Why Matt Zimmerman should quit Canonical

Sam Varghese
Friday, 02 October 2009 07:11

Opinion and Analysis

And this is what makes Zimmerman's position untenable.

How do you continue to work for someone in a senior position when you have publicly sided with another person who has called your boss sexist?

Shuttleworth is no ordinary figure in the free and open source software world; no company could be more high-profile than Canonical among GNU/Linux users as Ubuntu is said to be the most widely used distribution.

When Novell signed its infamous patent licensing deal with Microsoft back in November 2006, and sold out the FOSS community lock, stock and barrel, there were many well-known names in the Novell ranks who decided that money was more important than principle and kept quiet.

Not so Jeremy Allison of Samba fame, who denounced the deal for what it was and left the company. Allison proved that he was a man of integrity, one whose principles were not for sale. He walked.

Zimmerman finds himself in a position where he is working for a man whom he has accused of sexism in an open forum, someone who clearly violates something against which Zimmerman has, for some time, made himself a vocal critic.

If he has any integrity, he should walk.

There are other aspects of the issue that raise questions. The method of addressing it - by going public and, in Robert's case, by making it a pissing match - begs the question: was the intention to try and browbeat Shuttleworth into a backdown or was it to address something that is seen as holding back women from participating in FOSS projects in larger numbers?

In Robert's case, she went public before she had seen a transcript of the keynote or viewed a video, assumed guilt before hearing the evidence and asked Shuttleworth to apologise.

To anyone with commonsense, it should be evident that quiet diplomacy would have worked much better - that is, if the intention was to improve the situation.

But if the intention was to try and raise the profile of an individual in a bid to portray themselves as some kind of motley leader of some part of this so-called community, then the loudmouth method was the way to go.

And when your target is a big name, so much the better.