Canonical Reportedly Slashing Jobs, Seeking Outside Investment

[starshipeleven]

As for Upstart, that was probably one of the only applications Canonical made that was better than the alternatives.

While true, it does not mean it was not a failure given what its goals were.

I think systemd is pretty good but IMO it's a bit overkill. It reminds me a lot of the US government:
* Is set up in a way that is supposed to be compliant for the needs of the greatest number of people possible
* Fundamentally adopted by many, with a few adamant outliers
* Run by someone many people hate

So far, you are also describing the Linux kernel. (Torvalds isn't exactly worshipped by everyone)

* Has an unnecessary amount of power/control over things nobody asked it to do or approves of

There are quite a bit of people that approve its higher level of control over things, and use that.

* Has a tendency to complicate things for allied forces (FreeBSD vs NATO)

FreeBSD and Unixes in general are not "allied forces", they share many upstream projects with Linux (and also Windows sometimes), but there is no alliance. It's more like a free communal partnership.

[lpotter]

What you don't know is that this started (more than) half a year ago. I was one of the first to be made redundant 5 months ago. I am a maintainer of Qt module essential for Qt based mobile phones. There were no other internal Qt/Qml based jobs, only cloud to be found. The clues were there months ago. One way to determine a company's direction is to look at the positions they are hiring for.

They want an IPO. To do that best, you need profit. Easiest way to do that is chop of the parts that aren't selling. Unity8 wasn't selling because it wasn't ready to be sold. There was really only a handful of developers working on unity8. You cannot starve development and expect miracles.

[starshipeleven]

Haha. Best for Red Hat maybe.

What is best for RedHat is best for all.

[starshipeleven]

If Microsoft ends up buying Canonical the first thing they will do is shut down Ubuntu desktop and keep only cloud and server stuff. It's in Microsoft's best interest that the most popular Linux desktop dies.

When MS buys Canonical is to start the full migration of their stuff on Linux, until Windows becomes a very customized Linux Distro with proprietary additions.

Really, MS isn't going to shit its pants about an OS that has 1% of marketshare anyway.

[nanonyme]

It was inspired by both (and maybe also Solaris', not sure anymore).

Yeah, I guess. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html My main point though was that it wasn't just that Upstart *implementation* was to him something that needed to be replaced. He wanted to also change the *design*. That's something you can't trivially change without forking the entire project and if you're ready to do that, why not as well start from scratch anyway?
In fact, a direct quote from him from that page "Well, the point of the part about Upstart above was to show that the core design of Upstart is flawed, in our opinion. Starting completely from scratch suggests itself if the existing solution appears flawed in its core. However, note that we took a lot of inspiration from Upstart's code-base otherwise."

[starshipeleven]

Yeah, I guess. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html My main point though was that it wasn't just that Upstart *implementation* was to him something that needed to be replaced. He wanted to also change the *design*. That's something you can't trivially change without forking the entire project and if you're ready to do that, why not as well start from scratch anyway?

Agree with this. Minor clarification: design changes very commonly force a complete redesign.
Upstart was still initscript-based, he wanted systemd to be config-based, which is basically the opposite thing.
Starting from scratch was the only possible choice there.

[Mez']

Making money out of Free Software means building added value on top of existing bricks, not trying to build competing (Free) bricks, especially when resources are limited.

Canonical did well when they built Ubuntu on top on Debian, adding more polish and user-friendly-ness. They didn't do well when they tried to build an init system competing with systemd, a graphic server competing with Wayland, and a desktop environment competing with Gnome/KDE, instead of using those to make an awesome OS.

Yes they did well in their will to compete Gnome/KDE. Not a valid point as it is your personal opinion only.

[Anvil]

this will work in Redhats Favor, they'll just employ the ones that get the boot from Canonical, wonder if Oracle or Redhat will just buy out Ubuntu an demolish a competitor, or will Microsoft buy them out?

[Delgarde]

I'm totally with Poettering in his point about actually using Linux's features. If you never use more than POSIX, what's the point of these OSes being different? No, the use of cgroups and other great linux features is totally worthwhile. If FreeBSD wants to copy these features, or better alternatives, then cool - we get competition pushing OSes to get better.

Agreed - cross-platform support is good in general, but not if it means targeting the lowest common denominator, avoiding valuable features because they're not available on the less-popular platforms.

[Cerberus]

What you don't know is that this started (more than) half a year ago. I was one of the first to be made redundant 5 months ago. I am a maintainer of Qt module essential for Qt based mobile phones. There were no other internal Qt/Qml based jobs, only cloud to be found. The clues were there months ago. One way to determine a company's direction is to look at the positions they are hiring for.

They want an IPO. To do that best, you need profit. Easiest way to do that is chop of the parts that aren't selling. Unity8 wasn't selling because it wasn't ready to be sold. There was really only a handful of developers working on unity8. You cannot starve development and expect miracles.

I had a feeling something is wrong with the project when they stopped shipping regular updates to the phones and tablets and were supposedly working on snap based images, I said okay that makes sense for the future, and seeing they made lots of progress with Unity 8 in 17.04 cycle I thought "it is okay after all". I cant blame them for wanting IPO because after all these years it would be nice for the company to finally start turning a profit. Ubuntu needs to invest where it is strong, Unity 8, Mir and convergence were a sexy idea, but I had my doubts that Canonical has the manpower to pull it off, especially because it is all such a massive undertaking, I bought the phone and gave them the benefit of the doubt however, reported bugs etc. It is what I was able to contribute as a user. In the end Ubuntu will go on without Unity 8 and convergence, but I feel bad for the developers that invested a lot of time into these projects only to see them dropped, but that is how it goes sometimes in software development, I hope those that are getting laid off will be able to quickly find new jobs.