"Intel Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir" What will be the consequences?

[santosh83]

They maintain their own kernels.
It isn't that in-house development is "beneficial". It's that you can't do business if you can't meet schedule commitments made to customers. That's tough enough with your own developers, almost impossible if you are dependent on "community" developers who are indifferent, if not hostile, to your business needs.

Just wondering how Redhat meet these commitments then. Everyone seems to uphold Redhat as a model for contributing to upstream and working with the community, so how so they manage to do both that, and meeting commercial schedules?

[buzzingrobot]

So are we not allowed to cast judgement on anybody? I (even more frankly) disagree. Everybody is allowed to have an opinion. And to clarify, I am assuming you mean casting judgement as in deciding to dislike him.



I also do not see the software as a gift. I don't think Mark Shuttleworth does either. Telling me to be grateful for it is demeaning to me. And why can't I have emotions over it anyway? There are people' who's lives are heavily impacted, in both good and bad ways, by various software.

There's a real and important difference between not liking a policy Canonical has decided to follow versus declaring your hatred for someone just because he has a lead role in shaping tha policy.

If you receive something at no charge from someone, that's commonly called a "gift".

You can be as emotional as you wish. Publicly declaring your hatred for Shuttleworth because you don't agree with all his business decisions seems over the top and rather difficult to justify.

The world is afflicted with any number of unfortunate things that merit your hatred. People running software companies aren't on that list.

[buzzingrobot]

Just wondering how Redhat meet these commitments then. Everyone seems to uphold Redhat as a model for contributing to upstream and working with the community, so how so they manage to do both that, and meeting commercial schedules?

Red Hat is in a fundamentally different business. They sell support. They don't contract to deliver support for code that hasn't been released. Once they make a release, they come very close to freezing their code base for years, restricting the addition of new code to bug and security patches as much as possible. (And RH does have a staff of developers.)

Red Hat is also not trying to create a universal OS that works on multiple devices. If Red Hat was, in fact, trying to do that, they'd face the same issues. E.g., if they did a deal with a tablet maker, they'd need to agree on a set of schedules for delivery of working software, testing, etc. When the vendor asked for a change, they'd need to be able to fix a date for delivery that was not enitrely fictional. If they were dependent on people who don't work for them, who work part time on code that RH needs to meet a schedule commitment, then they'd lose control.

Or, suppose RH needs XYZ library patched, by next Friday. If the library's maintainer doesn't work for them, and decides he can't or won't do it, where does that leave RH?

More simple example: If you run a restaurant that needs to buy 200 loaves a bread a day, you won't sign a contract with a bakery than depends on part-time volunteer bakers who work out of their own kitchens, on no certain schedule.

[erasmusp]

> Where does all the "if you aren't with us, you are against us" attidude come from?
Ubuntu decided to go its own way, so what? Why is that a bad thing?
Why are people (many of whom, apparently don't use Ubuntu) so peeved up about Canonical tying to invent something?

100%. Everybody is making a fuss about this but why? So what? We heard the same noise when Ubuntu took the Unity route. Now that noise has subsided and Unity is being accepted and like by many.... So please, let's all not be arm chair coaches here and see how this plays out.

[ZoiaGuyver]

I'm just speculating here, but could this (i.e., the larger community dropping Upstart to favour systemd) have anything at all to do with licensing. I know Upstart is also GPL just like systemd, but does contributing to it have any requirement for signing copyright assignment agreements or something like that? I understand that's the case for contributing to Mir.



The thing though is Canonical seems to be increasingly preoccupied with mobile systems, as they seem to be convinced that's where they can find any commercial success if at all. Desktops are being treated as second class citizens everywhere these days.

As always hardware innovations and consumer reception will always drive the software by and large, as seen by the big shift from Workstations to PC form factors, then now the shift towards mobile. Redhat and Canonical both are profit driven (even if nominally) companies so they need to sell something somewhere. For Redhat it has long been enterprise support, and Canonical is now foraying into both mobile as well as enterprise support. The desktop code base will only be maintained by both as a sort of common launching point for their tailored solutions, and we have to live with that.

To cover the licensing part Canonical in the first CLA imo were wrong, they basically forced people to give Canonical the copyright to the material that person had contributed. With the changes in 2011 Canonical sorta reversed that, instead of giving Canonical the Copyright, the contributor gave Canonical a licence that allowed them to change the licence if needed, the contributor keeps the copyright. Its a much better solution, but at the moment the argument is there is no clause like that with FSF.

"FSFE shall only exercise the granted rights and licences in accordance with the principles of Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundations. FSFE guarantees to use the rights and licences transferred in strict accordance with the regulations imposed by Free Software licences, including, but not limited to, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) or the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) respectively. In the event FSFE violates the principles of Free Software, all granted rights and licences shall automatically return to the Beneficiary and the licences granted hereunder shall be terminated and expire.[18]"

Which seems to get a lot of peoples backs up, It's more a legal technicality and possibly a loophole. I'm not a lawyer, but having read and studied a lot of agreements from an OEMs perspective, I kinda see what Canonical are trying to do, but it also is a bit of contention. I think if any clause had been made in the CLA it wouldn't kick up as much fuss. Canonical isn't the only company in the free/open source market to use a CLA. Apache, FSF, Digia/QT Foundation and many others use them aswell. Although I personally have not studied them for the differences between them and Canonicals (outside of the before mentioned clause). All the projects at Canonical actually require this which is another point for argument, its not voluntary like the FSF one.

Now myself I kind of agree santosh83, at the moment Canonical seems to be focused on the mobile market. I don't agree that the desktop is a second class citizen (even though outside of the current issues it does certainly seem that way) I think a lot of people are seeing it as a separation which isn't the target. The target at least from Canonical is a convergence of the devices, I guess that at the start it does lead to a separation in the sense things have to be changed to accept the mobile infrastructure, So at some point mobile has to be the focus. Personally I feel this is the point at which we are at, 12.04LTS and 13.04 are well rounded and stable (for the most part). There hasn't been a lot of big changes as far as the end-user is concerned, but there has been a lot of change under the hood.

I think Canonical decided as the base 12.04 and 13.04 have proven themselves, that now was the time they could focus on the mobile side and start bringing things into line with each other. Time will tell if they are right, but the interest in Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Edge (although that failed for many reasons) shows that at least the direction is correct.

Over the years the desktop computer (or personal computer) as a whole has seen huge changes in both it's usage and in it's tech. From being a system that was separated and thought of as a work tool not targeted at the home space, to something that consolidates our devices and is the main hub of our media intake as a consumer. This will definitely be an interesting time, the whole market has shifted and is still shifting towards more convergence of the devices we use. Canonical I think are chasing that goal with Ubuntu, but its receiving as much opposition as any product trying it before has. Whether Ubuntu wins out to be really frank is down to us.

[codingman]

I personally think that Intel is shooting themselves in the foot. I've seen figures stating that there are about 70 million users of Linux based distributions, and Canonical claims there are about 20 million Ubuntu users, to me that looks like close to 1/3 of all Linux distribution users, use Ubuntu. I'm planning on building a new system in the new year, and this unsubstantiated silliness just pushed me away from even considering Intel products for my next build.

I'll put up with a cpu that is a few percentage points slower than the current Intel offerings, I"ve never had any really good experience with Intel products so for me it really isn't that hard a decision to make.

I'm not going to argue the merits of either graphics rendering system, as there aren't any released versions of any distribution that use wayland or mir at this time. I've played with both, and neither seems to be better or worse than the other.

Maybe it's time to create a poll with the pre-requisite that if you vote, you have to provide proof that you are actually using one or the other.

+1

By the way, what do you plan on using? AMD FX Series or what? Phenom II?

I only went for Intel because at the time of building, the FX Series was awful, and I needed something with low consumption, but before that I loved AMD all the way, and I was really sad about their decision to not compete with Intel any more...

[cariboo]

+1

By the way, what do you plan on using? AMD FX Series or what? Phenom II?

I only went for Intel because at the time of building, the FX Series was awful, and I needed something with low consumption, but before that I loved AMD all the way, and I was really sad about their decision to not compete with Intel any more...

I'm planning on going with the AMD-FX series, especially now that they have a cpu that runs at 5Ghz (FX-9590).

[Mephisto Pheles]

Interesting and very educational thread indeed.

I found the EDGE concept interesting enough to realise that there's no way they will ever get there without having to leave behind some of the bagage of the past.
You can't define a new pardigm by desperately hanging on to the previous one.
I can understand some people are afraid, worried about where this might be leading to.
Some of the arguments are philosphical in nature, but even philosophy is subject to evolution.
Or it will become dogmatic.
FOSS and whatever it is we understand under "linux community" will probably have to develop as well, unless it should become stale, and ultimately irrelevant.
That some people find that unsettling was to be expected. But honestly... does that justify your hatered?
I don't know Marc Shuttleworth, and although there have been some blunders and misunderstandings, it's not like there's a manual lying around somewhere to guide anybody through changes as fundamental as what Canonical has set out to do.
Their journey to the future might not go over trodden paths of the past any longer.
Words, terms, definitions, concepts that once were important might have to be adjusted, some even abandoned, to change the paradigm this radical.
Are "desktop users" really being left behind, or are we in the middle of a development where the term "desktop user" is being redefined.
From what i've seen from the EDGE it looks a lot like that is the case. We may very well get a lot more instead of less in the end.
I don't have a smartphone or a tablet, I never was interested, my old "dumb" nokia still works and serves me well, but this EDGE idea really struck a chord.
Now that would be something I might be willing to go for.

Nobody can guarantee that it will work out as planned, but nobody can tell where or what it will lead us to either.
Did anybody know what Steve Jobs was gonna pull off when he came back to Apple?.
Did anybody even expect Jobs to return to Apple at all?
Did anybody expect NExTStep to become OS-X?

Shuttleworth might not exactly be a Steve Jobs but he's got a vision that I would not want to dismiss just like that.
Even if intel, nvidia and others are reluctant, for whatever reason, that doesn't have to mean they won't jump on board once the train starts rolling.
Maybe Ubuntu will have to become a Linux based OS, like Android to some extent, instead of a Linux Distro as is now the case.
And those that want pure linux, there's enough choices. No?
I'm willing to wait and see.

I appreciate the guts that Ubuntu is displaying. And I'm sure that intel's coup will only make a lot of Canonical people even more determined.
And I wish them the best of luck.

- mephisto

[ZoiaGuyver]

JkbrrLJ That was a very interesting read and I agree with much of what you say.

Steve Jobs for good or bad made a very successful company, some would argue a "technology leading" company. Even though Apple is seen as the epitome of the "Walled/Shuttered/Closed garden" No one can really refute their success.

Steve Jobs was also a visionary and unlike much of the Linux community on a whole was a very outspoken and critical person, even to the detriment of how people saw him. I think Mr Shuttleworth has a tendency to be head strong and outspoken, but he also gives a lot in the sense of supporting projects and ideas. The whole issue with Wayland and Mir is one that is based on semantics, corporate politics, differing opinion, misunderstanding, misinterpretation and FUD. These are not of any value to anyone, but with technology is often part of the driving factors.

Like you say a lot of the times change is met with full brute force denial to it. The mindset for most people is that complete change is bad, incremental change is somewhat accepted. The whole Wayland/Mir story in a year or maybe less/more will be just another pin in the very spotty map of linux. Much like the arguments before them they will subside into obscurity.

As a whole people should embrace the projects as open source attempts to advance the current status quo. There will always be people who want to pick a fight just on the basis of their own view, the same as there will always be lemmings to follow those people.

Mistakes were made (hopefully they will be learnt from) now is the time to move on to bigger and better things.

On that note some may be interested to have a read through articles like this, they are not really pertinent to the topic now but they do make interesting reading. intel_fud_versus_amd_fact

[buzzingrobot]

The success of Apple is the best example that people care what's in the garden, not if it's closed or open.

If Jobs' developers brought him an idea or a prototype he didn't like, he would direct them to stop working on it. And, they would. In LinuxLand, they'd fork their ideas and publicly accuse Jobs of being hostile to the welfare of "the community" (dev speak for disgreeing with them).