Ubuntu to ship with Wayland. Ditches Mir

I believe @Zoltan predicted this in the Ubuntu to Gnome thread.

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It's Official; Shuttleworth held back mainstream linux a combined total of 18 years between Upstart, Mir, and Unity. That's an entire teenager of man hours per developer assigned to each project. We're talking an entire high school graduating class of wasted effort and broken promises.

What a Cock Goblin

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Looking forward to that.
Now hope that more DE´s could get ready for Wayland.
Not just Gnome 3.xx and KDE.

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Ehh it's a different lesson than that. The lesson here is lead by example and the rest will follow. If Mir was released on day one and they had the foresight to have been developing it, it would be another story.

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+1
Canonical fucked up right from the start because of greed. They only wanted to be different than everyone else, but they didn't have a plan, and if they had thought a few minutes about what it takes to make a display server from scratch, they probably would have picked another thing to try to make into a unique selling proposal lol.

Like some people wrote in the Canonical does Gnome thread, Gnome Shell on Wayland is a safe choice for Canonical. It's the choice for the investors. Not the choice for the users.

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If Intel and RedHat backed technology can't get mainstreamed in 5 years, it is not the big solution everybody is supposedly pushing and aiming for, it is as simple as that. Gnome has always done their own thing, I don't think Canonical can give that a lot of push to begin with (we'll see now). And Upstart solved a problem before systemd ever existed. Actually, you could point to RedHat just as well in that case.

And that does not even take into account the element of freedom that FOSS should be all about.

If I had been in Canonical's position, taking on what they were trying to do and taking into account the FOSS landscape, I would probably have done the same thing. As did Google for example.

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Reading how you judge other people's intentions just like that makes me sad. FWIW I think you got it all wrong.

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Boohoo lol

What other reason was there for Canonical to go for Mir then to reserve the technology for themselves in the hope of making it in the mobile market like Cyanogenmod... which is what they started out with as a base.
Remember the scandal when devs had to sign a double license agreement with Canonical?

Look at what happened to Cyanogenmod, they went commercial and failed, the community fork still thrives.

The same is true for Canonical. Canonical actually had a really good basis for a successful commercial model with Ubuntu One. So they closed it, and let Microsoft recycle the name. Now they want to go back to the cloud commercialisation model they had before? Why, because it didn't work out for them before?

What other reason than greed can be the driving force behind this major fubar? It's not scientific curiosity, not logic, not sex, so what is left... exactly, because it's not sensible business... what Canonical is doing now, is not saving the furniture from the deluge they could not see coming... what they are doing is compensating bad executive decisions by sacking dozens of people, devs contributing to open source software... and for what? For the investors!

The only sad thing here is that dozens of open source developers are relegated to their garage to do their work, which Canonical then can pick up for fucking free because it's open source... so that Marc can polish his P&L to get a better price when he sells Canonical to Microsoft? How does any of this serve open source development? It's a classic example of the parasitic mentality that doesn't belong in open source.

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Greed? What is greed?

Here is the condensed version..

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Yeah. And then there's facts.

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Upstart was excellent

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keyword: was

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Well, greed is a pejorative term. It is when motivation or endeavour goes awry. It's like the term murder. There are always instances that try to make it into a virtue, and there will always be those instances. It has nothing to do with intelligence. It's an emanation of bumping up against human personal limitations in an ungraceful fashion. Fact is that everyone bumps into his limitations at one time or another. Some people can achieve more than others, but there is nobody who can achieve everything they want by themselves.

When someone is bumping up to his/her personal limitations as a human, there are basically two paths to go... one could accept the limitation and get help from others, which means sharing the spoils of the achievement, or one could deny the achievement and shift the focus to something else. I'm not saying one is better than the other. The key thing is though, you can screw both of these up pretty badly, or you can go either way gracefully.

Greed is when you screw either of them up because you can't accept your failure to realize you're not handling the situation gracefully because of ego. So greed can be monetary in nature, or simply psychological.

In this instance, Shuttleworth has built Canonical with a certain mind set. He has contributed what he can, i.e. money, and has quite correctly based his venture upon open source development to leverage his company.

But at the same time, he's always been the one to look across the pond, to think that the grass is greener on the other side. He's always wanted to have that one thing nobody in open source had, the consumer market. He's first looked at Microsoft, then at Google, and has aked himself the self-poisoning question "why can't I have that?". Well, because he can't let go. There is a big difference between deciding to let go and share the spoils, and being forced to let go because you've held the helm for too long and have not seen the opportunities when they presented themselves. The first situation allows the company to grow further, the second one makes you lose interest in developing it further, and makes you want to get rid of it after clearing the bank accounts and selling the inventory.

The system has nothing to do with anything. Capitalism or not, a market economy will always exist by the simple fact of life that offer and demand is a ruthless mechanism like mathematics. Canonical did really well by taking the Debian Testing core and pimping it up with some creative development to make it ideal for enterprise markets. Why? Because it satifies a demand. That demand is response time. The initial idea of SuSE, RedHat and Canonical was to centralize the development in-house so that they could move faster than a pure community developed product like Slackware (which was the ancestor of SuSE) or Debian (the upstream of Ubuntu). Because that allows you as a company to provide services that independent service providers cannot provide in the same way. The added value is that you're on top of the technology. SuSE and RedHat have always done that really well. Ubuntu has done that really well, and the fact of the matter is, that it is really rewarding to use an Ubuntu base, because everything works. Ubuntu has provided a platform on which every software project works, despite not being developed in-house. You want some specific setup? Get it up and running on an Ubuntu base first because it might not check all of the boxes, but it will work: AMDGPU PRO, the latest version of Darktable with all the trimmings and OpenCL acceleration out of the box, Steam, Ardour 5 with all the plugins, etc... that is what Canonical has achieved, and it is no small feat. But where do you go from there? Well, SuSE has the answer, RedHat has the answer, even though their answers are not the same. SuSE offers maximum compatibility and platform independence through SuSEStudio, they have supreme management features and offer great technology out of the box for management, just practical stuff like Yast, Yast 1-Click, supreme support for journaling filesystems with easy snapshotting through snapper, Yast GUI kernel hardening, live kernel patching... things for which there is a demand. RedHat pushes hard on Wayland and SELinux, because there is a demand for the highest level of security. But what market demand is Canonical catering for? An alternative to Windows or Cyanogenmod? Is that the best they can come up with? An alternative to Wayland? Really? Oh yes, people are standing in line for that... not! In open source, you have to lead the technology. Canonical did that just fine by making it into the most accessible platform for developers, so that they just had the best software offering bar none. That is still the case to a certain extent, as many development projects are targeting Ubuntu Core. KDE and the whole KDE app ecosystem is developed towards Ubuntu Core, LibreOffice, Darktable, Steam, ... but also the specialised custom software of the French Gendarmerie, the French Secret Service and military, LiMux, the specialised crime prevention tools used by several Continental European police forces, ... SuSE doesn't have that, RedHat doesn't have that. Why not boost that? Why not hire developers instead of firing them, why not boost the development of software that caters for this demand, thereby putting Ubuntu on the map, while making Canonical support services into a necessity? Why not forget about the cloud and mobile and concentrate on real-time applications and providing the tools for serious enterprise grade technology development, why not concentrate on integrating artificial intelligence in local systems, bringing the leverage of artifical intelligence to desktops and servers for smaller companies and governments and educational institutions? Why did Canonical focus on side-shows instead of the main prize? Why did Canonical decide to stop empowering its customers? Why did Canonical think they should not distribute tools that empower the customers, but offer retail packages instead? The whole concept is not compatible with the idea of open source development.

It's popular to equate open source development with the freetard culture and communism, but the opposite is true: open source development is nothing but a very capitalist concept, the concept of leveraging assets that you don't own, that you haven't paid for... it enables you to exponentially magnify your talent pool, your code base, your quality assurance, but offering just the technology you have created based upon that, and the more you invest in further development, the more you get out of it, not because you can sell your developement, but because you can sell expertise. So the more developers you have working for you, keeping you on the forefront of development, keeping you in the seat of the most sharing instance in open source, the more you benefit. Right now, the market does not need walled garden sideshows, the market needs access to the technolgies the very big players have. Canonical has brought that technology to the SME market and to educational institutions and local goverments. But now that technology is not new any more. What those customers need now, is not another cloud service with cut-troath subscription services. What those customers and so many other customers need now, is the same technology Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have. Back in the day, that's exactly the kind of technology Canonical brough to the "masses". Well, why don't they do that now? Why don't they build up the expertise to provide people with the tools to implement AI solutions on local systems? Because that's what the small and medium enterprise market needs for their bottom line, and if Canonical provides that, it will benefit their bottom line because they can sell their expertise. Fuck Cloud services, they do not empower the customers that aren't already enrolled somewhere else. Cloud services is nothing but a fancy scheme to rent server hosting for an uneconomically high price that chokes the customers. What customers really need, is something that boosts their business instead of choking it. If you empower your customers, they will make money, and they will expand, and you will be paid to make that expansion happen. Greed is when you negate that mechanism of offer/demand, and when you try to hotwire a stolen vehicle to sell it in a shady auction abroad. Greed is when you decimate your own business to sell it off in a fast food joint hustle deal, instead of using your business to empower other businesses and rise with them. Greed is when you stop caring about your achievements, and settle for fast cash for hookers and blow. Greed is the opposite of capitalism, greed pops up when people are dropping out of capitalism because they have nothing left to offer that is of any interest to others. Greed is when you make others pay for your mistakes and failure.

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