Kubuntu's Cautionary Tale, Requiem for Open Standards
Andy Updegrove wrote yesterday, "The top IT companies are increasingly opting to use open source software to solve problems that they used to address with open standards." Elsewhere, Larry the BSD Guy said UbuntuBSD should remember what happened to Kubuntu when considering becoming an official Ubuntu flavor and Jesse Afolabi was "blown away" by Deepin OS 15. Jonathan Riddell announced a new rebasing of KDE Neon and Bruce Byfield looks at the Free Software Foundation's High Priority Projects.
Andy Updegrove, author and journalist, has managed a blog christened The Standards Blog for quite some time, advocating and reporting on issues concerning Open Standards. Yesterday he wrote that a couple of years ago he began to notice that the number of Open Standard stories being written declined as did the number of "new standards consortia." He said this means top companies are just looking to Open Source instead of Open Standards. "This is a major change from practices prevailing over the last twenty years, when the advent of any new technology was accompanied by a veritable algal bloom of new, often competing standards consortia." Today's cloud standards are made up "old, familiar names" according to Updegrove. Most troubling, he said the word standards has been "repurposed to describe code bases rather than specifications." He figures that while the need for Open Standards may diminish, it won't disappear completely.
Larry Cafiero is a *BSD fan and one of his nicknames is "Larry the BSD Guy." Today he wrote that perhaps UbuntuBSD should reconsider their wish to become an official Ubuntu project. He said, "UbuntuBSD’s Jonathan may want to talk to another Jonathan — Jonathan Riddell, founder and former de facto leader of Kubuntu — especially regarding where the control of the fruits of one’s labor really lie, and the potential for conflict from Canonical may inherently arise." He then added a reminder of Matthew Garrett's words on the subject. Cafiero concluded that wanting to be part of the Ubuntu family may be noble, but warned founder Jonathan Boden "just be aware of what you're getting into."
Speaking of Jonathans, Jonathan Riddell wrote today that KDE Neon has been rebased on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. He said it was so close to being finished, they just went ahead and moved on to it. Those with current Neon installs can just upgrade according to Riddell and, after a warning, describes how. Right now the images are still just KDE Frameworks and Plasma, but he said Applications and other bits are coming.
In other news:
* Free Software Foundation's Priorities Reflect Changing Times
* Deepin 15: A Beautifully Crafted Linux Distribution for Everyone