Tensions Between Ubuntu, Fedora Mount Over New Website
In an ideal world, free-software developers would happily get along and cooperate towards the same ends. But the world’s far from perfect, as rising tensions between the Ubuntu and Fedora camps have made clear recently in the wake of the founding a new website intended, ironically, to promote “respect” within the open-source ecosystems.
The site, OpenRespect.org, was launched about a week ago by Ubuntu community member Jono Bacon, who announced the new initiative on his blog. The domain currently doesn’t host much besides a brief blurb titled “The OpenRespect Declaration” and some tools designed to help socialize the OpenRespect concept.
While the site’s content may be minimal, it nonetheless elicited a response from the community surrounding the Fedora Linux distribution, perhaps the second most popular open-source operating system among desktop users, that was less than enthusiastic. Several Fedora users expressed dissatisfaction with the site–or at least Bacon’s decision to publish it without first seeking input from other groups–in a board meeting last week. Their objections ranged from concerns over whether the OpenRespect statement inappropriately equates politeness with respect, to complaints that it seems to be designed to benefit Canonical and as such leaves at least one Fedora user feeling “uncomfortable.”
The Fedora community wasn’t the only center of negative reaction to Bacon’s initiative. KDE developer Aaron Seigo also criticized it on his blog, arguing, in short, that the free-software ecosystem is comprised of too many individual communities, each with its own unique culture and values, to be compatible with a single statement on promoting respect. (The longer version of Seigo’s reaction to OpenRespect contains some very interesting observations on the sociology of the free-software world and is certainly worth a read.) Seigo declined Bacon’s request to become an “advocate” for the initiative.
Bacon vs. Fedora, or Canonical vs. Everyone Else?
I won’t weigh in on whether the OpenRespect site is good or bad or how Bacon might have executed it better. That’s what comments are for, and a wide range of opinions and suggestions have already been expressed on Bacon’s blog and elsewhere.
But I will observe that this recent controversy underscores tensions between the Ubuntu community and other groups that have been growing more virulent for a long time. These feelings of ill-will, moreover, have consequences not only for geeks directly involved in the projects in question, but also for the corporate players which are indirectly implicated, as well as casual end-users.
These tensions first came to a head back in the summer, when former Red Hat employee and Fedora leader Greg DeKoenigsberg charged Canonical on his blog with failing to provide its fair share of contributions to upstream projects. DeKoenigsberg later apologized for being “disrespectful,” but the episode had already given rise to a variety of nasty shots between defenders and critics of Canonical and Ubuntu.
Canonical’s recent decisions to break with GNOME by adopting Unity as its new interface also caused tempers to flare, and the announcement shortly afterwards that Ubuntu developers plan to abandon X.org in favor of Wayland–a project to which Red Hat has currently contributed much more than Canonical–elicited similar reactions from some quarters.
These controversies, meanwhile, reflect the competition between Canonical and companies like Red Hat and SUSE in the commercial marketplace, as the former endeavors to steal server marketshare. Discourse in the corporate realm, fortunately, is generally more civil than that which tends to dominate on personal blogs, but that fact doesn’t obscure the reality that Canonical is engaged in a bitter struggle against competing companies which, ironically, help to fund some of the key technologies on which Ubuntu relies.
Whether criticisms of Canonical reflect disagreement with its practices, jealousy at Ubuntu’s success vis-à-vis other Linux distributions or a fear that the company exercises too much unilateral influence over the open-source ecosystem, they don’t appear likely to disappear anytime–especially if efforts intended to restore goodwill, as Bacon ostensibly hoped to do, only engender more hard feelings.
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Hey,
Thanks for the balanced write-up. I just wanted to clarify a few things:
* I apologized on the news story and privately to Jared for not consulting with him regarding the statement and explained why – basically, I know how long writing legislation takes, and I don’t have that much time to focus on OpenRespect. I could have done this better, agreed, and I am going to make it even clearer on openrespect.org that the site is not necessarily representative of everyone’s views, and is my take on what respect is.
* As I have clarified elsewhere, OpenRespect is not an Ubuntu or Canonical initiative, and is not designed to deflect criticism of Ubuntu or Canonical. The project is something that I have been thinking of for a while; I just feel the level of negative discourse has been growing, and I wanted to contribute in some kind of way.
Hope this helps clarify a few things. Happy to talk more if needed. 🙂
Jono
I suggest the new motto for OpenRespect should be “For when you don’t have the time/inclination to do it right”. Actually, that should probably be the motto for Canonical’s 6 month buggy fork of Debian too.
Jono: thanks for stopping by and for the clarifications.
While I have your attention, if you don’t mind, I’d love to hear more about how you perceive the discourse to have grown especially negative as of late. Have there been any events in particular that have contributed to those feelings?
I’m just curious if you have anything specific in mind because on the one hand, I feel like someone could object that you’re making a straw-man argument based on the notion that everyone was polite and cooperative “back in the day” but that this is no longer so. And that argument sounds a little dubious to me because there were certainly instances of nasty discourse in the past; Linus Torvalds’s famous rant against GNOME many years ago is one example that comes to mind.
On the other hand, as I wrote in the post, it does seem to me that there have been a variety of specific examples in recent months of particularly nasty debates surrounding Canonical.
Chris, you’re absolutely correct that things are no different today than they’ve ever been. The “negative discourse” that Jono cites as “growing” is criticism of ubuntu, and things related to ubuntu. And why is ubuntu, Canonical, and its community seen such growing criticism? Well, because they’re no longer a brand new entity with no track record. They’ve been around for awhile now, and done a number of things that have burned a lot of bridges. And they continue to do it, such as the way OpenRespect came into being, and what it presumed to say about ubuntu criticism. Ubuntu, Canonical, and the ubuntu community are simply way too much empty P.R. and lip service, stewarded by someone who seems to see himself as the emperor of FOSS, take much more (especially in terms of credit) than they give back, believe themselves beyond any sort of criticism (and actively advocate stifling it), are guiding linux toward proprietary, single-vendor cloud services and whose software endeavors reek of NIH syndrome, and frankly, take perfectly good Debian code and turn it into something akin to a bloated version of Windows ME.
I just think ubuntu folks need to do a whole lot less crying about the chickens that have come home to roost, and a whole lot more substantial work (and no, I definitely don’t mean OpenRespect) before ubuntu deserves the amount of “respect” that Canonical folks clearly believe it is summarily entitled to. Get over yourselves, ubuntu. You would be nothing whatsoever without the work of plenty of organizations that have no fear of criticism, and have actually done much more than Canonical has ever done to a large extent _because_ of that criticism. Learn from the people who have done it better than you.
jg: I don’t know how many times I need to say this…but let me be clear…OpenRespect is not an Ubuntu/Canonical project, it is a spare time project that I worked on due to growing negative discourse I am seeing. Sure, this affects Ubuntu, and I am not denying that it has inspired the project in part, but this affects many projects, not just Ubuntu. But again, to be clear, OpenRespect is something *I* did in my spare time, not and Ubuntu or Canonical thing.
Christopher: thanks for the post 🙂 the goal behind OpenRespect is not so much that things were bright and rosy back in the day, but more than I feel like as Open Source and Free Software has grown, some participants sometimes forget in heated discussions how to be polite and exhibit behavior that they would not necessarily exhibit if they had the same conversation face-to-face with someone in the same room. OpenRespect is merely a way of reminding some folks of some common elements of respect, in much the same way the Ubuntu Code Of Conduct has reminded participants in Ubuntu how to engage in discussion and collaboration.
While there has been some criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu, I believe some is indeed warranted and there are areas we *do* need to improve, but some is also the nature of being one of the more popular distributions; it is common inside and outside of Open Source for popularity to generate more criticism because more people by definition have a viewpoint on your work. I am however conscious that we always look at criticism and recommendations for improvement honestly, and don’t just put it down to popularity and growth.
It’s not just Open Source. It’s not just Free Software. It’s everybody.
A little bit of controversy is not a problem. Linus and Richard Stallman have never shied away from controversy. But, in society, we are becoming increased surrounded with obnoxious spite of any hint of disagreement. It is in politics, religion, science, entertainment, and yes in software development and discussion.
This could be a gentle reminder to have discussions without the acrimony that surrounds us. We should still go on our separate ways. Ubuntu should not be a mirror image of Fedora, Fedora should not be a second class Ubuntu. Each is different and has different strengths. Similarly, Ubuntu is not pure Debian. OK, I can live with that.
Linux is great because it is several thousand different things. Whatever works grows and is co-opted. Whatever doesn’t work shrinks. This is a great way to expand the field of the possible.
As i have stated on other forums, I can disagree with you without being disagreeable.
I can even accept that we might both be right. Or wrong, or somewhere in between. The important thing is that the experiments continue, and the best ones get adopted.
That is the attitude I would like to see come from this.
There is absolutely __no__ “growing negative discourse” in the linux world, with one notable exception. The “negative discourse” (which I’ve found is synonymous to “criticism” in the eyes of ubuntu advocacy) is the _exact same_ as it ever was, the people who have done successful work are dealing with it (and actually thriving as a result) _exactly the same_ as they always have, and doing yet more successful work as always, and everything is playing out exactly as it always has, and we know always will.
The one and only exception is Ubuntu/Canonical. What you’re seeing is significant disillusion and dissatisfaction, and just plain annoyance at the sheer amount of P.R. noise and outright bungling versus notable contribution, regarding Ubuntu/Canonical. Obviously, it was destined to happen since I know some of us saw it coming from a mile away due to things Canonical, and the ubuntu community, were doing, even as the latter were blissfully unaware what seeds they were sowing. Well, there it is, and it ain’t going away. (And you ain’t seen nothing yet. I can’t wait for “the Unity show”. And god help you if you implement Wayland like you did Pulse Audio).
The only question is “Is Canonical/ubuntu going to be one of those entities that doesn’t make it, because unlike the people I allude to in my first paragraph, Canonical/ubuntu doesn’t know how to thrive in the world that always was (and always will be) the way you seem to believe it wasn’t/isn’t?”.
I think I’ve seen enough of Canonical/ubuntu over the years to place my bet that it’s going to be a footnote in the history of linux. This is definitely not going to be another Redhat happy ending. You guys just don’t seem to have that innate quality that thrives in stark reality. I don’t know. Maybe it comes from being financed as a pet-project of some guy who struck it rich in another field. There’s a whole “Alice in Wonderland” element to that scenario. Maybe that’s why it seems like Canonical/ubuntu doesn’t even exist in the same real world that everyone else has known exists, and will always exist.
@jg: Agreed, the in-fighting and acrimony is just the same as it has ever been. However, if anything confirms that he has a point then it is replies like yours that reveal you have an axe to grind and will take every opportunity to do so.
To clarify, Jono Bacon’s efforts were damned from the start on account of his collaboration with the enemy; he could have posted a cure for cancer on the site and you’d have taken issue with it.
Perhaps there is some mileage in promoting a more relaxed and harmonious discourse between the various camps after all?
http://sitaramc.blogspot.com/2010/11/openrespectorg.html
With all due respect 😉
People who understand Hindi (or indeed any Indian language) will appreciate it a little more, because Indian languages have a lot of extra words that are basically respectful variants of the normal ones.
The reference to Tom Lehrer dates me, I know, but it’s all in a good cause.
Excuse me… respectful cause. Double-plus-respectful cause, even.
The VAR Guy is quietly watching this conversation unfold. Our resident blogger doesn’t have any strong opinions on this chatter so far. He’s far more curious to learn exactly how Canonical’s business is performing. More updates on that soon…
-TVG
This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!
M$ must be laughing at both the Fedora Project and the Ubuntu Project.
Nice going, guys.
Consulting with all players would have been ideal, but that hasn’t happened, so why not try to fix the problem instead of slinging mud at one another.
Quoting from Jono “jg: I don’t know how many times I need to say this…but let me be clear…OpenRespect is not an Ubuntu/Canonical project”
Given the focus of the openrespect project it may as well be a Canonical project.
This was highlighted by the fact that you decided to go on your own and not work with the other distributions.
Sadly this effort did the opposite of it’s stated goal, it actually highlighted the in-focussed attitude within the ubuntu community.