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1. Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 10-Apr-2017 21:45:49 UTC Bob Mottram
   Ah, Mr Shuttleworth strikes again. In the old days Jono Bacon would rapidly follow up with a damage limitation blog post.
   
   

   "I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too...The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fk that st."
   
   

   To understand why Free Software people might not like the mainstream you have to understand its origins. When Stallman started GNU he was going against the mainstream commodification of software which was going on at the time. The mainstream has never liked Stallman or Torvalds. In the last decade there was the battle against Microsoft in which they called us "a cancer" and so on. Free software has really only gotten where it is today by going against the conventional wisdom, as epitomized by Bill Gates' open letter to the homebrew computer club.
   
   At its core Free Software is about software which works for its users the way they want it, and sadly that often isn't very mainstream. The mainstream of commercial software development is to screw the users and make sure the advertisers and share holders are happy.
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Monday, 10-Apr-2017 22:06:50 UTC Bob Mottram

     • futureBoyfriend
     @deadsuperhero I quite liked Jono when he was working for Canonical and thought he did a pretty good job of being the public face of Ubuntu. The point about them repeatedly going against their user/developer community is true though.
     
     With the end of Unity and the u-phone I think this may possibly be the beginning of the end of Canonical's involvement with Free Software. That is a loss, because I think that company particularly helped to raise the public profile of GNU/Linux considerably.