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Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Posted Mar 4, 2013 23:24 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) by mmcgrath Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Ubuntu is competing nicely on the server with Red Hat, having surpassed them according to certain measures. For instance on AWS it seems that Ubuntu is much more popular. That is a big impact, I think.
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Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 4, 2013 23:42 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Is that with paying customers? You can't eat marketshare or write checks based on your popularity. Sustainability is important too and while I don't question Shuttleworth's commitment I don't think it is sustainable, anybody could be hit by a bus or lose interest, Ubuntu really won't survive without him funding full time development.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 4, 2013 23:49 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Sure, and Google could decide that Android is a bad idea and abandon it. How many Android customers are paying (to Google) customers? How long would Android survive without Google's commitment? So your argument translates into one of relative size and of safe choices.But we were talking about impact, where IMHO it is not a good idea to downplay Canonical's contributions. Even though I prefer Debian myself (on the server and on the desktop), Ubuntu is a very nice distro and the only one that has made inroads into the general public.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 4, 2013 23:57 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Without Google's commitment, Samsung would take over Android development, with plenty of money to fund it (though they might no longer share with other players).Android has hundreds of millions of paying users. Neither Wayland nor MIR have end users yet. Perhaps MIR has good ideas, but the fragmentation of the quite small free desktop space makes me nervous.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 0:06 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Me too, but instead of shouting that the sky is falling, maybe we should be asking more interesting questions: will there be a standard ABI for drivers? Will the protocols be interoperable? Will there be a common API for applications and desktop environments? If we accept that both sides have good ideas and can learn from the other side, then we can wait patiently until Lennart Poettering reinvents the graphics stack with his own solution (preferently integrated into systemd, because where else? :)
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 2:39 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
My questions are more simple. Why couldn't they devote their limited resources to expanding/improving an existing solution? Wayland needs the help and for shuttleworth to run off and spend his limited resources on yet another fork is insanity. If he devoted those same resources to wayland he might be able to get what he wants while improving wayland for everyone.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 3:46 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Probably the same reason they are using upstart. They like what they are doing more then what others are doing.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 5:03 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
This seems different than with bazaar or upstart, in those cases they saw the need and were early to the party but failure to build a consensus around their design caused them to be left by the wayside as the industry moved on to technically better solutions (git and systemd). In this case they are late to the part, the early one is google with surface finger and the design that will probably win out on quality is Wayland so that doesnt leave much room for Mir. Maybe it will be like Phonon and just wrap the real API, as long as it doesn't get in the way
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 6, 2013 5:18 UTC (Wed) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link]
> In this case they are late to the part, the early one is google with surface finger and the design that will probably win out on quality is Wayland so that doesnt leave much room for Mir.
Not late. Currently there's nothing but Xorg in Linux. Yes, there're Wayland builds in some distributions, there's even RebeccaBlackOS livecd with Wayland on it. But most people have never seen it, they don't know how Wayland works or even looks. Even those who've seen it usually say that it's in early development stage, and lacks many features.
So actually there's Xorg and tales about legendary Wayland. :) Now we've just got one more tale about legendary Mir.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 5:53 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
The stated reason for sticking with upstart is that it took them five releases to make it work somehow and they expect the same kind of breakage from systemd.
> http://ubuntu.5.n6.nabble.com/upstart-beyond-Ubuntu-12-04...
It obviously never occurred to them that making upstart work was hard because it, you know, is upstart.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 7, 2013 20:27 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
From my point of view, it took so long because of lack of manpower. That problem didn't get solved until recently (the last 6 months or so?).
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 9:08 UTC (Tue) by cladisch (✭ supporter ✭, #50193) [Link]
> then we can wait patiently until Lennart Poettering reinvents the graphics stack with his own solution
There's no need to wait for Lennart; Kristian Høgsberg is quite capable of doing this by himself with Wayland (and already did this with the Linux FireWire stack, which he replaced with Juju).
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 0:54 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I'll freely admit my point isn't a strong one but google has many paying customers on android, although googles main customers are the advertisers, not handset users and androids main function is to prevent google from sliding into irrelevance, like yahoo.
Android Posted Mar 5, 2013 11:01 UTC (Tue) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link] Google also gets plenty of data: geolocation (how people move, plus supporting data like the locations of antennas and hotspots) and app installs, browsing histories for Chrome users, app usage for the ones that show their ads. Account integration enables apps to start sharing almost invisibly.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 0:58 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I should also point out that I like Ubuntu just fine, I think unity is a better interface than gnome3 shell and they probably made the right decision to split and make a more traditional desktop. I hope they do well but their decision making seems to be high risk and clouded by ignorance
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 6:24 UTC (Tue) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
The history is full of distros going out of business due to lack of fund. Think what happened to Mandriva for example. And Canonical is currently working on cost cutting initiative like "switching UDS to virtual event". They are also not planning on Mark money, or they would not have implemented stuff like "amazon referal", or tried to sell music. In fact, if Canonical didn't care about the money, they would have done a fundation like Mozilla or Wikimedia.
So yes, sustainability is what matter, and Canonical is nowhere being sustainable for now.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 7:23 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] A foundation, you mean? It was done in 2005.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 8:52 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
No. That isn't a real non-profit foundation with any real part in the Ubuntu governance model. It is just a financial reserve. Nothing more.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 8:56 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Well, it addresses the "sustainability" bit quite nicely.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 18:58 UTC (Tue) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
Well, for how long ?
RH had 343 millions $ of earning in Q3 of 2012. The company had around 5300 people on payroll at this time. According to SEC fillings, the expenses for Q3 is around 240 millions $.
Mozilla foundation, in 2010, spent 145 millions $ in expenses, for a payroll of around 250 people ( according to Quora and their own website ).
Canonical has around 500 people on payroll if i am not wrong. If I just divide by 10 to match the numbers of RH, that would mean operating expenses of at least 100 millions per year ( 4 * 24 millions ) for Canonical.
If I take the one of Mozilla, that mean around 300 millions of $ in expenses per year for Canonical.
So please now explain how 10 millions of $ put in 2005 on a bank account does address the sustainability in any way.
Either someone put something like 290 millions of $ to pay everybody for 3 years ( without any investment ), or there will be massive layoffs ( like 97% of the current work force ), along massive cost cutting changes ( like, not using one of the most expensive part of one one of the most expensive town of Europa as HQ, or not doing bi yearly events that cost around 500 000 euros to organize ).
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 19:17 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] If you are paying your employees $500K per year then your numbers make sense. If instead you have a mobile workforce spread all around Europe, of which developers are but a small fraction, then they don't.Let us reverse your computations: $10M allow you to pay 33 developers for 3 years if you give them $100K each, or $50K including benefits. That should give Ubuntu developers some air should Canonical stop employing them, even if there were zero income -- and in fairness we have to suppose that Ubuntu would get some money from other interested organizations and some volunteer efforts. It always amazes me how people can use numbers in ingenious ways to prove their point when Canonical is involved.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 5, 2013 20:54 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
Not hard to imagine Canonical is in trouble.. i can even imagine that most distros might be in trouble, there is just too many of them, and if the main focus of the enterprise is purely sell software, then they are asking for trouble.
I can think a lot of things, i can be wrong about many things, but i think a re-invention of the model for most of those will be in the order of the day... as example Mandriva is still alive and has a different model... only the forking spree seems more an act of desperation or a "forcing push trough the crowd" than a careful wise move.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 6, 2013 9:07 UTC (Wed) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
Sure, just show me where Mozilla or RH pay their employee 500K and maybe you can start saying "the numbers doesnt add up". Expenses count more than pay, there is also buildings, legal fees, travel, hardware, accounting, etc. In most countries you should also add taxes.
I based my computation on real life and verifiable numbers on the web ( and I would say, even stuff that are kinda legally required to reflect the truth ). You just take yours out of nowhere, forgetting lots of stuff that need to be paid. Just look at any foundation accounting to see how much this cost.
And both Mozilla and RH have highly decentralized workforce, both are in the same market segment as Canonical, so I am pretty sure that if Canonical started to publish now enough information to compare, the numbers would be the same. But feel free to find me a real life example of a organisation that match your numbers.
Also, 33 developpers are just 10% of the current canonical workforce. That's enough to make a small distribution, but in no way enough to sustain several complex project like Unity, Upstart, Bzr, Launchpad, Mir, Gwibber, Lightdm, Juju, Maas, AppArmor, software center, UbuntuOne, and all the distribution ( and port on others platforms like TV, phone, etc ).
You need people for QA, documentation, translation, system administration, etc.
Before people were fired from Mandriva to create Mageia, the company was around 50 person, split between Brasil and France. And this was barely enough to produce a OS and maintain in house code ( installer, drakxtools, etc ). There was less projects than Canonical, and they had income.
Not to mention that if 90% of your workforce leave, there is a high chance that all of them will not work for free for the project anymore ( see Stormy Peters talk about it, something around "would you do it again for free" ). There is also a high probability that you have to remove people who act as bridges with community, thus making the community angry ( again, look at Mandriva and the way people reacted when Adam Williamson or Gael Duval were asked to leave ).
And while you think people will pay to sustain Ubuntu, you are also not taking in account the fact that Canonical will not disappear in 1 day if the worst happen. If something happen that result into using the fund to create a fundation as a measure against Canonical financial problem, the whole project slowly start to go down, and then community will slowly leave ( again, Mandriva ), and so there is likely no others interested organisations to give any money.
A saner model would be to do it right now, when everything go well and to drop the whole CLA idea with copyright assignment to Canonical, cause this prevent others interested companies from investing time ( at least, not without lots of paperwork ). AFAIK, Suse, Google, RH and likely others have such policy, and while they can do it, they would not do for smaller projects.
This would also restore the confidence of community, after the various issues like "amazon integration dropped after the freeze", or "UDS announced 2 weeks before, thus causing issues to people who booked their holidays for it".
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 6, 2013 9:40 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Let us see: Mandriva reported expenses in Q4 2008 of €1.5 M. In Q3 2008 it was €1.6 M (before the restructuring). I have not found better numbers. If that is enough to pay 50 employees for a year and build a distro, then Ubuntu might continue for some 5 years.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 6, 2013 20:37 UTC (Wed) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
except that due to creative accounting and french law regarding equivalent of US chapter 11, most people were not employed by mandriva but by edge-it , connectiva and linbox, since mandriva contracts were better and limited to existing jobs, preventing changing the structure. Each of theses companies ( and in fact Connectiva count as 2 due to them having 1 offshore company for various tax related reasons ) were not counted in the financial results since "independant" structures. If you can read french, just go see how and why Edge it bankrupted and how Mandriva was offloading the debt on them, resulting into them disappearing. And simplifying the structure was one of the work done by the previous CEO Arnaud Laprevote.
Moving the goalposts Posted Mar 6, 2013 20:22 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]
>Not to mention that if 90% of your workforce leave, **there is a high chance that all of them will not work for free for the project anymore** ( see Stormy Peters talk about it, something around "would you do it again for free" ). There is also a high probability that you have to remove people who act as bridges with community, thus making the community angry ( again, look at Mandriva and the way people reacted when Adam Williamson or Gael Duval were asked to leave ).
>**there is a high chance that all of them will not work for free for the project anymore**
Oh! there is a good chance they will... and they could even end up paying for it to! lol... specially if they could derive a business out of it.
Maybe that is what makes me arrogant, but i never understood the lack of vision -> What is it that most ppl more connected to the F/OSS side really want ?
ummm... they want their own distro... no ?
So instead of a Mandriva 20388 or a Ubuntu Jolly Something... Why not a Mandriva or a Ubuntu "Stormy Peters" as example ?
see ?
In the same sense, since we are talking about "client side", but also perfectly appliable to any server version... why not a Ubuntu or Mandriva "MacDonal's" or "Ford" or "Boeing"... or more up to point a Mandriva or Ubuntu "local smaller company", with all the "local" customization, LOffice with the pertinent forms, the pertinent apps in place some that can be even CS commercial Linux versions.. etc ..etc ?
see the point ?
That seems a real good "re-invention" of the model... it is "service oriented" model, the main distro is only a big repository, app store kind of thing, and it can even adapt to the "masses" being all online compile-install with several degrees of customization...
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