14 DAY TRIAL // Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has clarified his “Tea Party” comments and apologized for this rather personal remark.
It's not every day that we see Mark Shuttleworth apologizing two times in a row, and most likely this is the first time that it happened.
The first apology came for the owner of fixubuntu.com, who was the recipient of a letter from the legal team of Canonical. Micah F. Lee, the guy behind the site, wrote an extensive blog post about these issues and the matter was discussed at length on a numerous forums and websites.
Mark Shuttleworth first apologized to him on Google+, but he also wrote a more formal text on his personal blog, which is usually reserved for things of great importance.
And since he was apologizing, he also took the time to say that he regretted the “Tea Party” comments that attracted a lot of heat towards Canonical, probably even more so than the original problems he was mad about.
“On another, more personal note, I made a mistake myself when I used the label ‘open source tea party’ to refer to the vocal non-technical critics of work that Canonical does. That was 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!).”
“There isn’t anything in what I said to suggest that I don’t welcome such technical feedback, but some assumed I was rejecting all feedback including technical commentary. I was not – I was talking about criticism of software which does not centre on the software itself, but rather on some combination of the motivations of the people who wrote it, or the particular free software license under which it is published, or the policies of the company, or the nationality of the company behind it,” said Mark Shuttleworth.
This will hopefully end all the discussions on the matter and people will finally be able to work together on Mir, which is actually the source of this whole debacle.