Peace, Love and C++

Alas. The blogosphere has been slammed with discontent.

Count me as one of them.

It’s been a long time since the last position (I’ve held) of significance in Ubuntu, a LoCo Council Member, which I left with a heavy heart.

I felt, at the time, that Ubuntu, “The Community” was no longer in control of Ubuntu “The Distro”.

Technical opinions of Ubuntu community members started to get disregarded (starting with the gawd-awful Yahoo search switch), and it continued to get worse as Canonical stopped becoming a contributor to Ubuntu and started becoming it’s sole guiding force.

In comes the mess called Ubuntu One — which, for the record, is a wrong name, it’s not Ubuntu in any sense, it’s not Community driven, it just uses Ubuntu as one of it’s platforms.

Trading on Ubuntu’s good name started this mess.

Slowly, like the ship of theseus, Canonical started to swap out bit by bit until nothing was left without Canonical assignment.

I always assumed it was so that selling the code for another company to use the code for non-free purpose was the reason. Oh well.

Look at us now: Starting off on an ill-thought out path because others are unwilling to say they just didn’t understand the whole problem.

This is a long way of saying:

Ex-Ubuntu’ers: You’re welcome in Debian. I’ve set up #ubuntu-expats on oftc. Please join us. You’re welcome there.

Working in Debian has been an absolute dream; it feels like contributing to Ubuntu in the early days.

Come. Have a say. Re-join a Community that isn’t just “Like us on Facebook”.

I still consider myself an Ubuntu Community Member, but I don’t think there’s any community left.