Shuttleworth: critics would do well to get a clue

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 09 November 2010 10:53

Opinion and Analysis

Few people in the free and open source software these days have to put up with as much criticism of their motives and moves as the owner of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth.

The latest round of barbs have been thrown at him because he decided to change the user interface of the next release of Ubuntu to Unity, abandoning the old GNOME UI.

A few days later, he announced that Ubuntu would be gradually transitioning to the Wayland server, leaving the old X behind.

To the logical mind, it is quite clear why Shuttleworth has taken these steps. He has tried, for some time, unsuccessfully, to get upstream projects to follow his vision for what GNU/Linux on devices - the desktop, the notebook, the netbook, the plethora of mobiles - should look and feel like.

Having failed to convince anyone, he has now decided that if Ubuntu is to continue to make headway, it has to distinguish itself from the rest. His model is Apple, which, despite having a much smaller share of the market than Microsoft, is still a major force with which to reckon in the tech space.

Shuttleworth isn't in a great hurry; he appears to be fully aware of the magnitude of the changes he is undertaking, with statements like this about the switch to Wayland: "Timeframes are difficult. I'm sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I'd love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it's more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem."

For years and years, we've heard a lot of swill about Linux on the desktop; it's now come to the stage where the desktop is slowly becoming less and less the default for users and still Linux has barely managed to penetrate the market.

Yet when someone wants to do things differently, everyone comes down on her/him like a ton of bricks. You would think that the FOSS community, which is rumoured to be progressive, would give the man his head and allow him to run with his vision. Such, sadly, is not the case.