
Losing graciously - ash
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
======
cs702
Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not
playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go
against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided.
Canonical _does_ try to collaborate with other projects and distributions.
It's just that such collaboration is _not_ the company's priority.

Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's
leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet,
phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this
goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are
not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal.

If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart,
they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus
Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning
the #1 spot."

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Unity and Mir have been two good choices.

~~~
csense
I haven't tried Mir yet.

Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've
tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's
some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as
fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application.

The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of
installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what
applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your
system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're
looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing.

Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for
smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity
down everyone's throats by making it the default.

~~~
chrismorgan
For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but
had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz
plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked
better.)

In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the
classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than
the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore.

I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I _do_ enjoy using it more than
almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3
a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity
is certainly my favourite.)

------
chimeracoder
> I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this
> decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely
> and expeditiously.

Well, this was a pleasant surprise.

I honestly thought that Ubuntu would continue to use Upstart regardless of
what Debian decided. It'd have been a monumental amount of work to take on,
but on the other hand, there's already been a lot of NIH-syndrome in Ubuntu-
land for a while (Upstart, Mir, Unity, etc.)

Ubuntu's been slowly moving in the direction of becoming a "silo", spearate
from other Linux distributions for a while now (a direction I dislike). If
Ubuntu had decided to double-down on Upstart against the tide, that would have
been the final nail in the coffin for them (in my books - they'd still find
success for at least a while no matter what they did).

 _EDIT_ : Upstart may actually not be a great example of NIH, but Mir
certainly is.

~~~
maxerickson
One difference is that the init system is not especially user facing.

(It can be, but that means it isn't working very well)

~~~
Eiwatah4
It is for sysadmins. And those are probably Canonical's biggest source of
income.

~~~
d0
Not really. We're mainly concerned that the interface is consistent.

 _service ssh restart_ works fine but that was fine in sysvinit as well..

~~~
octo_t
for some value of fine.

    
    
      service my_service restart 
    

required writing 100+ shell scripts, each of which was error prone and
difficult.

~~~
d0
But also 100% not my problem :)

~~~
pjscott
If one of those scripts forgets to kill a process's children (because the
process itself was supposed to handle that), and a server ends up with a
bazillion orphaned processes, then it could well become your problem!

This happened to me once. Never again, damn it.

~~~
jude-
What stopped you from spawning the daemon in a cgroup?

~~~
pjscott
I didn't know about them at the time, and I wasn't the one who wrote the
script that spawned it.

------
TeMPOraL
> _From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests
> that either option would work perfectly well._

It's a nice rationality gem right here. If the costs and benefits of both
options you're choosing from balance each other out, instead of carefully
searching for optimal solution that will yield little marginal utility benefit
you may as well toss a coin and be done with it.

~~~
yeahbutbut
Definitely a management perspective.

~~~
hercynium
Sometimes that's the best perspective to have. And in this case, I believe it
is. If left up to us engineers/hackers/nerds, we would continue to stubbornly
work on or with one system or the other, prolonging the debate indefinitely.
And hey, if enough people really feel strongly that Upstart is superior, it's
FOSS! Fork and build a community! I know it's not _easy_ but if enough people
share your passion it can happen, and that's Yet Another Reason(tm) Open
Source _rocks_.

------
themartorana
It's a tad annoying for us kinda-sys-admins that run full stacks in AWS (or
other cloud services) and have to maintain not only domain knowledge for the
code we're writing to run on the stack, but the server architecture and
services of the OS we choose. My time is limited, and Upstart scripts have
been written and run wonderfully.

Ubuntu smooths out many things, which is why I (and I guess many others)
choose it for my main server OS. I'm glad to hear 14.04 LTS will still have
Upstart support, but this means I have to put "move to systemd" as a medium-
range ticket, which is sadly more time wasted.

Go progress! But comon, progress! Stop making more work for me. :)

~~~
SEJeff
You host most of your stuff on a public cloud which means you don't do a lot
of what most sysadmins do. Do yourself a favor and embrace it. Learning new
tech and (more importantly) being able to know from experience which is more
fit for a specific task is part of the career field you've chosen.

I've professionally managed thousands of
RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/Gentoo/Ubuntu/Debian servers in production (and that is
just linux!) and not had any real issues learning the variations. Sure you
learn different package managers, /etc/sysconfig vs /etc/default, different
init scripts, but it is just semantics. That is why sysadmins get paid, to be
experts that know the differences.

It is a good thing to know both, embrace the new tech.

EDIT: Oh and I gave you an upvote, this isn't mean to be a snark.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
I don't see any difference in volume and complexity between sysadmin work on
physical iron and public cloud systems.

Everything you are describing applies to VPS systems.

There are differences, but those have more to do with optimal use of
resources, and in that aspect managing cloud systems is actually more
complicated. At least the behavior of your own physical systems is consistent
and predictable.

Besides touching physical machines, what is it you think a sysadmin for cloud
systems doesn't do?

~~~
SEJeff
The overwhelming majority of layer 1 monitoring and / or troubleshooting.
Using a cloud provider, by design, outsources all of the layer 1 monitoring
and troubleshooting to the cloud service provider. If you're not familar with
the OSI Layer Model[1], layer 1 == the physical layer ie: hardware.

How often do you need to monitor your EC2 instance for failed physical disks
or bad sticks of memory... never :)

Additionally, it depends on how much you outsource to your cloud hosting
provider. Many people trust ELB to do the right thing. It is a pretty
reasonable product, but having used keepalived + the default builtin LVS[2]
that is in every distro kernel out there for more than 10 years, why trust
Amazon to do it better? Why use Amazon Dynamodb when there is Riak[3] or
Amazon Elastic Cache when groupcache[4] is so awesome?

Using cloud services == outsourcing some/all of the traditional sysadmin work.
Many people who consider themselves devops people are smart developers with
very little real sysadmin experience. Please don't fall into the trap of
considering them exactly the same. It is an interesting hybrid role, but is
distinctly different.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model)

[2] [http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org](http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org)

[3] [http://basho.com/riak/](http://basho.com/riak/)

[4]
[https://github.com/golang/groupcache](https://github.com/golang/groupcache)

------
awjr
Kudos to him for this. Could not have been an easy decision but does sound
like he _listens_ and wants what is best for Ubuntu in the long run.

------
ForHackernews
It's interesting he doesn't mention that at least one significant factor
against Upstart (from the perspective of Debian) was the Canonical Contributor
License Agreement.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUOAUQJ-y00&t=42m15s)

~~~
dfc
That was interesting? You expected him to shine a light on their "icky
problem"? Every community has their "icky problem" that they do not like to
talk about in mixed company, if at all. The CCLA is Canonical's icky problem.

------
buster
Wow, i wouldn't have thought that. Since i moved away from Ubuntu to Debian
mostly because all this upstart, mir, advertising solo attempts, it's nice to
hear that.

Now i'm waiting for the same blog post about supporting Wayland and i may even
switch back sometimes.

~~~
pekk
Who is using Wayland right now?

~~~
kuschku
Who is using Mir right now?

Not even Ubuntu. They use Mir only as a wrapper around XMir which then
displays Unity – they've won nothing with this.

But with Wayland coming to kubuntu this summer and Mir coming to Ubuntu at the
same time, we'll see how Wayland and Mir compare in production.

~~~
jcastro
Mir has been shipping on Ubuntu Touch since 13.10.

~~~
sixbrx
Well that begs for another question, I would say...

------
ZenoArrow
Losing graciously is always deserving of respect. Thank you Mark.

------
nly
s/upstart/Mir/g

s/systemd/Wayland/g

s/2014/2015/g

~~~
ZenoArrow
Why would they drop Mir? Dropping Upstart makes sense because systemd has
momentum and they both do basically the same job. With Mir vs. Wayland they
already evaluated Wayland and decided it wasn't going to be suitable for their
needs, unless Canonical change their target markets this isn't something
that'd make sense to change (unless a later version of Wayland supports what
they want).

~~~
snotrockets
It is the common opinion that their needs (re Wayland/Mir) are not technical,
but related to defining and shipping the results product resulting of those
efforts.

~~~
ZenoArrow
That's how it appears, but Canonical wouldn't duplicate work unless they
thought it was in their best interests, the question then becomes what needs
are they trying to meet? Perhaps the needs are technical, perhaps not.

I understand part of the issue was Canonical changing their support for
Wayland, but what exactly does Mir do to make developers lives harder? Most
developers don't write for X directly, nor will most developers write for
Wayland or Mir directly, so as long as the library support is in place then
why should we care? I don't hear Android developers complaining about Android
using its own window manager. If Canonical want to pay extra for their own
window manager, and are prepared to work on the libraries that make developers
lives easier, what are we really losing?

~~~
chris_wot
"That's how it appears, but Canonical wouldn't duplicate work unless they
thought it was in their best interests"

Yes, _their_ best interests. Not to the Linux ecosystem.

~~~
ersii
Maybe if they do what's in their best interest, the best things happens for
the Linux/ _nix ecosystem. I 'm not exactly sure what your arguing about; All
corporate entities seem to (perhaps quite reasonable considering they're
corporations) cater to _their* own interests first.

From what I've gathered, we have, as a community gained a lot from that by
looking at Red Hat Inc, Canonical Ltd, SuSE GmbH/Novell/Attachmate Group and
others contributions.

~~~
chris_wot
Give me an example where Red Hat or SuSE have started a brand new project that
directly competes with an existing effort with broad support from the open
source community?

~~~
ZenoArrow
Best example is probably .deb (1995) vs. .rpm (1997).

------
mpnordland
Now that's a surprise. I've never known Canonical to give up like that.

~~~
d0
There's still time for Shuttleworth to get pissy yet.

~~~
DougMerritt
In his own title, he called himself gracious, which struck me as what people
do when the graciousness comes very hard to them and they have to make a
strong conscious effort.

So possibly he _felt_ pissy about, but rose above that.

I think he'd get extra graciousness points if he hadn't called himself
gracious, though.

~~~
mekoka
My thought as well. It's reminiscent of people listing humility as one of
their qualities.

------
angersock
_" (today our focus is on the cloud and on mobile, and we are quite clearly
leading GNU/Linux on both fronts) "_

How is targeting two widely-different platforms focus?

And how exactly is Ubuntu leading Linux in the cloud?

~~~
mistercow
Pretty much every source I can find shows Ubuntu with a clear lead, if not an
actual majority in marketshare on EC2 instances.

------
curtis17
Canonical are making a bet on the graphical subsystem re Mir/QT/QML/Oneclick
to crack touch/mobile. Similar to Apple going all-in on Objective
C/Cocoa(Touch).

But for the low level non-graphical parts of Ubuntu it makes a lot of sense to
stick to standard Linux/Debian. At the terminal/sysadmin/command line level a
standard setup is desirable.

------
azinman2
The headline made me think he was going to talk about losing the desktop and
mobile wars!

------
LukeHoersten
I'm really sad about this. I love Upstart and think it's an elegant init
process implementation. Anyone more informed than myself care to summarize the
key points in making the decision?

~~~
kazagistar
The summary is essentially just that systemd is just a bit more elegant.
Basically the (non gamed) votes had those two at the top, but in the end
upstart had a few more pain points, and systemd had a few more features.

\- SystemD parallelization is more automatic. \- SystemD has built in logging
for all managed processes. \- SystemD has Socket Activation (start process on
demand) \- SystemD has more momentum in other major distros (Fedora, Arch) \-
etc..

------
saosebastiao
So when will we see them drop Mir?

~~~
tinco
When all other distros start using Wayland, so never.

Mir hasnt lost the race, it just entered late. You could critisize them for
entering late, but in the end it doesn't matter. As long as people are working
on viable X alternatives.

------
ruben_varnish
I am an Ubuntu member and I was deeply wondering what I was going to do
next... Tollef had me realizing systemd is the future for quite a while now
:-)

Mark reminds us once again what the mission of Ubuntu is, why it is the best
alternative for end-user computing in the FLOSS world and, for me personally,
that I have a home already and do not need to go anywhere.

And... onward to build on top of the great foundation we already have.

------
vidoc
Nice move indeed! Let's just hope that there will always be viable
alternatives, just in case the systemd project ends up like pulseaudio.

~~~
vially
How did pulseaudio ended up? It seems to me that it's quite a healthy project
right now.

It may have had some issues at the beginning but I can't find anything to
complain about it right now.

------
mverwijs
The flipside is that diversity in software is usually mentioned as a Good
Thing. Losing Upstart means losing diversity, no?

------
dhfjgkrgjg
Upstart although being first was never going to win against the marketing
forces behind systemd. In the old days, tech was evaluated on technical merit,
today the slickest marketing hucksters win. Yet another piece of lennart-ware
to bring down the linux experience. Thank you BSDs for providing a sane
alternative.

------
kungpooey
Canonical, and more personally, Mark have been targets of my frustration with
the Linux desktop, I moved like many others to Mint. This is a very welcome
reminder that even if phrased negatively as 'lessor evils', Canonical
contributes and attracts people from various backgrounds to something I
sincerely want to overtake the current selection of OS options (more
philosophically than anything). Canonical may not listen very well, and
ultimately that may hurt any chances of desktop success for linux, however
this reminds me they're still in a very small circle of 'lessor' evils.

------
greatsuccess
The "new stewards of PID 1" == welcome to your imminent doom.

------
jericevans
Graciously?

~~~
cwyers
It seems very gracious to me. But if you're not convinced, compare it to Ian
Jackson, who is seriously pushing for GNOME to be removed from Debian if it
has dependencies on systemd:

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/02/msg00485.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
ctte/2014/02/msg00485.html)

~~~
cwyers
Actually, now that I think about it, this announcement has rather serious
implications for the current debate in Debian. Several members of the
Technical Committee are proceeding under the assumption that the Upstart
developers will continue to provide logind without systemd. If Ubuntu is
moving to systemd, that work is a dead-end, and Debian is going to have to
take over maintenance of that work if they want to use it to support multiple
init systems.

~~~
fdr_cs
The decision was already made, unless they can approve _and_ win a GR for
overriding it (and I don't think they would win).

~~~
cwyers
The decision to make systemd the default in jessie has been made. The TC is
still debating whether or not packages will be able to declare systemd as a
dependency.

