[pachydermic]

I'm highly suspicious of Mark Shuttleworth and the Canonical guys... hopefully that suspicion is misplaced. It's true that they've done an immense amount of good for desktop Linux - hell, I'm not sure I ever would have gotten into Linux without Ubuntu. On the other hand, they haven't shown that they're really willing to play nice with the rest of the community.

Going off on their own to develop Mir is a big deal, if for no other reason than it looks alienating. Adding Amazon search (by default) to the unity lens is an even bigger deal! I don't come to Linux for that shit! Unity as a whole is not a big deal because you can still just install something else.

I'm just not sure any more. They've burnt a lot of bridges with the community. How is that a good strategy? How is being an asshole a good thing if what you're achieving is partnering with Amazon to snoop on users? What are they trying to achieve here? I don't want to suggest that just because they're trying to make money means that what they are doing is automatically evil, but intentions do matter. What are their intentions? Just to spread awesome free software? I don't think that's all they are trying to do. And honestly, who needs another Apple, Microsoft or Google? We need something better.