Conflicting Goals Create Tension in OSS Community 135
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth, of Ubuntu, has a post up meant to clear the air and clarify the project's place in the Debian community. He's specifically referring to comments made by Matthew Garrett earlier this month." From the post: "A little introspection is healthy, and Debian will benefit from the discussion. Matt is to be credited for his open commentary - a lesser person would simply have disengaged, quietly. I hope that Matt will in fact stay involved in Debian, either directly or through Ubuntu, because his talent and humour are both of enormous benefit to the project. I also hope that Debian developers will make better use of the work we do in Ubuntu, integrating relevant bits of it back into Debian so as to help uplift some of those other peaks - Xandros, Linspire, Maemo, Skolelinux and of course Etch."
Please (Score:5, Insightful)
let the arguments rage (Score:2, Insightful)
we are never going to agree on how to do things... (Score:5, Insightful)
[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very well-written summation of the issues.
To paraphrase a comment from a message board I visit, "[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone."
Debian provides a wonderful base for many other distributions, not just Ubuntu, and it is a rock-solid platform for servers. It runs on many different architectures, and can be used on machines from a handheld up to a massive server. This is one of its greatest strengths, but also one of its greatest weaknesses.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, is far more focused than Debian is. Starting with the general base (the plateau, as Mark called it), it builds a strong distribution targeted to only 3-4 architectures (counting SPARC), which opens many more options. This is no different than many other distributions have done. For example, Knoppix is another version of Debian with customizations on top of it for a specific platform (or platforms).
Ubuntu can't be everything to everyone, because everyone has different needs and goals, and Ubuntu has a specific focus. Similarly, Debian can't be everything to everyone, because it is a more general distribution, a jack of all trades (and master of none).
And why they have to pay people to go there (NS) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:let the arguments rage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please (Score:5, Insightful)
You really can't have it both ways.
And not to imply that this is "bad" in any way - I was just struck by this comment attached to this particular story. The next time Slashdork posts the usual "what does the community think?" or "the community must do something about this!!" I wonder if I'll see a post making this same point. Probably not.
Re:let the arguments rage (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:[Debian|Ubuntu] can't be everything to everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
There's absolutely no reason for there to be any antagonism between Debian and any of the Debian-derived distributions. Debian can't be everything for everyone, but it certainly provides a wonderful starting point for others to build upon. It's the foundation stones, but you can build many different buildings on the same foundation.
Re:Please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Raging Arguments... (Score:2, Insightful)
The thorough discussions apparently remove the risk of mistakes associated with conformity, called "groupspeak" by some consulting firms.
However, when all is said and done, the code for a function needs to be stable. At what point does the free-for-all become a liability?
*nix projects a somewhat splintered image. There is a group of users who are unhappy with the other two closed OS vendors, and are surveying the state of affairs. I at least am baffled trying to objectively rate all the variants out there. Does anyone know of a comprehensive feature chart that allows prospective users to scrutinize the specs for their favorite purpose across most of the builds?
We all know what MS is about. Apple's entire existence has been positioned as "the Friendly Branded OS". I have remarked that I will ease into one of the OSS builds. But which one? Red Hat? Debian? uBuntu? Xandros? When I go reseaching, who is a neutral source?
I am quite satisfied that we don't need Every Last User on OSS. There are net jokes about AOL users, and the stereotype exists for a reason. But for the midline user who wants to promote OSS, what if ALL the variants remain incomplete because of the flamewars?
Re:we are never going to agree on how to do things (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh wait...
Maintainers != Project Managers (Score:5, Insightful)
A disturbing lack of thought is manifest. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody who has worked with Debian already should have a deep and profound respect for the fact that Debian is plain and broad. When you sit down at a Debian computer, you are seated before a gateway to what might be the most customizable distribution in existence. All of the packages are roughly as far away as "$ sudo aptitude", and it is all but guaranteed that no matter how complicated or convoluted the package you want is, it will be downloaded and installed, along with dependencies, and you don't have to worry about a damn thing. (If you've ever compiled your own VLC or GIMP, you know what I'm talking about.)
The problem is that people would like to see specialization in Debian. Debian is not for specialization. It's for everybody to make what they want. Taking that away from Debian compromises the entire goal of the project...
Slashdot discovers journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
You take a straightforward, uncontroversial statement (Shuttleworth's blog entry) that practically everyone agrees with. Then you publish a headline saying there's a "conflict", and pretend there's a huge row going on.
Pretty soon you've got a heated argument going on, mostly between people who haven't read the statement that allegedly started it all.
What does it all prove? That Slashdot isn't "stuff that matters" any more, it's stuff that draws mass readership. Just what we were trying to get away from when we first started reading Slashdot ...
Blog post more about Debian's focus and sid (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe he's right. Debian's never been succesful at meeting the scheduled release dates. If Ubuntu is capable of delivering better desktop releases, and in soon perhaps also better server releases, then what's the point of struggling and perpertually flamewaring to do the same inside Debian? Food for thought. Maybe a Debian developer would like to comment on that?
By the way, he openly admits that the unstable branch is vital for Ubuntu which could explain why he thinks that it is better to focus on it.
Re:a mile away (Score:3, Insightful)
There, it's said. Sure, they make huge amounts of money (for publishers; developers rarely break even) and they're important to a lot of people. But they're mostly one-shot, throw-away pieces of software that aren't maintained over a period of time and have a very short marketable lifespan. As such they don't benefit much from free software development (which excels at maintainance, not short time-to-market) and it doesn't really matter what platform they run on.
So what if they keep running on Windows? That just means Windows becomes the fourth console system. I wouldn't be very surprised if someday, Windows merged with the xbox, after all the 'serious' applications migrate over to Linux-based platforms.
You could argue that they slow down adoption of Linux in the home, but realistically, Linux on the desktop is happening first in businesses, and then the home users will follow. And businesses don't care about games.
Re:What (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What (Score:3, Insightful)
>
> 1.One GUI.
>
> 2. Ability to play DirectX games.
>
> 3. Double click driver and application installs. "Fire and forget"
>
> 4. No preaching. I don't really give a rat's ass about what is free and what isn't.
As your points, especially the last one, make it abundantly clear, what you want is not Linux but a free[*] clone of Windows. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but what does it have to do with Linux and why any of the developers working on Linux [desktop] should care about what you want?
[*] I presume the cost is the only thing which keeps you from just using the original right now
A bit of a collective mea culpa? (Score:2, Insightful)
Shuttleworth is ackowledging that many of the Ubuntu users/booster club members are thinking out of their ass. Cruise over to the Uubuntu forums (or any of the unbearable "I just installed Ubuntu" threads on Digg) and you'll see a blatant ignorance of Debian. Not of its existence necessarily, but of Debian's immense role in the Linux world for all of these years. Mark knows it, the Slackware folks know it (but don't want to deal with those sysv scripts), but the "my laptop spins like a floating cube with Ubuntu" crowd don't always get. And their brash attitude is a bit of an embarrassment.
Re:a mile away (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu is noise here. They talk a lot, but they sound like hippies because they mostly are hippies. RedHat and Novell are the ones to bring in. Especially Novell, with a well-known brand that managers are probably already familiar with, from Netware. Those guys can sell to management.
The obvious evidence for this: RedHat and Novell are making profits. Ubuntu aren't even making revenue (but are always talking about how they're going to get a big contract in 'real soon now'). Linux adoption is business is happening, and it's happening largely because of those two.
If you're trying to get corporate types to buy into it, call the corporates. Not the hippies.
Ubuntu not immune to conflicts (Score:2, Insightful)
Mark Shuttleworth is not in a position to tell other projects how to manage a project without conflicts. I recall that just before the Dapper release some German Kubuntu developers threatened to leave the project because Canonical refused to communicate with them. One of these rebelling German guys was the main developer of K/Ubuntu's new live-cd.
Part of the problem seemed to be that these Kubuntu developers were not paid employees. There was one paid employee in the lead of the Kubuntu project and this employee did his best trying to convince people that there was no conflict, although obviously there was. Hiding problems and denying conflicts seems to be the official policy of Mark Shuttleworth's pet project and this carefully built image of easy success that they want to project to the public makes Shuttleworth now think that he can advise other projects about their goals.
"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone," but Mark Shuttleworth is not as innocent as he'd like to appear. He has faced conflicts in managing his own project and I'm not at all sure that he's the right man to tell other projects how to avoid conflicts. And advising Debian to concentrate its efforts on improving Sid is definitely a bad advice, although such decision would certainly suit Ubuntu that is built upon snapshots of Sid.