The Open Source Tea Party

 

Mark Shuttleworth opens his mouth again ……… and this time it was sharp.

One day after the release of Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu Phone, Mark on his website posts among other things his thanks to those who collaborated with both projects, how proud he is of Ubuntu Phone and an invitation to collaborate with ideas for version 14.04, which will be called Trusty Tahr (it is a goat that lives in the mountains of the Himalayas) .

But the pearl that points Phoronix are his comments to the detractors of Mir, which has been running on Ubuntu Phone and is expected for 14.04, even though its compatibility version was not included in 13.10. I quote (translations of metalbyte, Tannhausser and me):

Mir is a very important job. When a lot of competitors attack a project for purely political reasons, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least now we know who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party. And to put all the fuss in context: Mir is relevant to about 1% of all developers, those who think about shell development. Any application developer will consume Mir through its toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals suffer from NIH on every piece of the pile they get their hands on… especially SystemD, which is highly invasive and hardly justified. How close I see Canonical's competitors torturing the English language in their efforts to justify how those tools should support Windows, but not Mir. But we're going to do it, and it's going to be amazing.

I can tell you what the Mir team's agenda is: speed, quality, reliability, efficiency. That. From what I've seen on the smartphone, Mir is going to be a huge leap forward for next-gen gaming performance, battery life, and display capabilities. So thanks for the many contributions to Mir, and to everyone who tries it out in environments more challenging than the smartphone. I'm enjoying it on my laptop and I love the native Mir gaming benchmarks. So to the team, and the larger community that helps test and refine Mir, thank you.

…………… .What do they tell me? First of all, we must clarify: The Tea Party it is a movement in favor of reducing state spending, the national debt and taxes. But since many of those who participate in that movement are conservatives like Sarah Palin (there are also many libertarians like Ron Paul), outside the US they are seen as crazy looks.

The answers soon arrived. This was the Lennart Poettering (creator of systemd, and another being hated in the linuxsphere)

And yes, I'm not entirely sure what he's saying, but I think some "outraged individuals" from "especially SystemD" have been called the "Open Source Tea Party" by Mark.

I wonder how we deserve such praise. I haven't publicly commented on Ubuntu and Canonical on my blog in years. And I don't think he said much about Mir. Yes, I can say that Upstart is poorly designed, but that's a technical opinion, and heck, another one that I don't care about ...

(Also, I think Matthew Garrett has posted on his blog probably the most relevant reviews of Mir's situation, but I find it ingenious to suggest that he would torture the English language. I mean, you can complain about my English, but heck, Matthew is from Cambridge…)

Then came the one of aaron sego which in a summarized and challenging way said (Tannhausser's translation):

As one of the people who has disagreed with Mir's need and worth, as well as the practice of spreading lies in his defense, it bothers me that I am equated with a political movement, which does not resemble the related issues with Mir. I am particularly offended by the suggestion that the only reply to Mir has been politically motivated. This amounts to slander at worst, and insults at best. I would not accept it being done to you, yet it does it to others. It's your fault, Mark, what a shame.

[…] My answer to that is simple, Mark: we are going to do this as adults. If you want to discuss Mir and the "slander" of those who disagree, we will do so live and online, as for example on the Linux Action Show videocast by Chris Fisher and Matt Hartley.

Yes, I am challenging you to a public debate on the matter. It seems appropriate since you perceive it as a political issue.

Another that would also challenge him is Martin Grasslin (KWin developer):

I love that part of Mark Shuttleworth's blog post (referring to English torture). A good personal attack on all those who did not have the opportunity to be born in a country whose main language is English. But I would challenge Mark to a duel in the most natively spoken language in Europe 😉 It would be nice to see Jono Bacon explaining to me how I shouldn't feel oppressed by that sentence. Oh and of course I know my problems with English.

The Windows part is also good. Since I once said to maintainers of KDE for Windows: "I am proud to keep the only part of KDE that can never be ported to Windows" and that our mission clearly excludes non-Unix OS.

And I say. A duel between Mark and Jono against Martin and Aaron would be interesting. Let's wait and see what Mark says.

Update: What you just wrote is not wasted Jono bacon.