Distribution quotes of the week

The magic happening in Android, and I hate to admit but iOS too, is they've gone back to the bazaar model where anyone can share any app they like. Sure, most of it is crap. In fact they probably have an app for crap. Part of it is driven by developer greed, which is counter to what Debian stands for, but most of it is just hackers enjoying their new found freedom to share. Sure, the base is solid, and carefully crafted and built at Google. You can't just write any old crud and expect it to ship installed on every phone by default. You need the default code base to "just work". However, anyone is enabled to share whatever crap they like as an app in the market. That freedom to share is missing in Debian.

Significant accommodations were made by Banshee upstream in order to make life easier for Canonical to integrate Banshee into their OS. For one thing, that's why the Ubuntu One Music Store support is a core Banshee feature, not part of the third-party community extensions package. If Banshee was being considered for replacement due to unresolved technical issues, then perhaps it would have been polite to, I don't know, inform upstream that it was on the cards? Or, if Canonical felt that problems specific to their own itches required scratching, then is it completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine they might have spent developer resources on bug fixing their OS and sending those fixes upstream? Or even - and call me crazy - providing access for upstream to specialized hardware such as a $174 Pandaboard to empower upstream to isolate and fix unreproducible bugs specific to Canonical's target hardware?

As such, while Ubuntu has always shipped a huge archive of available software, today the visibility on that software and the gems inside is better than ever. I think it would be a disservice for us to obsess too much on what is included on the default installation when there is a wealth of content available in the Ubuntu Software Center. Default apps are important (particularly for those in non-networked environments), but let's not forget about the wider commons that in only a click away and all the value it offers.

Doing btrfs development makes sense, but inflicting it by default on users who really have no need for it isn't quite the same discussion. For performance it's not showing any signs of being better than ext3/4 - in fact on some media its massively underperforming them currently. The funky feature set really isn't relevant to most users while their data still being available most definitely *is*.

I admire and respect the fact that you can make free software do exactly what you want - that's precisely what I set out to support in founding Ubuntu. What I did not set out to found was a project which pandered to the needs of a few, at the cost to the many. Especially when the few can perfectly well help themselves, and the many cannot.