newspeak

If Shuttleworth and Canonical want to keep some projects quiet until they’re ready for show and tell, they’re just doing what many Linux distributors have done long before them. Instead of wasting time and energy on who’s more open than someone else, all the Linux developers should be focusing their attention on developing the best possible operating system. Arguing like this only benefits Linux’s operating system rivals: Mac OS X and Windows and doesn’t help Linux, or any of its distributions.

via Ubuntu moves some Linux development inside | ZDNet.

Quite. Matt Asay made a similar point about which cloud claiming openness is most open, a misguided competition, given that the value of any given technology and its company is measured by its users and clients and their users. Put another way, open source and open communities are pragmatic in essence. Openness is a strategy but not a methodology; it is a means of making things and distributing them, and the goal is to maximize efficiency. Unfortunately, the framing elements, such as sustainability, is not foremost, but it is by no means an afterthought, especially among those projects that consider open source as a longterm strategy to build a market and make money at at it. Oh, “sustainability” doesn’t mean doing things that will please Mother Earth. It means doing things in a way that can be replicated, at least in outcome, until such point it makes no sense to continue doing it. The alternative is a slash and burn economics that catastrophically rakes the wealth of a community to a more remote other place.