Feeds

Shuttleworth sorry for 'Open source Tea Party' jibe

Ubuntu Daddy also apologises for 'new guy' inciting 'torches and pitchforks' with legal letter

Security and trust: The backbone of doing business over the internet

Ubuntu Daddy Mark Shuttleworth has blogged a pair of apologies for recent transgressions.

One of his apologies concerns his recent remarks that those who oppose Mir, the Xwindows replacement oddly omitted from Ubuntu 13.10, are ”the Open Source Tea Party”.

Shuttleworth now says it was “unfair” to use the term in reference to “vocal non-technical critics of work that Canonical does.” He goes on to describe use of the phrase as “unnecessary and quite possibly equally offensive to members of the real Tea Party (hi there!) and the people with vocal non-technical criticism of work that Canonical does (hello there!).”

The more grovelling of the two apologies is made on behalf of a “less-than-a-month-at-Canonical new guy” who last week sent Canonical's most strongly-worded letter to fixubuntu.com because it was felt the site's name and use of the Ubuntu logo infringed copyright.

The chap who runs the site and received the letter works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so as Shuttleworth writes “The internets went wild” as a textbook media storm flared and the name Canonical was not mentioned kindly.

Shuttleworth's apology says the whole incident was an error caused by poor training of a new employee, that the company's policy is reasonable and that reasonable steps were quickly taken to point out the error. Here's how he describes those steps:

“Within hours of the publication of a response to our letter, the CEO, COO and legal team reviewed the decision, corrected the action and addressed the matter publicly. I apologised the moment I was made aware of the incident. And I’m reassured that the team in question is taking steps in training and process to minimise the risk of a recurrence.”

His conclusion is that the error was analogous to “a bug in a line of code in one of many thousands of changes being made monthly by a large team”. His concluding query asks readers to consider if a media firestorm is an appropriate response to an error of this type.

You'd best answer that question here: comments on Shuttleworth's blog have been turned off. ®

Protecting against web application threats using SSL

More from The Register

next story
Use Windows software on Android – Microsoft couldn't be app-ier
Run code anywhere, all the time, just in time for Christmas
Crack open more champagne, Satya, XP's snowballing to HELL
Netmarketshare says operating system has lost 43 per cent of users in 60 days
Ten Linux freeware apps to feed your penguin
Out with the old and in with the GNU
systemd row ends with Debian getting forked
Greybeards vs. Gnomes fight sees creation of new 'Devuan' distro
Microsoft: So sorry for NOT paying Xbox indie game devs on time
$397bn IT giant says payment will take two weeks
Azure has put new life into Active Directory
Cynical sysadmin ventures into the blue yonder
CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker
Claim's Docker's direction is 'fundamentally flawed'
prev story

Whitepapers

Three businesses share why they chose Citrix XenDesktop over VMware View
Delivering Windows apps and desktops as secure mobile services from a cloud-ready platform while simplifying management, reducing costs and enhancing security.
Focus on 5 SIEM requirements
In order for SIEM to help usher in more effective security and risk management strategies—particularly as they relate to threat mitigation, embracing trends, and aligning with business priorities—these five issues must be solved.
The Escalating Threat of DDoS Attacks
With increasing frequency and scale, some of the world’s largest data center and network operators are suffering from crippling Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Reg Reader Research: SaaS based Email and Office Productivity Tools
Read this Reg reader report which provides advice and guidance for SMBs towards the use of SaaS based email and Office productivity tools.
Mobile, multilingual, and content authoring
The major changes in Drupal 8 for end users, site builders, designers and front-end developers, and for back-end developers - part 1.