I have been thinking about whether I should write a blog post about the following topic for a long time. After all Jono asked us to calm down and not put more oil into the fire. But on the other hand I had asked Jono to make sure that there are no personal insults and attacks against my person several times and unfortunately on the Ubuntu Planet there is still a blog post which attacks me personally without any sign that this will change. As I had been attacked by the Ubuntu community quite a lot over the last half year and I had to ask Jonathan to tell Jono that I’m not the scape goat for Ubuntu, I think it is important that I stand up against this and point out the abusive behavior we get from the Ubuntu community.
First of all I want to verbatim quote the Ubuntu Code of Conduct:
Be respectful
Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don’t allow frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.
And now I’m going to quote verbatim what Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party
And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir.
Mark took care to write it so generic that it would fit Intel, Wayland, KDE, GNOME, Enlightment, Red Hat, systemd and everybody else who criticized the Mir decision. Nevertheless I’m convinced that the primary recipient of that attack is the KDE community and especially me personally. This is something I derive from a comment Mark put below his blog post:
When a project says “we will not accept a patch to enable support for Mir” they are saying you should not have the option. When that’s typically a project which goes to great lengths to give its users every option, again, I suggest there is a political motive.
If we combine all of it, it’s getting clear that he addresses the KDE community. Who else has support for Windows and is known for lots of options? Of all the communities, projects and companies listed above only KDE offers Windows components (well Intel as well, but I assume that Mark is not going to blame Intel for that). Thus I’m assuming that Mark intended those comments only against the KDE community. I asked him in a comment to his blog post to clarify, unfortunately Mark has at the time of this writing not yet replied and the comment is still awaiting moderation. I also copied the same comment to Google+ and included Mark and Jono, but still no clarification.
Now people could say that it’s not that bad what Mark wrote. But his claims are factually wrong and need to be corrected. After all we don’t want that his followers repeat the false claims over and over again to attack the KDE community. I’m now going to reply to the claims without going down to the level of personal attacks but just showing that all those claims are factually wrong if they are intended against the KDE community, KWin and me in person.
So let’s look at the claims one by one.
When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds
together with
When a project says “we will not accept a patch to enable support for Mir”
I said that I will not accept a patch for Mir, but this is not a political decision, but a pure technical one. I’m now going to quote myself from my very first blog post on the subject of Mir:
Will KWin support Mir? No! Mir is currently a one distribution only solution and any adjustments would be distro specific. We do not accept patches to support one downstream. If there are downstream specific patches they should be applied downstream. This means at the current time there is no way to add support and even if someone would implement support for KWin on Ubuntu I would veto the patches as we don’t accept distro-specific code.
Maybe Mark thinks that this is a political decision. But not for me: this is a pure technical decision as we would not be able to maintain the code. And Mark should know about the costs of maintaining code. After all at the podium discussion about CLA at Desktop Summit 2011 Mark told us that the CLA is needed because of the maintenance costs.
Furthermore I had dedicated a complete blog post on the technical reasons on why we do not want to and cannot support Mir. Mark should have been aware of this blog post given that Jonathan re-blogged it to Planet Ubuntu. In summary I cannot understand how Mark could think that these are political decisions given that I clearly outlined the technical reasons.
So let’s look at the next part:
you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is
Well yes, one has. As I showed above I gave a technical reason in less than 24 hours after the Mir announcement. I wonder how Mark can seriously think that we could have come up with an agenda against a product we didn’t know of before or that we are that fast. So to make it clear: there is no agenda. My only agenda is to correct false claims as in this blog post.
Personally I’m wondering what Canonical’s agenda is with the strong lobbying for us to support Mir and these constant attacks against my person. Mark is not the first one to directly attack me since the announcement of Mir.
The next part would be the NIH part. I do not know how that would fit in with KDE as I’m not aware of anything we NIH’ed recently. Also Lennart already commented on that. I think there is nothing more to add to what Lennart wrote.
And last but not least there is:
What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir.
I would be very interested in seeing where anybody from the KDE community justifies the Windows support in favor of Mir. This just doesn’t make any sense. So let’s look at it in more detail. As Mark states himself most of the applications do not have to care about Mir at all as the toolkit (in our case Qt) takes care of that. That’s exactly the reason why KDE can offer Windows ports of applications. It’s more or less just a recompile and it will work. In some cases X11 dependencies had to be abstracted and exactly that will ensure that the applications will also work on Mir. So to say thanks to the Windows port the applications will work on Mir (and on Wayland). Side note: as Aaron explains on Google+ of course Mark is wrong in saying that applications do not have to care, of course the technological split affects all applications.
As Mark also states what will need adjustments are the desktop shell programs. In case of KDE that would be mostly KWin. I’m now quoting the “mission statement” for the KWin development:
KWin is an easy to use, but flexible, composited Window Manger for Xorg windowing systems on Linux.
As one can see we do not consider Windows as a target for our development. It even goes so far to exclude non-Linux based unix systems. I’m quite known for thinking that support for anything except a standardized Linux stack (this includes systemd) is a waste of time. One can find my opinion to that on blog posts, mailing list threads, review requests or just talking to people from the KDE community who know my opinion about that.
There is an additional interesting twist in this claim about Windows vs. Ubuntu. KWin as explained is currently working on Kubuntu and not on Windows and this will stay so as long as Kubuntu is able to offer either Xorg or Wayland packages. If the Kubuntu community would no longer be able to offer such packages it would be due to changes in the underlying stack introduced by Ubuntu. So it can only be Ubuntu to remove support for KWin, not KWin removing support for Kubuntu. Furthermore it’s of course the task of a distribution to integrate software and not our task to integrate with a distribution.
Even more some years ago one was able to use KWin in Ubuntu. But then Canonical decided to introduce Unity and implement it as a plugin to Compiz. Since then it is no longer possible to run KWin in Ubuntu. A decision made by Canonical. I’m not blaming them for that, don’t get that wrong. I’m just pointing out to show how wrong it is to try to blame us for not supporting Ubuntu. It was Ubuntu which decided to no longer offer the possibility to run our software in Ubuntu. This behavior over the time made me think that I’m being made a scape goat, that Canonical tries to blame me for them moving away from the rest of Linux.
In summary we can see all the claims put up by Mark to attack the KDE community are false.
Last but not least I want to say something about a very common claim: I do neither hate Mir nor Canonical. I can hardly give prove to it, but I just point out that I attended the German Ubuntu community conference last weekend and also last year. If I were in general against Canonical I wouldn’t do something like that, wouldn’t I?
