Mark Shuttleworth

I am glad there is a clarifcation from Mark - http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1299.

>Last week, the less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy sent out the toughest template letter to the folks behind a “sucks” site. Now, that was not a decision based on policy or guidance; as I said, Canonical’s trademark policy is unusually generous relative to corporate norms in explicitly allowing for this sort of usage. It was a mistake, and there is no question that the various people in the line of responsibility know and agree that it was a mistake.

But if the person who sent the template letter was new, then surely this becomes a training issue?

Trademark violations can soon become PR disasters just like this has become. So perhaps companies and start up's may wish to learn from Canonical's mistake as it can easily happen to them.

No one is perfect. Mistakes happen...

The main alternatives seem to be OpenRC and Upstart. One of the biggest criticisms of systemd by its detractors is that it's unproven and not stable; and neither of these address that concern.

Upstart was developed by Ubuntu, which has stopped supporting it and is adopting systemd because they recognized the need to standardize on a single system. After the Debian committee voted to go with systemd, Ubuntu (being a Debian derivative) followed suit.[1]

OpenRC isn't really a replacement for sysvinit; rather it bolts on some functionality on top of sysvinit. My understanding is that OpenRC is not an incredibly mature codebase and would have needed a lot of work to come up to feature/stability parity with systemd. Because it doesn't fully replace sysvinit, it also doesn't solve all of the same problems as systemd.

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Unity was not pointless.

The point was that Microsoft was threatening to sue any company distributing a Windows-like desktop Linux.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/11/20/microsoft_claims_linux_code

SUSE signed a patent-sharing agreement; Red Hat and Canonical said no.

Both developed their own non-Windows-like desktops. RH sponsors GNOME, and many RH people worked on GNOME 3.

Canonical tried to get involved and was rebuffed.
E.g.
https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/tag/gnome

So it rebuilt its existing "Netbook Launcher" as a general-purpose desktop.

MS didn't sue anyone in the end, but it got what it wanted: massive fragmentation in the Linux world, no harmony, lots of split and duplicated effort.

My analysis, from a decade ago, is here:
https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/

Often? Only in case of Upstart and LXD (I'm not familiar with the latter's history).

Here's Mark Shuttleworth in 2010:

The next major transition for Unity will be to deliver it on Wayland, the OpenGL-based display management system.

We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.

https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Then in 2013, Unity 8 was released with Mir.

Snap was largely developed in parallel with FlatPak (called xdg-app initially).

There was a talk about the plans at GUADEC 2013:

https://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/sandboxed-applications-for-gnome

I don't think it's entirely a corporate move here. Free software contributions aren't infinite; if you have $N developers working on integrating support for display servers, then it's simple math that having to support two display servers means that you'll have $N/2 developers working on each, and will therefore get half the work done (and, since they'll probably still have to support X11 for a while, make that $N/3). Ubuntu selfishly forked Mir instead of choosing to try to use Wayland (especially when they had originally committed to using Wayland[1]), so the burden is on them here. It also doesn't help that Canonical employees were using the inclusion of XMir support as political fodder[2].

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
[2] https://twitter.com/olliries/status/375704285083738112

I don't think it's that nefarious. She came from an enterprise background and was made CEO to emphasize the importance of enterprise sales to Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth says as much in this blog post from 2009:

"As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs."
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/295

When meeting with Fortune 500 customers, it makes sense to have the CEO participate in negotiations rather than the same person with a more nebulous VP title.