With respect, we do contribute enormously, and those contributions are immediately evident to anybody who spends any time working with Ubuntu, or using it, or participating in the project. You are entitled to your own opinion, but I would urge you to spend some time digging into the work that gets done in putting Ubuntu together and then decide for yourself.

Your article is, no offense, *pathetic*, as you (Canonical) are one huge “Ubuntu tribe”.

Seriously: please stop confusing people, mess things up and cover the field with mud in favor of your business. Once again: UBUNTU ISN’T FREE SOFTWARE. Only those distros stated as that by the Free Software Foundation are free; you know that, and such you’re responsable of your words: please stop lying in favor your personal business.

You can call Ubuntu OpenSource and that would be great, but stop offending a philosophical idea to save your business.

You said it: “the Internet doesn’t forget”. Stop lieing before people (like me) stop believeing in you.

It might be a bit short-sighted to single out Microsoft and not apply the same standard to Apple, Adobe and all other producers of proprietary software, but it’s far from being the xenophobic gut response you make it out to be.

The lack of [willingness for] user education is one of things that always made me feel bad about Ubuntu tribe, starting right with its SABDFL.

PS: yes, we’ve chatted for a few months back in 2005 and my conclusions still hold true for me — “nice words” but then something quite different being done.

Complexity of any kind needs to be addressed by e.g. cooperation, collaboration, context, relation, not by e.g. thinking in categories, stereotyping, inside-the-box thinking.

Of course we’re all parts of nature itself which doesn’t exclude failures, but at the same time includes the advantage of learning and developing. I’d say we don’t have any other option than developing our minds.

*)Over ten years ago my tutor was Frederic Vester, unfortunately his book ‘The Art of Network Thinking’ wasn’t released in English, but here is a short review.
http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/1/2

I’m a long time user of Linux, from the late 90′s. I installed many distros, starting with Mandrake/Mandriva and Debian. Today my computer has K-ubuntu installed – I like the new KDE -, while I use Debian and OpenSuSe in my daily job – and MS Windows too -.

Today I can say that Ubuntu has the highest level of fanboyism and tribalism of the Linux world, even higher than the GNOME/KDE folks; Ubuntu fans usually thinks that Ubuntu equals Linux, and it’s very easy to find generic Linux tutorials and howtos behind the brand “Ubuntu tutorial” and “Ubuntu howto” – 10 points to your marketing efforts, Mark -. But Linux universe is not Ubuntu, Linux is greater than Ubuntu and includes it.

In the blog of Sense Hofstede – http://sensehofstede.nl/just-1-thats-a-challenge – I found an interesting discussion; I wrote my opinion about the “alienation” of the mainstream projects in your main page – an informed guy “corrected” me about Debian presence in Ubuntu’s main page -. There is no Linux or GNOME mentions at Ubuntu’s “Main Entrance”, and it’s too egocentric Mark; Ubuntu fanboys follow this egocentrism like an act of faith.

Sense wrote that Ubuntu devs should contribute more to the mainstream project – I agree -; their efforts were centered 99’9%in the Ubuntu universe 99’9%, while their GNOME patches and commits are too “ubuntu-centric” many times. some GNOME people suffer the NIH syndrome and have a high level of banboyism too, but there are – many – other reasonable people in the GNOME community.

But as a simple “user” of the codebase you can’t impose your design criteria in the mainstream; so Ubuntu devs must involve deeper in the mainstream development before trying to impose things, like the usability improvements.

For Example, there is an annoying bug in Nautilus/gvfs with WebDAV remote resources; you can list the resources, you can navigate through the folders structure, but you can’t copy an entire folder in one step -???-. In my former job we needed to access WebDAV folders from an Alfresco server, and our users needed to publish and recover entire folders of documents, so we changed workstations to KDE. GNOME boys response was that this behaviour is not defined in the specifications of WebDAV, but it’s a matter of common sense in a file manager .

This bug is alive in Ubuntu bug list, but there is no solution for it – I tried the new 10.04 LTS and the bug was there again -; it’s a perfect candidate to a mainstream patch, but there is none out there. Ubuntu devs could be more involved in the GNOME community by solving bugs like this one, but they spent too much efforts in the “cosmetic” side – icons left or right, indicators here or there,… -.

Ubuntu devs have many ways to participate in mainstream. There is a way.

P.D. : sorry for my english .