Interesting read about the future of Ubuntu

[Avi Greenbury]

Robert Holtzman wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 07:38:33PM +0000, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> > Robert Holtzman wrote:
> > 
> > > On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 05:41:53PM +1100, Basil Chupin wrote:
> > > > On 26/12/2010 07:05, Robert Holtzman wrote:.
> > > Leadership is one thing. Autocracy is another.
> > > 
> > 
> > So far, Autocracy appears to be the 'better' option :)
> 
> In terms of what?

In terms of the aims of the distro. For Ubuntu that's popularity, so
that seems a pretty good way to measure it. I do think that the sorts
of things that you need to do to gain popularity are generally better
effected under less bureaucratic sorts of leadership, if only because
of their efficiency and agility.

> > Mark's 'autocracy' is quite unuique amongst distributions, and
> > Ubuntu (as a distribution aimimg for market share) is pretty high
> > among the most popular distributions
> 
> If "better" is to be measured in terms of popularity, we all know what
> would win.....and it sure ain't a linux distro. That doesn't make it
> better in any way that matters to me. 

Well, no, I wasn't going on your particular values; aside from not
knowing what they are it would make sense to consider the success of
anything on the grounds of what it intends to be rather than what you
wish it to be.
> 
> > - anyone not wanting to be involved in an
> > autocratically-lead distro would surely find themselves involved in
> > a more *cratic one, depending on their preference?
> Example?

The only one that immediately comes to mind is Debian. But, of course,
its other values might well be at odds with yours.  

RedHat/Fedora and Novell, being business-lead are probably fairly
autocratic in nature. Slackware, as has been noted, has its own
autocratic leader. One might extend Mark's autocracy through to the
other Ubuntu children (Mint, Mepis etc.). There's still a big bunch of
other distros, though, and Linux has traditionally favoured a
meritocracy, or painstaking democracy, over other sorts of governance.
I must admit, though, that it's been a while since I last looked at
much outside of Debian. Off the top of my head, if Debian doesn't match
up, there's Arch as a sort-of differently-directed Ubuntu. And for
not-even-deb-based, Mandriva and Gentoo are all that I can think of.

Also, I think all the BSDs are still firmly in the mindset of
quality-over-quantity, which naturally leads to democratic
meritocracies.

But I've never been overly concerned with the governance of distros -
all still aim for being the best they can, if some do so only as a
means to popularity. I think that it's nice that Ubuntu has the sort of
governance to make it occasionally do things completely differently
from anyone else, but then I already have a different distro with which
I'm in almost complete agreement with - Ubuntu's very much my second
distro.

-- 
Avi