KDE Developers Continue To Be Frustrated With Canonical

[marciocr]

I actually think Aaron's criticism is pretty poignant and makes it very clear where his objections are while being supportive of the overall effort. I would encourage everyone to adopt such a approach.

"p.s. I'm usually very hesitant to speak critically in public about other Free software projects as it usually does more harm than good, and given my professional interest in these areas some may wonder if I'm speaking from a conflict of interest. I want to make it crystal clear that I think Ubuntu Phone a great thing to see; more Free software mobile efforts, particularly ones using Qt/QML, warm my insides like a good bowl of soup on a cold winter's night."

He called Canonical team liars and deceivers and after that he said he is supportive? Right.....

ps: I am starting to thing that the problem is a very bad social skills. I can't believe that Seigo wrote what he wrote thinking that was just a harmless opinion.

[RahulSundaram]

He called Canonical team liars and deceivers and after that he said he is supportive? Right.....

You probably aren't a native speaker. He didn't say they lied at all. He is saying that what they are claiming is a false pretense. It is a more naunced argument about overselling an idea and there is a big difference in terms of intent. You need to read it more carefully.

[MartinN]

You should quit writing blog posts :-) Your first post was the one that got you into all this mess. Even though it was technical in nature it sounded more like politics. Why talk about not accepting patches for upstream projects or even vetoing against them? With such posts you are immediately closing a door, even though there is no need for it. You should simply have written: "We currently do not have the manpower to support multiple display servers. We are concentrating on Wayland for now as it will be the display server used by most distributions."

As you said yourself, it is not that easy to support KWin on Mir. So just wait and see what happens. Maybe someone comes up with a patch, maybe not. Cross that bridge about accepting/rejecting or vetoing against patches when it comes to it. You would be in much better position now and then.

Maybe you should be his PR person

[ceage]

From reading through Aaron Seigo's post, I think he's confused and misled by a false notion of community and makes unfounded assumptions on how people are supposed to behave. No wonder he then draws wrong conclusions and gets frustrated in the end.

[...] as the world needs Free-as-in-freedom technology more than it even knows, this is not a small matter.

So he knows what the world needs. I'd say it's dangerous to even start thinking in that directon. That's just the kind of rhetoric and mindset that usually makes thing worse, no matter how well intentioned. He's likely projecting his own wishful thinking onto the rest of the world and now he's disappointed because the world fails to do what he thinks is best --- for *everyone* on this planet.

This is not the sort of leadership called for, nor acceptable, within the Free software community.

What call for leadership? I didn't hear a collective call for leadership coming from FLOSS entities (users *and* companies) all over the world.

And what's that nebulous community he keeps mentioning?

A community needs common purpose and uniform will. What he refers to lacks both. Open Source is not an end in itself (i.e. it's *not* purpose), it's just a method. The term society would be more appropriate for what he thinks he's talking about, but all that can be said without making unsafe assumptions is: there's a set of people who all employ the same method. Full stop.
A lot of people use bicycles as a method of transportation. It doesn't make them a `community'.

It is the sort of behavior that tears a movement apart from the inside.

Again, this `movement' is non-existent in the first place. So there's nothing to `tear apart'. There may be lots of movement around Open Source, but it's not uniform at all. To try to convince e.g. Canonical to act against their own judgement is like trying to convice the BSD people to switch over to Linux and direct all their efforts towards that ecosystem. They're not a potential resource in the first place, so why bother? It's a pointless waste of energy.

I think Aaron would save himself a lot of frustration if he took a few minutes of time to revise his world view and ditch the notion that all of FLOSS ought to be one big happy family.

[mrugiero]

Who is dismissing dissenting opinions?. In fact , everybody should accept the dissenting opinion of canonical regarding waylaid , without whining even if you disagree. Why? because Canonical is totally entitled to do it. And I highly doubt that paid developers are not acting in the behalf of their employers, that's their money. So i am just dismissing the nonsensical FUD and childish rationalizations .

Yes. And they should accept other people's dissenting opinions on the subject. Specially, maintainers' opinions about not supporting it.

What that have anything to do with your insinuation that KDE developers will be somehow compromised ?

Not directly. You need to sum up one plus one. If there is nobody (and there are no signs that it will be) from Canonical working on KWin support, the comment that "KWin will run great on Mir" (I don't remember if that's an exact quote) means they expect the maintainers to support it. Otherwise, magic.

AFAIK, only some libraries will have to be rebuilt, and no (or almost no) applications. Unless they want to use new features, of course.

Canonical would be crazy if they had to recompile half of the packages in their repositories every time they uploaded a new version of Mir (it's something that would take ages to complete, especially for ARM).

AFAIK, client API is supposed to be stable from certain point and forward. The problem is that, if they expect other DEs to work on top of Mir, server API should be stable.

[bkor]

somehow i doubt the community has much to say in gnome development

Whomever does things has influence. Whining that someone you owes you nothing doesn't immediately jump on some feature request: whatever.

If you contribute to GNOME you'll get more influence. You're "community" is vague. Be specific about what you mean.

It seems you're suggesting that GNOME is only Red Hat. Try actually investigating a little. I'm from GNOME and I think you're nuts to think this, but oh well :P

[deanjo]

Yum API is by used by a enormous number of projects including the build system, installer etc in Fedora and you can't just swap it out.

That's exactly what openSUSE did so you can't tell me it cannot be done even if it involved a compatibility library for the period of transition.

[TheBlackCat]

Who is dismissing dissenting opinions?. In fact , everybody should accept the dissenting opinion of canonical regarding waylaid , without whining even if you disagree. Why? because Canonical is totally entitled to do it.

So in other words, canonical is allowed to have their dissenting opinion regarding wayland, but wayland devs are not allowed to have a dissenting opinion about mir? Why is canonical the only ones who are entitled to their opinion?

[Alex Sarmiento]

So in other words, canonical is allowed to have their dissenting opinion regarding wayland, but wayland devs are not allowed to have a dissenting opinion about mir? Why is canonical the only ones who are entitled to their opinion?

Everybody is entitled . But calling Canonical traitors, evil,theft , hurting the "community". whatever, because they decided to follow their own path is not the same as saying "we are not interested". Or are you going to accuse Canonical of "asymmetrical" opinions? too

I find all this just ridiculous.

[RahulSundaram]

That's exactly what openSUSE did so you can't tell me it cannot be done even if it involved a compatibility library for the period of transition.

Why would you force a transition from a familiar command line to a new one?