Community response of new ubuntu artwork

[Jan Kokoska]

On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 00:09 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> people, of different shapes and sizes, being people. Our logo emphasizes 
> the idea of people of different ethnic backgrounds working and playing 
> together, so we tried to work that into it. Now, visually, it's very 
> hard to put people into computer art. You should SEE some of the early 
> mockups. Nonetheless, we pursued this idea with professional artists and 
> designers, and the images you see today are the first in a series that 
> attempt to encapsulate the theme of warmth, human-ness, diversity, 
> sharing, caring and nature.

I appreciate the apparent attempt for professionalism, but plainly and
simply, this is not what I could start to teach my sysadmin workshop
with early next week. Talk about being caught off guard, I would like to
have more workshops after that one.

I understand this will *not* be the default theme in the stable release,
so I can still rely on Ubuntu, however slightly shaken.

---

If the previous turns out not to be the case, though, I am not going to
tweak some extra package and set up an apt cache to hide my
embarassement. There is not any. I am a white male in my twenties, not
too worried about political correctness, quite judgmental indeed, and
this is certainly not the most explicit piece of graphics I have seen in
my life. But out of plain pragmaticism I would have to use tried and
proven Debian there and stop giving out CDs with your distro to my
friends who rely on me with technical issues.

I am not having a single guy calling me up that his g/f is upset about
the half-naked women on his computer and hold me responsible. 

I don't even dare to think about the reactions of people from cultures
that have not been preoccupied with tearing down any and all social
taboos during the last century or so. What a poor crowd lives on this
planet, not ready to cheer on a collection of models ready to explore
each other's private parts on their very desktop!

Would you believe that my father, a successful middle-aged businessman
who has seen the world, refuses to use Mozilla because it features a
tyrranosaurus? What a pain, before Firefox came out, I could have saved
two reinstalls of his box already. 

It would not be too bad on the other hand if some effort was spent  on
finding a distinctive, simple *and* neutral logo, like Linux, GNU,
Debian or Apache have. Python's snake, Mozilla's saurus and BSDs' devils
don't turn out to be good examples in this respect. There are people out
there who do not know about technical advantages of the featured
software and who would not queue up to get a chip implant, scary world
indeed.

The massive momentum that is building around Ubuntu is not here because
you give out fancy wallpapers interesting to a marginal minority of sex-
starved geeks. It is here because people would very much like to get a
free OS usable even by beginners. Or a Debian that works out of the box.
Simply something real and reliable, to use every day, to love, to be
proud of. Don't divide them before they were even united.

Regards,

Jan Kokoska