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by Bo102010
5344 days ago
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I'm not a big fan of Unity, but I'm sympathetic to Shuttleworth in this matter. After following open source projects for some years, it seems they're all eventually accused of some dark corruption - usually after making some UI change. "You're betraying the ideals of the [project / community / founder]," the accusers say. "It used to be about giving users [freedom / choice / slightly less RAM usage]. Now it's just about [main leader of project / 'the developers' / the corporations]'s whims! Why not just give us [a setting / the old behavior / a large-scale feature]!" Take a look at Firefox forums after every release, or Pidgin's bug tracker every time they tweak the GUI... It reminds me of an older Less Wrong article - (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/). Now, it could be that all projects are slowly decaying into [ego / corporate / dictatorial designer]-centric tarpits, but I kind of doubt it. |
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Firefox is a good example. I have used it since "Phoenix 0.1" came out. Already during "Firebird" times, users have started to complain that it is getting slower and bigger. Mozilla ignored it. It needed Google's Chrome browser to ring the bells at Mozilla and show them that the user complaints were valid after all.
Compare that with well managed projects like the Linux kernel. There its usually the BDFL who does the wake up calls, after having listened to user complaints and suggestions. Not saying that everything is perfect, but the kernel has been hugely successful for 25+ years and is still well focused.
Ubuntu OTOH has completely lost its original focus of providing an easy desktop Linux. They started pushing server versions and now suddenly smartphones. As if the desktop would disappear in the next years.