on glorious leaders

Source

So, some meta-thoughts on the whole Wayland-Ubuntu thing. On one level, I think it's all rather silly. It's funny how many blog posts and even news articles on reasonably respected sites pop up praising Mark's 'courage' and 'vision' - this for, remember, an announcement that the distribution sponsored by his company wants to use a certain bit of technology in future. Mark didn't do any work on Wayland. No-one at Canonical did, either. Implicit in this is that Mark's vision of 'let's use this neat thing' is a lot duller than Kristian's vision of 'let's write this thing that will be neat' (Kristian Høgsberg being the guy who mostly writes Wayland). Yet, here's the thing. Wayland's been around for years. Anyone who's moderately involved in Linux graphics stuff - even just an interested observer like me, hell, like anyone who reads Phoronix - knew about it already. The vision was out there for anyone who cared. Yet still, Mark saying 'oh hey this looks neat' becomes a huge splash. Why? I don't know, really. Because Mark is Mark, I suppose. I'd get much more excited about a blog post from an engineer - oh happy day if it were a Canonical engineer - saying 'hey, look at all this neat work I'm doing to make GTK+ work with Wayland' or 'hey, look at these improvements I'm making in nouveau to support Wayland use' and then noting 'this is because we want to take Wayland to the desktop'. But maybe that's just my prejudice. I think it's kind of sad that it seems like you need a Glorious Leader to have the world sit up and take notice of something, but especially in software, it seems like it's the case. For some reason, the tech press and a lot of people interested in tech like to hang off the grand pronouncements of a Glorious Leader; a charismatic guy (it's always a guy) who's happy to make grand pronouncements and co-opt whole reams of trench work by others into his own Glorious Vision. The archetype is Jobs, of course, but Silicon Valley is littered with Gateses and Ballmers and Ellisons and so on. When they stand up and say something, the world apparently takes notice - even if it's something that people actually doing the grunt work have been talking about and have known about for a long time. Maybe it's good for us to have our very own Glorious Leader in this mould. It seems to work, in some way - apparently, contributions to Wayland have been up since Mark's Grand Pronouncement hit the wires. I wonder if that'll continue.

Comments

finalzone wrote on 2010-11-09 18:29:
It is sad that a small company like to take a lot of credit from other contributors while doing nothing other than polishing. It is also sad how today journalism sucks with most praising and without critical analysis. One thing for sure, Mark is a millionaire which is why he got more press along its company Canonical.
adamw wrote on 2010-11-09 18:36:
that's not really what I mean in this case. I don't think Mark's tried to take credit for anything with his post; all his post really says is 'this thing's cool and we're thinking of using it'. I don't have any issue with Mark's post, I don't have a problem with anything really - I'm just thinking about the level of reaction the post gets and wondering what's behind it.
gregdek wrote on 2010-11-09 19:11:
"Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd." P. T. Barnum.
LinuxCanuck wrote on 2010-11-09 20:32:
The thing about the announcement was that it came out of nowhere. Since this announcement I believe the Wayland developer is now on Canonical's payroll. That adds additional weight to the announcement. Shuttleworth is willing to put his money where his mouth is. So while you may want to make light of it, it has significant ramifications for Ubuntu and other distributions. BTW, do people know that you cross post in Planet Fedora and Planet Mandriva? I am not sure how cool that is. Many people consider it to be bad form.
adamw wrote on 2010-11-09 20:46:
"The thing about the announcement was that it came out of nowhere. Since this announcement I believe the Wayland developer is now on Canonical’s payroll." Erm, nope. The Wayland developer was on Intel's payroll before Mark's announcement, and still is. (He started working on Wayland when he worked at Red Hat, and now he works on it at Intel.) Take a look at wayland's commit log - http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland - and note that almost every commit is by Kristian (go back a few pages to really notice this). Of the other recent committers, AFAIK, none work for Canonical.
jspaleta wrote on 2010-11-09 21:02:
LinuxCanuck Do you have a public citation that Canonical hired _the_ Wayland developer. I've yet to see that asserted anywhere else, so I'm sort of wondering where you saw or heard that particular bit of information. -jef
Links 10/11/2010: Mageia Alpha in December, New ACTA Leak | Techrights wrote on 2010-11-10 12:40:
[...] on glorious leaders Yet, here’s the thing. Wayland’s been around for years. Anyone who’s moderately involved in Linux graphics stuff – even just an interested observer like me, hell, like anyone who reads Phoronix – knew about it already. The vision was out there for anyone who cared. Yet still, Mark saying ‘oh hey this looks neat’ becomes a huge splash. Why? I don’t know, really. Because Mark is Mark, I suppose. [...]
hunterp wrote on 2010-11-10 17:06:
"it's always a guy", LOL, so true, sadly.
kitgerrits wrote on 2010-11-10 23:22:
Unfortunately Linux, aw a whole, already has a Benevolent Dictator For Life: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds My name is Linus Torvalds and I am your god. Shuttleworth is only noted 3 places further down the list as Self Appointed Benevolent Doctator for Life