Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 14:31 UTC (Fri) by juliank (guest, #45896)
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Losing graciously

Nelson says Ha Ha!

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 15:38 UTC (Fri) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960) [Link] (4 responses)

There is also such a thing as winning graciously.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 15:45 UTC (Fri) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, it's just Nelson saying this. Nelson has no personal interest in things. He just likes saying Ha Ha. It's just a well fitting quote from the Simpsons you can use whenever someone loses.

And it's not about the losing per se, it's more the fact that Mark called it losing. He did not do anything, Canonical was officially not involved in the whole process, and he previously said he was committed to upstart, so how can he call it losing?

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 16:00 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

It is impossible to use the Nelson quote as an unaccompanied one-liner without making it reasonable for people to infer that you are experiencing schadenfreude.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 17:47 UTC (Fri) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

"Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude"

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:41 UTC (Sat) by danielf2 (guest, #92398) [Link]

Schadenfreude ist die _einzige_ Freude! :)

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 19:12 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (16 responses)

Uncalled for and unhelpful.

Some of us who are publicly critical of Canonical do so because we genuinely believe they've made poor management decisions and are trying to find a way to encourage them to make better ones going forward. Rubbing there nose in poor decision making, after they decide to change totally defeats the point. No matter how long and drawn out the discussion on a particular error in judgement, its actively destructive to gloat when they decide to change course. A decision to wind down upstart development now, as implied by Mark's blog post, is more of a win for Canonical and Ubuntu than anyone else. Nelsoning that decision makes it that much harder for Canonical and Ubuntu to move forward cleanly and fully embrace the change without hard feelings.

Or to give everyone something that will fit into a tweet:
Juliank, Stop being a dick.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 20:55 UTC (Fri) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

Sorry for that. It was not really meant that way.

But nice word "nelsoning".

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 14, 2014 23:41 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (14 responses)

Have you forgotten about the "open source tea party" already? Have you already forgotten about Martin Gräßlin almost quitting his Open Source work due to mobbing by Canonical? https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13hi1tbptzigbmn...
Not to mention that they're *still* actively fracturing the Linux Community with Mir. So I'm sorry, but Mark had it coming. And when he gives up on Mir, I'll be laughing at him too.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 0:18 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

Mir is a different kettle of fish entirely....

upstart was created as a legitimate effort to solve real deficiencies in sysinit at a time when no other competing option for service management was seeing any serious development or adoption momentum at all. Mir, on the other hand, is just a wasteful distraction that doesn't really solve any technical problems wayland wasn't already trying to solve.

So credit where credit is due. Unlike Mir, Upstart was intended to solve some long standing and commonly experienced deficiencies and had the potential to be a wildly used replacement for sysvinit. Upstart's development stagnation and its inability to attract a development community is a cautionary tale to learn from...not to deride because it failed.

And for me at least, seeing Canonical drop upstart isn't really a win at all. The ultimate win, is to get Canonical to drop that blasted CLA requirement on all their gpl licensed projects. Canonical has not really internalized the fact that their CLA requirements hurt their ability to sustain innovation and to build development communities. Irony abounds, in that Canonical can do such a reasonably good job of community building in every aspect of the Ubuntu distribution _except_ development of Canonical led projects...which is the only area with a legal hurdle like the CLA. I can only imagine that one of the early conversations around community management went like this: "I'm bored burning ants with my magnifying glass. bored bored bored. Hey you know what would be fun?! Let's build a rock star community development team inside the corporate fenceline and then throw up insurmountable hurdles in their way." That's a profoundly sadistic management philosophy.

There's still more work to do to convince them that the CLA gets in the way of building strong developer communities. And sadly if they don't learn this lesson soon, their Unity stack push into mobile is going to get bitten by the same problem that bit upstart. Canonical does not have the manpower to sustain technology development on their own and the CLA is _hostile_ to external developer interests.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 11:14 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

+1. Shuttleworth has not learned the right lesson at all. Its the CLA that felled upstart, otherwise (according to SJR, Upstart's creator) systemd may not have existed and upstart may have ended looking much like systemd. I support their decision to work on Mir, but it will never catch on elsewhere either as long as the CLA is in place.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 0:32 UTC (Sat) by Tov (subscriber, #61080) [Link] (11 responses)

I can perfectly see, what MS meant by "open source tea party". The forum here and elsewhere seems to be full of people polarizing the debate, holding grudge and trying to dig the trenches deeper. No matter the preceding heated discussion (technical and otherwise) I really salute MS for trying to bury the hatchet and and bowing for the decision by the TC.

Although personally having enjoyed the benefits of Upstart for several years, I really look forward to the new benefits promised by systemd. Also the (friendly?) competition between Mir and Wayland may really propel the Linux desktop/phone forward. What happened to "Freedom of choice"? MS and Canonical are free to make their choices, and you and me are free to make our choices.

Please try to be polite, respectful, and informative.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 3:55 UTC (Sat) by alison (subscriber, #63752) [Link] (10 responses)

>I can perfectly see, what MS meant by "open source tea party".

I agree. We do have a mob mentality sometimes in open source. We all know of examples and reciting them is unnecessary, assuredly.

The big question is, will ChomeOS now abandon Upstart? Notably Upstart creator Resnick works at Google. Unlike Canonical, Google assuredly has plenty of money to maintain a fork indefinitely, as they have already demonstrated with the kernel, codecs, Android and webkit. I don't see splintering going away at all -- the parties to it are just morphing.

I do hope that the distros will stop fighting each and focus on the real enemy, closed-source. I'm with Zach Pfeffer: let's kill those binary blobs dead, and stop wasting energy wrestling each other.

systemd in ChromeOS

Posted Feb 15, 2014 12:01 UTC (Sat) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

If they do decide to change to systemd is should be a lot easier for them given there is only one version of ChromeOS and they can dictate when the change gets rolled out.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 13:23 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (8 responses)

Scott James Remnant, the original Upstart creator, works at Google but has nothing to do with Upstart development any longer – mostly because he would have had to sign the Canonical CLA.

My guess would be that Google will at some point move ChromeOS over to systemd. It's not as if the init system in ChromeOS was a user-serviceable part, or that there'd many tricky services in ChromeOS running as Upstart-native jobs, so they might as well go with the flow.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 16:50 UTC (Sat) by alison (subscriber, #63752) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah, "Remnant," not Resnick -- thanks for the correction. Presumably Google has a policy forbidding their employees from signing CLAs like Canonicals. Android doesn't have a CLA, but that's because AFAICT they don't accept contributions. Is it fair to criticize Canonical's CLA more than projects that don't take patches at all?

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 17:06 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

AOSP does accept patches, see http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:20 UTC (Sat) by mdeslaur (subscriber, #55004) [Link]

> Android doesn't have a CLA

Sure it does:

http://source.android.com/source/licenses.html#contributo...

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:18 UTC (Sat) by mdeslaur (subscriber, #55004) [Link] (4 responses)

> mostly because he would have had to sign the Canonical CLA

Since there are Google submitted patches in the current Upstart tree, I would believe the CLA has already been signed.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:23 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

Scott James Remnant said that he hadn't signed the CLA. Whether that was due to his own preference or Google policy wasn't specified.

It is also worth pointing out that according to what he said he doesn't do anything Upstart-related at Google in the first place; if there are patches from Google in Upstart then they were presumably submitted by somebody else.

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 18:27 UTC (Sat) by mdeslaur (subscriber, #55004) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, they are from "Scott James Remnant <keybuk@google.com>".

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 20:15 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

What's the possibility that *Google* has signed the CLA?

Bearing in mind, as an employee SJR presumably doesn't own the copyright to work he writes on Google's dime, there's no point in him signing the CLA because it's not his copyright to assign?

Cheers,
Wol

Shuttleworth: Losing gracefully

Posted Feb 15, 2014 21:06 UTC (Sat) by mdeslaur (subscriber, #55004) [Link]

Yes, that is quite possible.