Snappy

Bug #1711249
Comment #17

Comment 17 for bug 1711249

Revision history for this message

Damiön la Bagh (kat-amsterdam) wrote on 2017-08-18:

#17

This really comes down to the big difference between the philosophy behind Canonical, RedHat and their respective communities.

RedHat's business model is make things as difficult as possible to install, use, configure and maintain so they can sell expensive courses to teach people how to perform those tasks. When people using RedHat even after the course can't figure it out they sell expensive support contracts and use expensive consultants to help you on your way.
The GNU/Linux community behind them create things that are expressly over-complicated to use and maintain. This gives them a sense of status, as only they know how to use it and also gives them some sense of job security. This is great for Enterprise environments that expect this type of treatment. This group is trying to communicate with computers as if they themselves are computers.

Canonical's business model is make things people *want* to use, are comfortable using and are more 'human' in feel. They are not trying to screw everyone over with courses, unreasonable support contracts and expensive consultants. They are trying to nurture and protect their community to achieve both their own commercial goals as well as the goals of the community.
This section of the GNU/Linux community doesn't want to type a jumble of hard to remember symbols and characters just to run, install, configure or maintain their application. They want something that just works with as little hassle as possible and can go a bit deeper if they need to fine tune something. This group is trying to interact with computers as humans.

Due to these differences;
Snap needs to exist for the Ubuntu 'human' community and to balance out Flatpacks complexity.

==== Extra arguments ===
Same argument for the existence of AppArmour. From a security standpoint AppArmour is much safer than the extremely complex SELinux because AppArmour is less complex to configure. Thus reducing the chance someone makes a typo in the config that results in a security disaster.

As was the argument for Upstart. Upstart just works, out of the box, no lengthy configuration necessary. systemd is a configuration nightmare with insane hard-to-type commands no-one can remember.

Someone was talking about the Canonical License Agreement as well in this thread. The CLA is there to protect your ass from being sued by Patent Trolls. Caonical steps up to the plate to take responsibility for your application. It's there to protect GNU software writers from Patent trolls and a real shame people are still blind to this.
========================

This really comes down to the big difference between the philosophy behind Canonical, RedHat and their respective communities.

RedHat's business model is make things as difficult as possible to install, use, configure and maintain so they can sell expensive courses to teach people how to perform those tasks. When people using RedHat even after the course can't figure it out they sell expensive support contracts and use expensive consultants to help you on your way. 
The GNU/Linux community behind them create things that are expressly over-complicated to use and maintain. This gives them a sense of status, as only they know how to use it and also gives them some sense of job security. This is great for Enterprise environments that expect this type of treatment. This group is trying to communicate with computers as if they themselves are computers.

Canonical's business model is make things people *want* to use, are comfortable using and are more 'human' in feel. They are not trying to screw everyone over with courses, unreasonable support contracts and expensive consultants. They are trying to nurture and protect their community to achieve both their own commercial goals as well as the goals of the community.
 This section of the GNU/Linux community doesn't want to type a jumble of hard to remember symbols and characters just to run, install, configure or maintain their application. They want something that just works with as little hassle as possible and can go a bit deeper if they need to fine tune something. This group is trying to interact with computers as humans.

Due to these differences;
Snap needs to exist for the Ubuntu 'human' community and to balance out Flatpacks complexity.

As was the argument for Upstart. Upstart just works, out of the box, no lengthy configuration necessary. systemd is a configuration nightmare with insane hard-to-type commands no-one can remember.