On 11/12/12 22:06, Imran Chaudhry wrote:
> Thanks Anton for that welcome injection of anti-tinfoil hat serum :-)
>
> I don't use Ubuntu but would have no problem with the shopping lens
> stuff. As I understand it Canonical Ltd is expanding quickly and so
> they need to think about income because - shock, horror - they are a
> business and have wages and bills to pay.
>
Yes, Canonical is a company which has outgoings including developer
payroll and infrastructure costs used by Ubuntu, flavours and many
derivatives (hello Mint users!).
A significant chunk of the many millions of pounds spent on developing
Ubuntu (and keeping Canonical afloat) comes from the deep pockets of one
guy, Mark Shuttleworth. This is flat out not a sustainable approach and
never has been seen as one. We've always been looking for ways to
generate revenue, and already have many in place.
But that's only part of the story. The goal of the dash in Unity is to
be a central place where users can search for *anything*. This is very
similar to the start menu in Windows 7, Spotlight on the Mac, and the
search page on iOS. All of those platforms implemented a simple "search
everything which is important to me" feature before we did.
What we're trying to do is make it easy for users to find the stuff
that's important to them right from their desktop. In the past that was
limited to searching documents & files, applications, music, video both
online and offline. The ability to search iPlayer, Google Docs and
Amazon Video were also added. Then came the shopping lens.
The shopping lens adds "more suggestions" to the search in the dash. At
the moment in the very first release it's limited to a restricted set of
stores. Most people see Amazon, but it's possible for us to add any
number of additional stores in the future.
The shopping lens has been contentious for a number of reasons. One of
the main causes of this contention is that it landed very late in the
development cycle of 12.10. It should have landed nice and early so it
got lots of visibility, testing, discussion and debugging before we
froze 12.10 and pushed it out the door at the end of October.
Unfortunately it wasn't developed until very late, and was pushed into
the distro in quite a rush. We've learned a lot from that and have
changed a number of processes to ensure it doesn't happen again.
We were really surprised when the protests kicked off about the shopping
lens. We very rapidly developed an imperfect fix to enable people to
switch the lenses online features off, and have been monitoring the bug
reports and feedback we're getting.
Of course this doesn't address the specifics of what people are
objecting to, but I think enough has been written about that. What I
would say is that 12.10 is a post-LTS release, where we often introduce
new "crack". In subsequent releases we improve upon that as we head
towards the next LTS release. Users who are unhappy with the feature
have numerous options including staying on 12.04, uninstalling the lens,
using a different desktop or using a different distro altogether.
I don't see the shopping lens going away in 13.04, I don't see it being
made opt-in and I don't see us ripping it out of 12.10. I find it
incredibly disappointing but unsurprising that someone like RMS takes to
the airwaves to tell people to shun us. He's entitled to his opinion
though, as are you and I.
Cheers,
--
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager
Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@???
http://ubuntu.com/
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