The OOo, LibreOffice Tale Should Be a Warning To Canonical, Other FOSS Projects

Tue Apr 19 20:47:20 UTC 2011

On 19 April 2011 20:16, Cybe R. Wizard <cybe_r_wizard at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I won't snip any of this because it is important and can stand
> re-iteration.
>
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:02:54 -0400
> Michael Haney <thezorch at 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 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.
>>
> 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.    ;-]

:¬)

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. :¬)

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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