

Open letter to Mark Shuttleworth - Nathaly

Dear Mark,<p>First, I want to thank you for all what you offered to the opensource community. Ubuntu is a huge success and millions of people are using it worldwide. You could, in few years, create a distribution that became the most popular linux operating system in the world. And I'm sure that hundreds or may be thousands of people do respect you as much as I do.<p>Second, I can't stop myself thinking of the latest release of Ubuntu and I want to share with you my thoughts.<p>I'm really disappointed that Canonical decided what the Ubuntu community should and should not use. I mean, despite the fact that Unity is a disaster (my own point of view), I don't think that obliging Ubuntu users to use it is a good idea. We're in Linux and it sticks in one world, Freedom. It's not right to think that you are right and the rest of people are wrong. Many users expressed their anger against Unity since it's first release, and Canonical still think that Unity should be the future of Ubuntu. 
It's the Ubuntu community who decides what Ubuntu should have, not Canonical.<p>My father loves Ubuntu. He was a Windows user. Last summer I installed Ubuntu 10.04 in his computer and he liked it so much. He could do the upgrade to 10.10 by himself and could even install many softwares from the Ubuntu Software Center since Ubuntu was easy to use and almost perfect. Yesterday, he called me and told me this : "I think there is a virus in my computer, I don't know what to do". He upgraded to 11.04 and he got completely lost.<p>Dear Mark,<p>Ubuntu doesn't belong to Canonical. It belongs to you, to me, and all users who love open source. Canonical should not decide alone what's good and what's bad. (Python 3 vs Python 2)<p>Linux should be an example of democracy and freedom. Not a joke that mac/windows users tell each other.<p>How can I, as a Ubuntu user, change all my habits to understand/use 11.04?
How will you explain to thousands of Ubuntu users in governments and schools all over the world, that the Linux that they spent hours trying to understand and use is now gone, and that they have to learn again from level 0. Do you think that governments will trust Canonical after this disaster (my own point of view)? It's a betrayal of trust of many Ubuntu users.<p>Why didn't you just hire the Docky/AWN developers to create an awesome dock ?
Why didn't you hire the Gnome Do developers and use it natively in 11.04 instead of the search bar menu ? I'm not the only one who asks these questions.<p>I simply hope that Canonical knows what it's doing.<p>With all my sincere respects,<p>Nathaly.
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RexRollman
This open letter strike me as a bit naive. Communities, while important, do
not decide what gets into or worked on in open source projects; in the end,
it's the developers who do.

If you don't like where Ubuntu is headed, and it seems you don't, then it
would seem that you have two options: move on or fork it.

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> It's the Ubuntu community who decides what Ubuntu should have, not
> Canonical.

I think it's Canonical that decides. Ubuntu definitely belongs to Canonical.
If you don't like it, don't use it.

Opinionated decision making is a great tool: mob rule can't achieve the same
coherence a single decision making body can.

This "GNU/Linux = democracy" meme seems to be missing the point: the
"democracy" lies in the various choices of distro. You don't necessarily need
"democracy" at the distro level: if you don't like what a distro is doing,
you're free to cast your "vote" by using another.

