Shuttleworth On Mir: "A Fantastic Piece of Engineering"

[Nobu]

In other words, LibreOffice was a successful because it was able to attain momentum near equal or greater than that of the project it was forking. Otherwise, companies would have had no reason to use or help develop the fork, and the original would continue to progress at a pace more attractive than the fork, and the company behind the original product would still have incentive to make a commercially licensed version available.

It's the exact same for projects under MIT or similar licenses, except there's the freedom for many other failed attempts at commercial forks to be made, and the possibility for one or two successful commercial forks, at less cost to the company.

[Luke_Wolf]

It can be a fantastic piece of Software Architecture, but sure as hell isn't Engineering.

Software Engineering is just as legitimate as any other field of engineering. The famous related quote by the adobe guy is pure idiocy that ignores the history of various fields of engineering. Do remember that Bridge Engineers are standing on the shoulders of the engineers long past who figured it out before them who are standing upon the rubble of the previous engineers mistakes. software engineering is in an amazing state given that it's a field that's (in legitimate terms) less than 100 years old, compared with building engineers with thousands of years of history.

[Hamish Wilson]

I shall write a general message here.

First, will people stop complaining that Larabel is in everyone's pocket please? Seriously, the amount of times I have seen people say he is being paid by someone, by rights he should be richer than Bill Gates (or Mark Shuttleworth) by now. Larabel may be boisterous and sometimes a little cooky, but his opinions are his own, and I do not think he has ever adapted them to suit anyone's agenda. He can sometimes be a bit of a dick, but the dick he is waving is all his own (my apologies for putting that image in you guy's heads). He is not working for Canonical, he is not working Red Hat (remember all the bitching he did about the new Anaconda?), he is not working for Microsoft, he is not working for Martin Gr??lin, he is not working for Lennart Pottering, and he is not working for the Illuminati. He is just Larabel.

Second, I do not appreciate all of the thread carpet bombing from new users who are just coming here to bitch and call people whiners when that is the whole reason they joined this forum. Especially when they have not posted any real cohesive argument other than calling people butt-hurts.

Going on to a more personal argument, Ubuntu is not god's gift to Linux and I find it offensive that people would say so, not because it is praising Canonical, but because it is burying the hard work of thousands of developers off all stripes who have over the years got us to where we are now. The simple truth is Canonical does not have all that much to it's name besides it's name, and the fact that people are touting that lone asset as a justification for their attacks on many of these hard working developers is just asinine, entitled, and spoiled behaviour.

People have legitimate concerns about Mir. And like it or not it is going to affect everyone, regardless of if they are using Ubuntu or not. So people are going to express these concerns (eloquently or not) and they should be, because this is supposed to be a community. People who are saying you can not express your opinion about Canonical simply because they have the right to do what they want and can not see the hypocrisy are kidding themselves. As are the people trying to brush this off as a smear campaign against Ubuntu, when they are trying to blindly smear the rest of the Linux community (just as Canonical was trying to smear Wayland).

There. Will you please stop carpet-bombing this thread with this ill-conceived vitriol and actually try and find a proper justification for Mir? Maybe then you could convince people, especially since the Wayland "butthurt trolls" seem to have offered a lot more substantive technical and fact based arguments than the people lining up to blindly defend Canonical.

[chithanh]

I hate to trumpet failure and sound negative, but it's important to keep a vague factual basis to your castle building, I find.

So let's look at some numbers on this huge rise in public awareness and users that Ubuntu has brought about, shall we?


netmarketshare's numbers only go back to 2008. They have:

Jan 2008 - Linux 0.72%
Feb 2013 - Linux 1.04%

hitlink's stats go back to late 2004:

Found via http://www.berkeleylug.com/?p=43

While this growth can be considered modest by some (not me), the other important aspect is that Ubuntu has become synonymous with the Linux desktop. And not only the desktop: Ubuntu is displacing the "classic" server distributions at an astonishing rate. See e.g. Amazon EC2 stats:


Source: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/totals

So, Linux's numbers are up. That's great. But it's not like Ubuntu has ushered in some kind of Linux usage revolution, I'm afraid. Apple has done substantially better over the same period of time.

That's only part of the picture. The other part is that Ubuntu has reached more desktop users than all other distros combined. The same is currently happening for servers. EC2 is somewhat ahead of the curve because it is not as inert as SOHO or even enterprise sectors, but clearly shows where we are heading.

So the claim of the previous poster that Ubuntu is where commercial Linux development happens or is going to happen is plausible.

[johnc]

People have legitimate concerns about Mir. And like it or not it is going to affect everyone, regardless of if they are using Ubuntu or not. So people are going to express these concerns (eloquently or not) and they should be, because this is supposed to be a community. People who are saying you can not express your opinion about Canonical simply because they have the right to do what they want and can not see the hypocrisy are kidding themselves. As are the people trying to brush this off as a smear campaign against Ubuntu, when they are trying to blindly smear the rest of the Linux community (just as Canonical was trying to smear Wayland).

Expressing concerns and criticism is completely legitimate of course. Even I have huge doubts about this Mir being anything other than a fail. But there are people here posting (and in other places) like they've had their children ripped away from them and Shuttleworth is some great satan trying to sabotage Linux. Not to mention the variety of arrogant pricks in the Linux dev community who sneer on any decision made outside the established "clique".

There. Will you please stop carpet-bombing this thread with this ill-conceived vitriol and actually try and find a proper justification for Mir? Maybe then you could convince people, especially since the Wayland "butthurt trolls" seem to have offered a lot more substantive technical and fact based arguments than the people lining up to blindly defend Canonical.

The justification is probably what we already know: for whatever reasons, they just want to roll their own way. Some of that is because they don't feel the community-provided stuff is good enough for consumer use (hence Unity rather than GNOME Shell). Regarding Mir, it's probably a combo of wanting to have control of their own destiny and likely something they can easily scoop from SF to have a broad and mature base for existing Android drivers.

The thing is, if their goal is 100% control of their own software and nothing else, even that is a 100% valid, legitimate reason to make their own display server and so to line them up as some kind of evil organization or a backstabber is just obnoxious.

[Tgui]

It can be a fantastic piece of Software Architecture, but sure as hell isn't Engineering.

I have degrees in both Mechanical engineering and Computer science. Well, 2x Computer science since I have a BS/MS in that.

You have no idea what the words you use actually mean.

You have to be trolling, right?! Seriously, architecture vs engineering?!

[Luke_Wolf]

The justification is probably what we already know: for whatever reasons, they just want to roll their own way. Some of that is because they don't feel the community-provided stuff is good enough for consumer use (hence Unity rather than GNOME Shell). Regarding Mir, it's probably a combo of wanting to have control of their own destiny and likely something they can easily scoop from SF to have a broad and mature base for existing Android drivers.

The thing is, if their goal is 100% control of their own software and nothing else, even that is a 100% valid, legitimate reason to make their own display server and so to line them up as some kind of evil organization or a backstabber is just obnoxious.

That they're making their own display server isn't what the backstabbing is, the back stabbing is that in 2010 they said they were going to use Wayland, but they don't even get involved with wayland, then 9 months ago they started up this new display server without telling anybody and no discussion and no attempts to make wayland fit what they want (and by what the wayland devs have said it seems to already fulfill their needs), and then they come out now and piss all over wayland and only the reaction of the community forced them to withdraw their statement, and they're continuing to push Mir on technical grounds which implicitly continues to piss on wayland. In mine and most people's books that's a foul play, and it's not exactly the first time either (remember when they decided to divert away funds from gnome developers into their pockets with it was either banshee or rhythmbox). If they had either A). Stated their real intentions and not pissed all over wayland, or B). Actually worked with the wayland devs before deciding to go on their own we wouldn't be having this conversation. There would be outcry like there was over systemd but not outrage like they've spurred now.

[Luke_Wolf]

I have degrees in both Mechanical engineering and Computer science. Well, 2x Computer science since I have a BS/MS in that.

You have no idea what the words you use actually mean.

You have to be trolling, right?! Seriously, architecture vs engineering?!

I'm actually going to assume he's a delusional academic (come to think of it, isn't that statement redundant?) like the other one I was arguing with over Object Oriented Programming, who thinks that math solves everything and forgets that engineering has a long and ... entertaining... past of failures before things get to the point where you can just pop out a bridge or a building. The other one was delusional enough to believe that we got sending people into space right in 1. Which if you know anything about the history of space travel... well you're busting a gut in laughter right now, or maybe crying if you had relatives involved.. Hell we weren't even able to get it right again today with the constellation project which resulted in that all being acceded to corporations..

[johnc]

That they're making their own display server isn't what the backstabbing is, the back stabbing is that in 2010 they said they were going to use Wayland, but they don't even get involved with wayland, then 9 months ago they started up this new display server without telling anybody and no discussion and no attempts to make wayland fit what they want (and by what the wayland devs have said it seems to already fulfill their needs), and then they come out now and piss all over wayland and only the reaction of the community forced them to withdraw their statement, and they're continuing to push Mir on technical grounds which implicitly continues to piss on wayland. In mine and most people's books that's a foul play, and it's not exactly the first time either (remember when they decided to divert away funds from gnome developers into their pockets with it was either banshee or rhythmbox). If they had either A). Stated their real intentions and not pissed all over wayland, or B). Actually worked with the wayland devs before deciding to go on their own we wouldn't be having this conversation. There would be outcry like there was over systemd but not outrage like they've spurred now.

They didn't piss all over Wayland. Yeah they made a wrong statement or two out of error but they went back and publicly redacted that. Yes, in 2010 they got behind Wayland, but at the time seemingly not believing it was a perfect solution, if I read Mark's statements from back then correctly. But by 2012 they wanted to do their own thing for whatever reason. Things change.

[mether]

They didn't piss all over Wayland. Yeah they made a wrong statement or two out of error but they went back and publicly redacted that. Yes, in 2010 they got behind Wayland, but at the time seemingly not believing it was a perfect solution, if I read Mark's statements from back then correctly. But by 2012 they wanted to do their own thing for whatever reason. Things change.

There is really no problems with things changing but think about why those incorrect claims about Wayland was made? Those weren't just a "wrong statement or two". It was serious claims about security issues with Wayland etc and after their retraction their entire rationale for not adopting Wayland has vanished. They never talked to Wayland developers at all before announcing Mir who has been developed for an year in private and they admitted they didn't know about Wayland much. Opportunity for colloboration and a unified solution has been lost because of this. Not to mention Mir requires you to sign a canonical CLA before they will accept patches and this makes it unlikely that Mir will be anything other than a single vendor solution.