First there was “Bansheegate”, the scandal that saw space tourist, multi-millionaire tycoon and Linux opportunist, Mark Shuttleworth, deny the Gnome project 75% of the Amazon affiliate donations they would otherwise have received, courtesy of a Banshee plugin, by altering it to syphon the money into Canonical’s bank account instead.
Then, to add insult to embezzlement, when Banshee developers complained about this misappropriation of their good will, Shuttleworth issued them with the stark ultimatum that they could have 25% or nothing, then threatened to withdraw the plugin completely. As you can imagine, that went down like a ton of bricks, and the Banshee devs told Shuttleworth to shuttle off, but he shipped the plugin, then ran off with the loot anyway.
But, incredibly, it gets even worse. Next we had the “Peanutgate” scandal, in which Jono Bacon (full time Windows evangelist, and part time Ubuntu Community Manager) described detractors’ complaints about this misappropriation as the “views of the peanut gallery”. It should be noted that the members of this “peanut gallery” included Banshee developers, Gnome developers and various highly respected Linux luminaries, such as Jef Spaleta and Chuck Frain, the latter of whom has just quit in protest, from his position as leader of the Ubuntu Maryland Local Community Team. In his own words, it was his “tipping point”. I can’t say I blame him.
And to think, it seems like only yesterday that Jono Bacon was lecturing all those nasty Open Sauce people about showing some Open Respect®.
Hmm, Bacon could do with learning some Open Respect® himself.
In the midst of all this scandal, it would have been easy to miss the furore, which I hereby dub “Copygate”, kicking-off over in Ubuntu’s proprietary new and improved Open Sauce Launchpad®, as fanboys ranted like mad ranty things about the evils of X.org, that stalwart of the Linux desktop, which Canonical has condemned to death for the crime of “Not Invented Here”, to make way for their shiny new toy, Wayland.
In the tea-breaks between grinding axes and hoisting petards, Ubuntu’s finest throw rocks and insults in X.org’s general direction, like the following well coordinated attack, for X.org’s heinous sin of lacking a persistent clipboard – something it was never designed to do, and rightfully so. After various people, including myself, pointed this out, and suggested using a clipboard manager like everyone else, we (and poor-old X.org) were subjected to a vicious tirade that would have made even Steve “fucking kill Google” Ballmer blush. I invite you to read their belligerent ravings for yourself, but the gist of it is:
First, this immortal classic: “open source idiots do everything they can to defend Linux and open source”.
“Every Linux distribution just sucks”
Mac OS X is “a proper operating system”
“GNU” means “1970s command line instead of an interface”. I guess that includes Gnome then, a member of the GNU Foundation [slaps forhead]
X.org’s handy copy-on-select and middle-click paste feature is “abhorring”
… and “stupid”
Only “programmers and advanced linux users” know how to click the middle mouse button
X.org developers are “arrogant” for not slavishly copying the Windows way of copy and pasting (although that might have been rather difficult, since Project Athena, the project that defined X11’s protocols and fundamental standards, was created in 1983, two years before the first release of Windows)
X.org needs to do it the Windows way, to encourage Windows developers to “create their app on linux”, presumably so Ubuntu fanboys can bask in the glow of all that wonderful proprietary Windows Linux blobware
Oh, and Windows and Mac fanboys demand Linux becomes like their proprietary operating systems, and they “refuse to give in” until it does. So there!
“X.org is ancient”, and so like everything more than 5 years old (coincidentally, the average mental age of an Ubuntu user) it needs to be taken out and shot. Twice for good measure. Then burned at the stake, just in case
“It’s not the 1980’s anymore”, apparently. Although it’s doubtful if any Ubuntu user is actually old enough to have even seen the 1980s, so I’m not sure what their objection is. Personally, I didn’t like it much, but that had more to do with Bananarama and bad haircuts than computers. In fact, now that I think about it, computing was a whole lot of fun back then, and people generally didn’t want to take software out and shoot it, even if it did utilise the middle mouse button
“We got computers that are way more powerful then that with a lot more memory”, which is an excellent (albeit grammatically perplexing) excuse to fill that memory with unnecessary crap, like Windows does. Oh wait, now I get it
A clipboard manager is evil, because “you need to install it”, which is utterly beyond the capabilities of the average Ubuntu user, naturally
This “bug” proves that “programmers don’t care” and “no one is paying them money” to fix it. Allegedly.
They dream of this being “the year of linux on the desktop”, and hate that it only has “1% of market share”, despite the fact that this is completely irrelevant to the goal of Free Software, and has no bearing whatsoever on their use of GNU/Linux. I mean, it’s not like another couple of million archetypal Ubuntu users will help fix its bugs any quicker, given that most of them seem barely capable of even using a mouse. No, for that they’ll need to turn to us “archaic” programmers, who actually know what we’re doing. Looks like that “1970s command line instead of an interface” might come in handy, after all
And finally, having launched this tirade of Windows and Mac advocacy, in an Ubuntu bug report, the brave defenders of the modern age demand to know “why does Launchpad allow people to argue and leave advocacy comments?”
Good question.
Let’s just pause for a moment, and reflect on the sombre fact that these are Ubuntu users, not paid Microsoft astroturfers.
Hard to believe, isn’t it?
But in the interest of fairness, let me leave you with this handy list that proves conclusively that proprietary operating systems like Mac OS X have far superior copy and paste capabilities, and we should all rush out immediately and pirate buy a copy:
Open Office has copy/paste problems in OS X
Keynote and Illustrator have copy/paste problems in OS X
OS X upgrade breaks Synergy copy/paste
OS X upgrade breaks Illustrator to photoshop copy/paste
OS X Snow Leopard drops accents during copy/paste
OS X copy/paste operation freezes VNC sessions on Mac side
Can’t select text for copy/paste in OS X Finder app
Inkscape copy/paste doesn’t work as expected in OS X
‘Nuff said.
– from slated.org