leadershi...

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1232

http://smartboyhw.tk/wordpress_smartboyhw/?p=28

http://linuxgrandma.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/thoughts-and-worr...

http://philipballew.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/confessions-of-...

http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=7670

http://ftbeowulf.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/freedom-and-commun...

taliesinb• 13 years ago

I completely agree. This kind of pivot will slough off some Ubuntu enthusiasts and contributors, and upset some users, but I suspect that we'll all be looking back in 5 years and saying how obvious this move was.

Why am I so confident it'll actually work? Canonical has done a great job for many years on managing the sprawling world of integrating multiple upstream OSS projects that weren't under its control.

That's just a totally different thing from how you manage the development and integration of commercial software. What Canonical has done is much, much harder. And in my view, people who have done that can do anything -- beginning with the long-term technology planning, partnership building, and platform integration work that their vision requires.

That vision, by the way, is I think one that most of us want: 1) a 'smart device' OS, suitable for many hardware channels 2) a desktop OS tuned for content creation and collaboration 3) open cloud infrastructure to provide services to 1 and 2

For me, the single most important outcome of this vision is using Ubuntu to drive an educational revolution in the developing world. That requires Ubuntu to be in the hands of a wide and diverse community of developers, educators, scientists, engineers, artists, artisans, activists, policymakers, and hobbyists interested in such things, and who have total freedom to hack them.

That will not happen if "Linux" still means your dad's 90s desktop OS.

Go Shuttleworth!

monkeyfacebag• 13 years ago

I found myself agreeing with a lot of the sentiment expressed in Mark's post but ultimately, I lack faith that Shuttleworth and Canonical have what it takes to pull off the stated goal of creating "an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders." For example, I don't find Unity to be better in any meaningful sense than the "community-driven" GNOME 3. Canonical has come up with some interesting ideas, especially with the HUD menu system, but I just haven't seen real progress towards building the kind of consistent user experience I can find on Android, Windows and OS X.

I'd love for them to succeed, but every passing day I'm looking more to Android as the future of quasi-open Linuxes.

mixmastamyk• 13 years ago

Agreed. Talk about being stretched too thin. For example, I've been fighting with compiz (their wm of choice) all day. I'm about to give up, but love the negative plugin.

If they could demonstrate capacity to fix existing bugs I might be interested in their new directions... until then no.

fakeer• 13 years ago

>>I don't find Unity to be better in any meaningful sense than the "community-driven" GNOME 3

It's not better even in a meaningless sense. I just not that good.

There are times when you stick to your idea long enough because you are passionately convinced about it and there are times when you stick to that idea because others said it was a bad idea, somehow they were true and now you do not want to accept it. Well, Canonical is Mark's and Ubuntu belongs to Canonical. They must have a plan. I hope.

As per whining about it and whims. That was normal reaction and Mark should have accepted it, if not as feedback.

After trying all the Linux distros I settled with Ubuntu, then it was ruined. Moving to OSX was painful. Moving to an (very) expansive and very very closed ecosystem.

lennel• 13 years ago

The HUD makes no sense on a desktop environment and since I have not tried it on a mobile device I cannot make a final judgement. My gut instinct is that the HUD will work on a mobile device and as the platform matures it will become better. Most people prefer Gnome3, let them use it with other distros.

I feel the true battle for Canonical lies in mobile devices and being an entity which can stand up against all the other closed eco-systems and manufacturers in this space. If they can keep it open for everybody so much the better for us all.

I have nothing but respect for shuttleworth, he is an extremely smart bloke who has invested a lot of his money in this, this obviously does not make Canonical exempt from criticism.

eriksank• 13 years ago

Mark Shuttleworth may have good intentions at the basis, but he may also be overly ambitious. From there he may indeed be misguided in his daring and rather rash decisions. Mark may also be incapable of assessing first-hand what it all means in technical terms. Mark also seems to overestimate the real level of insight of his close technical advisers; who are the guys doing the real thinking for him. Mark also seems to substantially overestimate the true ability and aggregate capacity of his rather small team; which is supposed to make all of it happen. Mediocre results after mediocre results, we can indeed clearly discern in Mark a pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.

philipn• 13 years ago

Complete linkbait title, a HN mod should change this. Typical of the Register.

It's worthwhile to read the actual post:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1228

On the subject, I started to hear a lot of criticism of Canonical's Ubuntu efforts right around when Unity was first released. I just updated to 12.10 on my laptop a couple of weeks ago, and as one of the 31337 d00ds Mark speaks of, I was pretty confused -- everything was different! I didn't quite understand the point of the whole thing.

But I run a tiling window manager on a years-old Thinkpad without even a trackpad (trackpoint!). I'm a freak. And most of us here are.

Then the other day I picked up a new Macbook Air for some Mac-centric development work. And Unity completely clicked for me. If you look at the direction of OS X it's clearly converging with iOS. I right-swipe to get notifications! There's all these awesome gestures! My IM client shows my phone's text messages, for god's sake!

This is the kind computing experience normal people are expecting over the next several years, and in order for Ubuntu to fully realize its mission it needs to adapt. And it looks like they're doing a really good job. I mean, have you seen the Ubuntu phone videos? It looks really slick.

auggierose• 13 years ago

Lol. Ubuntu is obviously doomed to fail. What technical genius would want to follow UNPAID another persons "Grand Vision" if that other person isn't an even greater technical genius?

JeremyMorgan8• 13 years ago

Yeah yeah, we get it. Canonical: "You guys hate Unity but we're really stubborn about it".

Keep trumpeting your crap then. Thankfully it's pretty easy for just about anyone to switch window managers (or Distro for that matter)

DrZen2• 13 years ago

Nice attitude to legitimate criticism (Unity kills productivity for many). I guess thats why all the 'l33ts' and everyone else is running to OSX. Thanks for the motivation.

JeremyMorgan8• 13 years ago

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm paraphrasing what they're saying to people. I agree with you completely, Unity is garbage and thankfully we can still switch it if we need to, or switch distros altogether.

My comment is disparaging the arrogant attitude of Canonical on this subject.

Lashawndazqd3• 13 years ago

Yes, widespread adoption is important, but don't insult the giants whose shoulders you're standing on Mark.

neya3• 13 years ago

    "By 2009 I was convinced that none of the existing free software communities could create an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders," Shuttleworth wrote, "and so, if we were serious about the dream of a free software norm, we would have to lead."

If Unity is the outcome of Canonical's lead, then I'm sorry to say that they're doing it wrong. I want you to download Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 and compare it with Ubuntu 12.04/12.10. You will be nothing short of terrified of the experience - They just destroyed every single advantage of Ubuntu - For example:

Unity creates a terrible confusion on what is where and how you access or close an open window.

Shutdown speed is slower than windows 8 sometimes! (And Windows 8 isn't slow, it's really fast, but Ubuntu 10.x used to be faster)

The OS itself feels sluggish at times.

I sincerely feel someone should take the 10.04 and spin it off into a new better OS, polish it and give it back to the community - If it's good enough, I won't even mind paying for it!!

crdoconnor• 13 years ago

10.04 was definitely when it peaked, as far as I'm concerned.

icelancer• 13 years ago

Ubuntu 10.04 is infinitely better than 12.x and Unity. It blows my mind that anyone could think otherwise.

>I sincerely feel someone should take the 10.04 and spin it off into a new better OS, polish it and give it back to the community - If it's good enough, I won't even mind paying for it!!

Yes, 100 times yes. If I could get that OS with the 12.x patches and updates, I would do it in a heartbeat.

neya3• 13 years ago

agreed!

ricree• 13 years ago

>I sincerely feel someone should take the 10.04 and spin it off into a new better OS, polish it and give it back to the community

Do you have any particular objections with Mint? It's what I went to after 10.04 (well, after a couple months trying out 12.04 and deciding it definitely wasn't for me).

neya3• 13 years ago

No objections mate, just that I'm not convinced if Mint would receive updates as early as the original ones get. Or does it work in a different way?? Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Kliment• 13 years ago

Isn't that basically the entire point of Mint?

anoncow• 13 years ago

What I undestand is that he wants people to rise above petty politics and work at making Ubuntu better. Imo he could have just said the latter and let the former lie. Sometimes it is better to do that. A substantial chunk of the community does not like unity and even more hate the amazon integration. Telling them to shut up is not a great idea. You cannot keep everyone happy, not in a project of this scale. Mark is doing this to keep the people at canonical happy and driven. I hope he succeeds, because I would like ubuntu to be better.

charonn02• 13 years ago

>Just roll your eyeballs at the 1337 crowd

This is not leadership. If Mr. Shuttleworth truly wants to provide leadership for the FOSS community, then blaming people for disagreeing with him is not a good start and "my way or the highway" is not a sustainable model.

JeremyMorgan8• 13 years ago

That's been the attitude at Canonical since they got into the game. Definitely not sustainable.

res0nat0r5• 13 years ago

Why is that? I don't see any evidence of mass users leaving Ubuntu anytime lately. Only minor whining on nerd forums about the default desktop and other quibbles.

res0nat0r5• 13 years ago

His leadership is to not listen to the opinions of ten thousand different people and to direct his team to develop their product as they see fit. If it fails Ubuntu will go away due to lack of any outside contributions or popularity. If it works he will be proven right.

Shorel• 13 years ago

Say that to Linus.

cmccabe• 13 years ago

It makes me sad that Canonical is doing so many things to split the community. First they stuck to upstart, after everyone else moved over to systemd. Then, they decided to snub GNOME3 in order to create a new windowing environment called Unity. Now, they're trying to build their own copy of Wayland, codenamed Mir. Ubuntu still uses bzr, when most of the rest of the world uses git.

I guess maybe this was inevitable. They wanted to differentiate themselves from Red Hat and similar distros that were using the "normal" stack. But do we really need so many duplicate projects, so many of which seem to be duds?

Ultimately, Ubuntu wants to be Android. And it never will be, because Canonical doesn't have Google's engineering or financial resources, or a business model that would support such an undertaking. I understand the idealism, but as they say, "hope is a good breakfast, but a poor supper."

I feel like Ubuntu's decision to include adware like the Amazon toolbar is the first of many such decisions. Ultimately, they have to make a profit, and they're going to have to turn to "traditional methods." The traditional method for PC OEMs to make a profit is-- let's be honest here-- crapware. I fear that this is going to blacken the name of Linux for a lot of people. Already a lot of people think that "Linux" can't do suspend or hibernate properly, because Ubuntu often can't. Soon people are going to think that "Linux" is full of adware and spyware, simply because Ubuntu is. Sigh.

Skoofoo• 13 years ago

Mark Shuttleworth is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The square peg being Steve Jobs' style, the round hole being open source/free software.

mtgx• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what it means for the Linux community that Canonical is doing this, but I do think they are doing the right thing for "Ubuntu" if they want to make it a more mainstream OS, and also an OS that works on mobile hardware, and it's fast and smooth.

If that means they have to break clean from a lot of legacy stuff, then so be it. Ultimately, I want a strong mainstream OS alternative to Windows - one that is popular enough and gets support from all major software vendors for apps. If Ubuntu got at least as popular as Mac OS, it would be amazing, and I don't really care what they have to do to get there.

I also hope this means they will make it dead-easy for developers, whether paid ones or open source volunteers, to make beautiful apps for Ubuntu/Linux. I hate how ugly and old Linux apps look. Absolutely hate them. And if that's happenig to me, then I can only imagine the reaction of "normal" PC users and how much of a turn off that must be for them, especially now when we're living in a time of iOS, Holo and Metro apps. Most of them would find the majority of Linux apps unacceptable.

If Canonical gives developers easy to use set of design resources and tools, then even open source apps for Linux or cross-platform won't have an excuse to not look beautiful anymore.

If Canonical manages to get chip makers to make unified drivers for Ubuntu/Linux/Android that would be an amazing feat as well, and something I wish Google tried from the beginning or was already working on. But I haven't seen any hints of that happening, unfortunately. So Canonical might be Android's last hope for that.

mich41• 13 years ago

> I want a strong mainstream OS alternative to Windows - one that is popular enough and gets support from all major software vendors for apps. If Ubuntu got at least as popular as Mac OS, it would be amazing, and I don't really care what they have to do to get there.

I can understand that Canonical wants to become a "mainstream alternative to Windows" because this means money for them. But why do you care how many buggy Windows or OSX clones are out there if you can just pay few bucks and get the real thing?

pekk• 13 years ago

It's pretty ridiculous to call Ubuntu a "buggy Windows or OSX clone".

JeremyMorgan8• 13 years ago

I think we should take his advice. He says he doesn't want "leet" Linux users and we should go use something else, and many of us have been taking that advice all along.

Personally, I'm a Gentoo guy and have been for a while. Here are some great hacker distros that I love to use and contribute to:

Gentoo

Arch

Slackware

Debian

And for those who want a "user friendly" distro for their mom to try out:

Linux Mint

Yeah, I said it, I know it's not exactly popular but if you want to convert someone to a Linux user I think Mint is your best bet.

In the end, we still have a choice. Thanks Canonical/Ubuntu for bringing more users and development to the community, we'll just steer them towards something better when they're ready.

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

Linux Mint: it's an Ubuntu derivative, and I suspect that Ubuntu/Canonical will one day either be hostile or at least actively unhelpful to derivatives.

Downloads: http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

Everything there is an ubuntu derivative, except in the middle there's a debian rolling release edition.

I suppose the mainstream ubuntu derivative will be great for stereotypical "mom's", as long as Ubuntu's eye doesn't turn in that direction.

For more hacker types that want some creature comforts, are the debian versions a good choice? I would expect/hope that some of the multimedia "just works" benefits would be in there. http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=14

Or would I be better off on debian/LXDE, and manage the few packages that I most care about on my own?

phaus• 13 years ago

>>There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment.

Soo... It is a community distro? Because Ubuntu sure has plenty of that.

>>To Shuttleworth, Ubuntu isn't about catering to hobbyists, but about building an open source OS that is so compelling that free software becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

There's nothing compelling about implementing advertising directly into the operating system. I was just starting get used to Unity, and then Canonical did something that makes it impossible to trust them about anything.

nonamegiven2• 13 years ago

Ubuntu used to be one thing, and it was exactly what I wanted.

Now they're something else, and that's OK, but it's not what I want, and that's OK too.

At the moment I'm hanging on to the parts I want by my fingernails, running the nicely minimal Lubuntu. But I think the writing's on the wall that eventually Ubuntu/Canonical will have no interest in supporting the various Ubuntu derivatives, and I'll need to fall back to something like LXDE on Debian. And that's OK too.

Ubuntu used to be one thing. Now they're something else. That's OK. So long, and thanks for all the updates.

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical leads Ubuntu, not 'your whims'

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