3 ms·

This piece is only about politics, which is the usual drama: most players have an NIH-attitude and we'll end up with three different standards. No one is helped

This piece is only about politics, which is the usual drama: most players have an NIH-attitude and we'll end up with three different standards. No one is helped except for news outlets who can proceed to construct a nice dramatic 'he said, she said' story. It would be more interesting to see an in-depth technical comparison of Linux app container implementations, so that an outsider can make an informed choice.

bkor 10y ago
Politics are quite important to do right and politics is different from NIH. The article notes two important things: 1) Canonical wanting to do big announcements. This causes problems if you want to work with communities. They'll try and work and get support, but one person per distribution isn't the same as working with the entire community. So when the announcement implies that there's broad support, the communities feel like it is a big lie. That'll destroy the willingness to cooperate. 2) Canonical likes to keep control. E.g. the CLA. Canonical has special rights nobody else will have. Companies don't like this at all, it changes the working together into helping a competitor. It doesn't make business sense. Canonical tries to solve things by e.g. saying you keep the copyright, but that is just ignoring the actual issue. This CLA has been an issue for various Canonical projects for many years. An "we might change this" I don't trust. Similarly, Canonical rolled this out while the code only supports the Canonical proprietary app store. Someone else now made a open/free source (not sure which) store, but at the moment the experience quite assumes just one app store. Those two things together make people want to refrain from spending time (doesn't matter much if they're paid or not). Note: I'm biased and I like Flatpak as well as AppImage. I don't see the problem in having multiple standards. Canonical is IMO very good at having a great Ubuntu experience. They're (again IMO) terrible at doing cross distribution work due to reasons explained above.
- cbHXBY1D 10y ago
  I too am leaning toward Flatpak. I expect it, like other products from Red Hat (systemd, pulseaudio) will eventually be the winner in the end.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Canonical want to be in control because they are looking at trademarks etc. Also they are a small player in the pool compared to certain other companies, and thus have to fight harder to be heard. Btw, all you need to distribute snaps is a web server afaik.
alex_duf 10y ago
NIH?
- insulanian 10y ago
  Not Invented Here
legulere 10y ago
I think it's more that there are 3 different factions. The modernists (Redhat, Suse, Arch, ...) Cannonical (which are also modernists, but Cannonical and the modernists don't work together) The don't change anything faction (Gentoo, Slackware, ...) > It would be more interesting to see an in-depth technical comparison of Linux app container implementations, so that an outsider can make an informed choice. If one takes MIR/Wayland as an example, the differences will probably be minuscle, so social factors will be way more important than technical ones.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I dunno about "don't change anything" with regards to Gentoo. Frankly both Gentoo and Slackware is in the end about letting the admin/user have the final say. Even if this means blowing their virtual foot of with a virtual shotgun. You can see this in how gentoo provides all manner of useflags that ebuilds take into account, and how slackware have no dependency enforcement. The impression i have is that Canonical and certain DE people get in a row over trademarks and UX. Canonical wants to present a certain UX when people use their distro, while the DE people wants a fixed experience for their DE (to the point of reshaping whole distros to their demands). Those two goals clash.

bkor 10y ago

Politics are quite important to do right and politics is different from NIH. The article notes two important things: 1) Canonical wanting to do big announcements. This causes problems if you want to work with communities. They'll try and work and get support, but one person per distribution isn't the same as working with the entire community. So when the announcement implies that there's broad support, the communities feel like it is a big lie. That'll destroy the willingness to cooperate. 2) Canonical likes to keep control. E.g. the CLA. Canonical has special rights nobody else will have. Companies don't like this at all, it changes the working together into helping a competitor. It doesn't make business sense. Canonical tries to solve things by e.g. saying you keep the copyright, but that is just ignoring the actual issue. This CLA has been an issue for various Canonical projects for many years. An "we might change this" I don't trust. Similarly, Canonical rolled this out while the code only supports the Canonical proprietary app store. Someone else now made a open/free source (not sure which) store, but at the moment the experience quite assumes just one app store. Those two things together make people want to refrain from spending time (doesn't matter much if they're paid or not). Note: I'm biased and I like Flatpak as well as AppImage. I don't see the problem in having multiple standards. Canonical is IMO very good at having a great Ubuntu experience. They're (again IMO) terrible at doing cross distribution work due to reasons explained above.

cbHXBY1D 10y ago
I too am leaning toward Flatpak. I expect it, like other products from Red Hat (systemd, pulseaudio) will eventually be the winner in the end.
digi_owl 10y ago
Canonical want to be in control because they are looking at trademarks etc. Also they are a small player in the pool compared to certain other companies, and thus have to fight harder to be heard. Btw, all you need to distribute snaps is a web server afaik.

alex_duf 10y ago

NIH?

insulanian 10y ago
Not Invented Here

legulere 10y ago

I think it's more that there are 3 different factions. The modernists (Redhat, Suse, Arch, ...) Cannonical (which are also modernists, but Cannonical and the modernists don't work together) The don't change anything faction (Gentoo, Slackware, ...) > It would be more interesting to see an in-depth technical comparison of Linux app container implementations, so that an outsider can make an informed choice. If one takes MIR/Wayland as an example, the differences will probably be minuscle, so social factors will be way more important than technical ones.

digi_owl 10y ago
I dunno about "don't change anything" with regards to Gentoo. Frankly both Gentoo and Slackware is in the end about letting the admin/user have the final say. Even if this means blowing their virtual foot of with a virtual shotgun. You can see this in how gentoo provides all manner of useflags that ebuilds take into account, and how slackware have no dependency enforcement. The impression i have is that Canonical and certain DE people get in a row over trademarks and UX. Canonical wants to present a certain UX when people use their distro, while the DE people wants a fixed experience for their DE (to the point of reshaping whole distros to their demands). Those two goals clash.