I have been pretty pissed at Canonical lately for a number of missteps they have made but a few of them do seem like legitimate mistakes. Mark is not really a PR guy and you can tell - a lot of what he has done has just kind of fanned the flames. I don't think I need to remind you, but even in a sarcastic tone, "open source tea party" and "we have root" are inflammatory things to say. I think he addresses some of these problems pretty well in this post, and I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt here. Think about all that he has accomplished and the amount that Ubuntu has helped the Linux community grow.

So kudos to him for having the balls to apologize. I accept that apology, and I think that a lot of people (including myself) have had some venomous things to say about him as well as Canonical which probably weren't fair. So we could probably all back off here and focus on the real issues.

...but...

He's still not talking about the two elephants in the room.

The Unity lens is fundamentally fucked up. It should be opt-in. Period. It's clearly an infringement on users' privacy and totally not in the spirit of libre software or Linux. I can't really trust Canonical - even though they've given us all so much - because of this issue. So long as they don't back down from this I'm going to look at everything they do with a critical and possibly cynical eye... it just clearly looks like they're selling out their users. It is really just sad to see them selling out to Amazon like this, and I wish it didn't have to be this way. I can't really fathom the amount of money Mark has spent on Ubuntu. I don't really know how he can make it work as a business. But the Amazon search in the lens just seems like a morally wrong and short-sighted way to go.

The second issue which we all need to address is Mir. The technical arguments are completely over my head, but I feel like Canonical hasn't fully made the case for why they've decided to fragment the community and do their own thing. This could just be me not understanding what's going on, but pretty much everyone who's developing this stuff seems to be on Wayland's side... why is that (and is that)? It's worth considering, but I feel like Canonical should be engaging the community, although with all the flaming that goes on I can see why they don't. We all want the best free software we can get, but some serious thought needs to be devoted to the ramifications and rationale for having two display servers.

So that's the end of this long rant - let me know what you think.