>Sometimes that means many people coming up with many solutions. In other areas of open source development this doesn't seem to be perceived as a problem. In fa

>Sometimes that means many people coming up with many solutions. In other areas of open source development this doesn't seem to be perceived as a problem. In fact, it's celebrated as a marker of freedom for giving the user a lot of choices. That's because in other areas more choice is always a good thing as it doesn't equal fragmentation. Yet another choice for parsing JSON? Yet another email program? Great, why not? But operating systems are platforms, not just libraries or tools that you can combine ad libitum. For an OS to be an attractive target for developers it needs users. If you split the user base into several smaller user bases, the OS becomes that much less attractive for developers and as result it becomes less attractive for users as well. A big player like Canonical should understand that and consider consensus building as much part of its role as creating new software.