14 DAY TRIAL // The conflict that has been brewing between the KDE developers and Canonical has finally exploded in a flurry of statements which show just how many problems the Mir display server has caused.
KDE and Canonical, especially Mark Shuttleworth, have been friends for a long time. Once upon a time, back in 2006, Mark Shuttleworth was the first patron of KDE and people were uttering things like this:
“I have no doubt that you will do the right thing once you actually see the true potential that KDE4 could bring. You are a true visionary. The world needs more people like you,” said one of the members of the KDE community.
Seven years later, Canonical announces a new display server and everything that KDE, Kubuntu, and Canonical communities have built together goes out the window.
The war of declarations has culminated with a post written by Mark Shuttleworth in which he grouped all the people that have been criticizing the Mir display server, on purely political reasons in his opinion, into a virtual “Tea Party.” A lot of people took offense, especially a couple of prolific KDE developers who opposed Mir straight from the get-go.
KDE Plasma developers and the President of KDE e.v, Aaron Seigo, challenged Mark Shuttleworth to a debate regarding the issue. The founder of Canonical has ignored his request, which prompted a second reaction that turned out to be a lot more acid that the first comments.
The second reaction came from one of the Kwin developers and maintainers, Martin Gräßlin, who has basically said goodbye to the Ubuntu community. The reactions to his Google+ post have been mixed, and the post prompted a reaction from the Ubuntu community manager, Jono Bacon.
“Open Source has been and will always be filled with very energetic discussion. In some cases this discussion blurs into the area of rudeness and disrespect. The difficulty is that everyone's definition of what is rude and disrespectful is different. Likewise, everyone's definition of good and bad conduct is different,” said Jono Bacon in his post.
He expressed his regret towards the decision of Martin Gräßlin, but he also pointed out the Ubuntu Code of Conduct 2.0, which has been broken so many times it's hard to keep count.
As it stands right now, KDE will never adopt Mir, Kubuntu will probably follow suit, and the days of this Ubuntu flavor are probably numbered.