The OOo, LibreOffice Tale Should Be a Warning To Canonical, Other FOSS Projects
Michael Haney
Oracle is throwing in the towel on OpenOffice after the majority of
the community jumped ship and sided with The Document Foundation and
LibreOffice. This move by the community to fork OOo due to Oracle's
heavy handed handling of the project should be a warning to not just
Canonical, but any other major Open Source project that runs things
like a totalitarian regime and fails to listen to the cries of its
community.
Anger the community enough and they will fork the project, and the
community will leave the original to molder and die.
That's the beauty of Open Source, if the project you love is being run
by a tyrant who isn't listening to your suggestion or complaint you
can fork the project and build a new community based on higher ideals.
There is a growing sense that Canonical isn't listening to its
community. There's been several issues which haven't been addressed
for some time, and when they're brought up they're usually blown off.
One of the big issues is the removal of the monitor model selection
feature from the screen resolution system preferences window. This
has left a greatly underestimated number of users in a quandary, and
since the majority of them are newbies to Linux most give up and never
give Ubuntu a second glance. This in turn is hurting Ubuntu's image
as a "user friendly" Linux distribution in the eyes of those whom the
project depends the most more so than developers ... the user
community. Without the users Ubuntu would be Linux distro that simply
exists but isn't being used.
Unity is another issue. Given time Unity may turn out to be a great
desktop for Ubuntu, but it still needs work. Canonical is really
gambling with their future releasing Unity in 11.04 and making it
compulsory in 11.10. I understand the releases in between the LTS
distributions are meant to perfect new features and technology for the
next LTS release, but Canonical should have made Unity voluntary only
and gave users incentives to use it to help the dev community make the
necessary improvements. Thus, once the next TLS release came around
Canonical could release Ubuntu with a version of Unity that was rock
solid.
The moral of the story is, if you fail to listen to your community
they'll fork the project, and abandon the original to die in
obscurity. If it can happened to Open Office it can happen to Ubuntu,
and Gnome too.
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Cybe R. Wizard
re-iteration.
Michael, you are right. My own take on the new Ubuntu direction is that
it is on a headlong course toward a brick wall. I /do/ think the
desktop is doomed in the future but doubt that an Iphone UI is going to
be its death. I imagine that people who really get work done will
want nothing to do with Unity (or GNOME shell, FTM) and will run
quickly to a saner replacement. It seems that lots of folks agree and
it looks further like Mint (much as I hope not but I 'ain't openin' that
can-0-worms' again!) is going to be the short-term gainer.
I would be willing to bet that forks of Ubuntu that use a
still-normal-looking UI will prosper going forward.
Liam, what about that one you had entertained thoughts of producing?
You may gain easy help these days. ;-]
Cybe R. Wizard
--
Registered GNU/Linux user # 126326
Registered Ubuntu User # 2136
chris
> I won't snip any of this because it is important and can stand
> re-iteration.
>
The Kiwi
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:02:54 -0400
> Michael Haney <thez...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project.ars
> >
> > Oracle is throwing in the towel on OpenOffice after the majority of
> > the community jumped ship and sided with The Document Foundation and
> > LibreOffice. This move by the community to fork OOo due to Oracle's
> > heavy handed handling of the project should be a warning to not just
> > Canonical, but any other major Open Source project that runs things
> > like a totalitarian regime and fails to listen to the cries of its
> > community.
> >
> > Anger the community enough and they will fork the project, and the
> > community will leave the original to molder and diI leave things alone ?
>
> Is this the version you were thinking of ?
>
> Hope you are feeling less rough .
> > they'll fork the project, and abandon the originalI leave things alone ?
>
> Is this the version you were thinking of ?
>
> Hope you are feeling less rough .
Liam Proven
:¬)
I think Michael over-states it a little bit. Mark is a benevolent
self-appointed dictator for life, after all. He gets to set the
direction for the distro because he's paying! It's only through his
largesse that we have this excellent distro and it costs nothing at
all.
Saying that, well, I'm not sure about Unity. I know it's weird and
different, but AFAICS, it's /less/ weird and different than GNOME 3
is.
People seem to be forgetting this. If Ubuntu /hadn't/ gone for Unity,
and had stayed with GNOME and its 6-monthly releases, then 11.04 or at
the latest 11.10 would have been based on GNOME 3.
That means no minimisation feature or button - it's been removed. No
maximise button - it's been removed; you drag the title bar upwards.
The only button window title bars have is close. At least Unity keeps
them and their functions, it just moves them around.
GNOME 3 means no desktop at all without 3D compositing - AFAICT,
that's mandatory, with no fallback. I don't know what happens -
nobody's writing about it. Perhaps it falls back to something
resembling GNOME 2; I lietrally have no clue, and I've looked.
It means a NotADock™ down the left hand side /anyway/ and no
hierarchical menus with a full-screen app launcher instead, much like
Unity. (But there seem to be categories available down the right hand
side, which is a step ahead of Unity.)
It means the primary method of window management is an Apple Exposé
ripoff and an indefinite number of virtual desktops.
There's still a top panel (like Unity) but with no menus, an oddly
centrally-positioned clock (shades of the mad centralised
functionless, decorative Apple icon of the Mac OS X betas) and no app
starter icons in the screenshots. The bottom panel is gone (like
Unity) but status icons seem to float around on their own in the
bottom right corner where the panel used to be.
It's... strange. I can get no coherent picture of how it works from
the videos and screenshots, except to know that it won't work on my
notebook. I'll try it on the desktop once it's been out for a little
while.
It's all a bit weird.
I believe Mint 11 is going with GNOME 2.32 but I don't know if GNOME 2
/has/ a future any more. 2.32 might be the last ever release of the
2.xx codebase. Perhaps it will be like KDE - where distros hung on to
the aging 3.x codebase until the shiny new 4.x codebase matured a bit
and people got used to it.
Me, if Unity takes off, I think we might look back on it as being a
good move. If it doesn't, I tentatively predict some form of merger
into GNOME 3. Either way, I think we're going to get the funky new
more-Mac-like desktop whether we like it or not.
Which I think might be good news for KDE, XFCE and LXDE. :¬)
--
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Cybe R. Wizard
Liam Proven <lpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Michael over-states it a little bit. Mark is a benevolent
> self-appointed dictator for life, after all. He gets to set the
> direction for the distro because he's paying! It's only through his
> largesse that we have this excellent distro and it costs nothing at
> all.
Granted, and I've never thought differently. That said, even the most
benevolent of dictators needs serfs to whom to dictate. The present
course of Ubuntu will not leave many of those, trust me. In fact, when
I go to Debian and LXDE, myself, (tomorrow) I will begin to evangelize
for that solution instead of /and against/ the "listen to users but
don't pay attention' that has become Ubuntu. I really started to feel
this way when Ubu started being more and more failure-prone on the
low-end hardware on which it originally wanted to be available. It
seems that the third-world isn't all that important after all.
I've had it; I'm gone. Good luck to you who stay and to Ubuntu as a
whole. You will likely both need it. I currently see Ubu as EOL.
Cybe R. Wizard -no longer available to sounder /or/ ubuntu-users
--
Registered GNU/Linux user # 126326
Registered Ubuntu User # 2136
--
Michael Haney
Then perhaps its time for someone to fork Gnome 2.x into a new
project. Any takers. I'd do it if I were a developer, but the only
programming I've ever done was in dBase III way back when. I used to
know how to do some fairly intermediate programming on the Apple IIe
in BASIC, but that's about it.
--
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking
of morality by religion." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and
politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place
for it in the endeavor of science. " ~ Carl Sagan
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Samuel Thurston
> I believe Mint 11 is going with GNOME 2.32 but I don't know if GNOME 2
> /has/ a future any more. 2.32 might be the last ever release of the
> 2.xx codebase. Perhaps it will be like KDE - where distros hung on to
> the aging 3.x codebase until the shiny new 4.x codebase matured a bit
> and people got used to it.
I think it's unlikely that GNOME 2 has a future as you mean it. I do
suspect you're right though, that distributions will hang on until 3.x
is in a better state.
Personally I'm beginning to tire of GNOME. What was once a reasonable
improvement over some of the available options *coughFVWMcough* has
become a bloated un-configurable nightmare. I may head over to KDE
land for a while to see how things are over there. I earnestly wish
that E17 was making more progress but I think it's taken too long to
get to where it was headed and now the train has left the station.
Basil Chupin
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 3:47 PM, Liam Proven<lpr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I believe Mint 11 is going with GNOME 2.32 but I don't know if GNOME 2
>> /has/ a future any more. 2.32 might be the last ever release of the
>> 2.xx codebase. Perhaps it will be like KDE - where distros hung on to
>> the aging 3.x codebase until the shiny new 4.x codebase matured a bit
>> and people got used to it.
>
> I think it's unlikely that GNOME 2 has a future as you mean it. I do
> suspect you're right though, that distributions will hang on until 3.x
> is in a better state.
>
> Personally I'm beginning to tire of GNOME. What was once a reasonable
> improvement over some of the available options *coughFVWMcough* has
> become a bloated un-configurable nightmare. I may head over to KDE
> land for a while to see how things are over there.
Which is the way I'll be heading, in the final analysis.
I have already expressed my thoughts in private messages: KDE is there
for the long haul and at least will not suddenly change within 6 months
into some DE which is unproductive.
I am getting too old to waste my time fooling around with something
which some kids in short pants came up while smoking some "magical
substances" behind the toilet block; I now want stability and
reliability and not uncertainty and insecurity.
So, yes, I am now certain that I will be going back to where I started
from: KDE - and openSUSE (which, BTW, has an offtopic mail list where it
is possible to discuss anything, provided that it is within reason and
not foul-mouthed abusive crud, and it is moderated but the mail list
itself is NOT archived nor accessed by google-doogle).
BC
--
Great Man reaches complete understanding of the main issues; Petty Man reaches complete understanding of the minute details."
Confucius