[DC LoCo] Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project

[Daniel Chen]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
> (actually, a Gnome 2-only fork of Ubuntu 11.04 has already been
> started).

This idea seems rather misled; GNOME 2 is very much available in
11.04. In fact, I use it or Unity-2d preferentially to Unity.

> Instead of toss the blame
> around it would have served the community better if Canonical had
> simply put the feature back where it belongs in the first place.  But,
> no they didn't, so now I have to replace the xorg.conf file every time
> I want a fresh install of Ubuntu to work properly with my monitor.

What's preventing you from fixing the root issue? Upload access?

> Unity is a whole other pickle.  I accept the fact that the release in
> between LTS releases are meant to perfect new technologies for the
> next LTS release, but a drastic change in UI such as Unity should be
> voluntary rather than compulsory, and Canonical should give incentives
> to use Unity so the community can find where its lacking and make the
> necessary improvements so when the next LTS release comes around Unity
> will be a robust and rock solid desktop UI.

What sorts of incentives should have been (or should be) given?

This chicken-n'-egg instance is simply another in a long line of
changes, IMO. Without actually enforcing the new tech, you get few
users on the types of hardware that would stress the underlying
subsystems. Without that baseline, you can't resolve the actual
plumbing issues that prevent the new tech from working as intended. In
this instance, Unity has been instrumental in helping resolve dozens
of bugs in graphics drivers, X Window System libraries, and Compiz. We
(the larger community) went through this debacle with PulseAudio, and
everyone blamed PulseAudio when in fact the entire audio stack- from
the BIOS, the audio hardware, the Linux drivers, the sound libraries
in userspace, upward- needed (rather, needs) to be fixed.

> The point is, the Ubuntu
> project isn't being run based on its core philosophy of "humanity
> towards humans", and is being run more like a meritocracy where only
> the voices of a chosen few make any difference and the community as a
> whole doesn't have any say.  This I think is Canonical's greatest
> failing, and I fear it will eventually come to haunt them in the end.

Canonical is a business and will have business priorities, and a
meritocracy works rather efficiently for it, IMO. Certainly
Canonical's input to the Ubuntu project plays a major role in the
latter's success, but there have always been ways to contribute to
Ubuntu, e.g., through Debian, through upstreams. It goes without
saying, of course, that one can choose to "leave" Ubuntu.

-Dan