Shuttleworth: Quantal, raring, saucy…

Seems like a pretty bad idea to be so polarizing and cause such a divide if you want to attract any community support.

If he wants Ubuntu phone to be successful he needs to the early adopters and tech advocates on his side. Not to mention techies to write apps. And I think anyone who takes an objective look at the birth of Mir would conclude it wasn't necessary.

Insinuating that the people behind Wayland (who are mostly also from X land) are like the Tea Party turns me off from Ubuntu even further.

Childish dictator can keep his little sand pit, and I'll recommend people stay away from Ubuntu.

If you time your releases every 6 months, then some of them will be more awesome than others. IMO regular releases are way better than feature based ones. But aside from Mir, 13.10 doesn't seem that exciting (IMO). Which is ok, but if you make a lot of noise about Mir, then delay it, well, people will instead write about that.

Having Mark say that things are done on political grounds will ruin any last cooperation IMO. Really impolite. This while I still don't understand the technical reason for Mir (or keeping it secret).

Unless he really thinks that Mir is the equivalent of the Federal Bank in the USA or something like that I guess.

I'm not good at the retweetable retorts.

Look, there really isn't much in the blog post worth engaging Shuttleworth over. Once you strip out the overtly scandalously petty salvos at "competitors" (and I dare say Shuttleworth continues to misunderstand who is actual competitors are... hint: its actually Google) what are we really left with?

A depiction of how fully Canonical as pivoted over to a mobile platform focus in the last year. That's were the concentration is for them. That's what strategically matters for them now. That's where the engineering resources are going. Enterprise? Cloud? Desktop? footnotes.

So take all the defensive posturing against shadowy (pun-intended) boogeymen competitors with a grain of salt. The reality is, Canonical isn't gearing up for a fight with Red Hat, that fights been over for a long while (even for cloud where Red Hat is a huge openstack contributor), Canonical is gearing up to take on Google in mobile and attempt to scratch out a piece of Android marketshare for itself.

All of this back and forth about Mir or systemd or whatever NIH Mark wants lay at Red Hat's feet is a huge distraction. Google didn't care about being blamed for NIH when they burned down the traditional linux userspace and built Android. They just frelling did it and built their platform and owned the decision. They did business.

I think Shuttleworth suffers from the same character flaw that I do.. he likes a good argument. He relishes it. And we indulge him far too often for his own good, or ours.

For Canonical right now that must absolutely be laser focused on delivering a mobile platform that can compete head to head with Android. It really doesn't matter any more if Mir or Wayland is technically better or if upstart or systemd are technically better. It really doesn't matter if the click packages are a twisted monstrosity of the dpkg tenants instead of a clean engineered solution for application installs over a mobile image.

For Canonical right now, they've made their technology stack choices and its time to start painting the story of how their platform brings benefits to mobile users over Android coupled with Google Play. If they can't walk away from the comfortable battlelines they have drawn with the shadowman, they are never going to learn how to stand their ground with Google.

The hardest thing in Shuttleworth's blog for me is the lost opportunity for him to stake his ground and boldly tell Google that he's coming for their marketshare. Instead he's taking potshots at Red Hat who appear absolutely irrelevant right now for the personal mobile devise marketplace that Mir has been designed to attack as a replacement to Google's surfaceflinger.

I just don't get it. The Mir wayland comparison isn't actually fundamentally that interesting. Its the Mir surfaceflinger comparison that really matters. Its the Android/Unity8 platform comparison that really matters. Everything else is a sideshow. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the U platform actually doesn't measure up to Android competitively yet so Mark needs to throw up the sideshow to keep the fighting spirit alive. The fight with Android in a head to head matchup is going to be tough and uncomfortable invasion onto Google's home turf. The running skirmish with Red Hat, well-established ground across a well-defined political border that feeds existing nationalist/tribal identity.

Meh. I look forward to seeing what Canonical hauls out as a map navigation app on their phone platform to compete with Google Maps.

your point being? If there was something actually worth responding to, then maybe it would have got more than a retort. But on a *technical* level, this whole wayland vs mir thing has been beaten into the ground several times already. The rest to discuss is all politics and that doesn't merit more than a retort.

Shuttleworth _is_ demonised by the community, to the point of not being considered worth parsing -- people seem to apply "quick scan, trigger on buzzwords" approach to reading what he writes.

Look at it like this -- his universe is isolated to a degree, which makes it harder to empathise. But at least that isolation is not as impenetrable as what we have with Google.

Animosity will lead to mutual isolation and further misunderstanding.

That's obviously not the case for Linux. In fact, many projects have Linux as their primary target nowadays. In addition, basically all software originally written for other Unix variants was ported to Linux. We have tons of nice software.

> to basically exclude most third-party developers

The only kind of developer feeling excluded from Linux development are those that want to tightly control everything from source code to distribution to what the user can do with their software. Such demands are obviously not a good fit with the wider Linux and Open Source commmunities and, naturally, it shows.

That's absolutely the reverse of the truth.

"This was tested by netbooks arrival and subsequent death: they arrived with Linux, people hated them because they had no application to use with them, they switched to Windows"

Nonsense. I have one of those early netbooks and it works great - after you roll your own linux distro. The problem with them was that everyone expected the manufacturers to roll a usable distro to ship on them and that never happened! The manufacturer obviously hadnt bothered to hire a single person that understood linux to any degree (or if they did hire such a person, they didnt let him make the decisions.)

Linux was an excellent *Workstation* OS (that's for real computers, not toy desktops) way back in the early 90s when I first ran into it. Chatter to the contrary is just ignorant.

It's quite interesting how similar the Wayland vs. Mir debate is to the Gnome vs. KDE debate of some 15 years ago.