Duty of care and crass release management

[William Anderson]

Richard Morrell wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Now it took me two seconds to change the GDM greeter and backdrop but the
> original furore ruined that experience and trust that that new user had in
> Ubuntu.

I'd be interested to know the opinion, feelings and rationale of the person 
you showed the login screen to as opposed to just their initial reaction.

> People - you can shout me down as much as you want but I've released more Linux
> iso's to more people than any of you on this list period. You're about winning
> hearts and minds with good software. Being Slashdotted in 1999/2000 was good PR
> now it's the pathetic sanctuary of Cmdr Taco's fanclub and other hairy palmed
> muppets. I worked at Slashdot so please don't shout me down (well I worked at
> VA  on Sourceforge when I wrote SW..).

Remind us all what code you contributed again?

> Ubuntu is great - really powerful well designed well thought out and has an
> ethos and a message that will win hearts and minds. So bearing that in mind how
> the f**k did such a stupid and braindead decision get made to potentially offend
> and alienate new users by making such a stupid move.

What, like hard coding a "donate now" popup window into every page on a 
firewall web management interface and only offering to individuals to remove 
it once they've donated via PayPal?

> Not good when 50k people an hr read my online blog and see me praising it and

50,000/hr * 18KB = 900,000KB/hr / 3600 = 250KB/s * 8 = 2000Kb/s
ntl: cable upstream = ~ 128-256Kb/s

Even being generous, 2000Kbits/sec != 256Kbits/sec.

> Now if you want Ubuntu to be the toy of the home user community - cool you just
> narrowed your market by 80% in one fell swoop. Either that or it's time to
> realise that when you accept the responsibility of releasing a project and an
> ISO that as much care and detail is needed in making sure you don't offend
> people by being a dickwad as it is important to make sure you've got latest
> glibc or openssh binaries.

I personally like the new artwork, and I can see the point of view of those 
who think it's inappropriate, but if you're using release candidate builds 
in an production environment you need your head examined IMHO.

To be honest, it seems clear to me that further discussion of this should be 
put off til the community meeting on Monday - arguing about it here won't 
produce anything more productive.

-- 
_ __/|  William Anderson      | Brodie: The Force is strong with this one
\`O_o'  neuro at well dot com |    Jay: Dude, don't encourage him
=(_ _)= http://neuro.me.uk/   |  -- Mallrats, (1995)
    U  - Thhbt! GPG 0xFA5F1100 |