We of course all know the story of the Haemorrhaging Horse.
My horses is bleeding!
So, here's a great recipe for slaughtering horses:
1. Start with a sensational headline:
"Ubuntu savaged by rivals infected with fondleslab fever" (Note the l33t speak techno jargon injected to make the headline seem super-cool.)
2. Add a bogus tagline:
"Help, the penguins are revolting!"
3. Choose a writer (Gavin Clarke in San Francisco, one home of the Ubuntu California LoCo team) that's a member of the Ubuntu Non-Consumer Community (i.e. not an Ubuntu person) and evidently not a member of Ubuntu California.
4. Make a dubious claim:
"The penguins are on the march: they are leaving Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu and migrating towards other Linux distros, fresh data suggests."
5. On a popular and widely read website:
the Register
6. Back the claim by citing a kernely web site that doesn't really track the popularity of free (or non-free) operating systems, but claims to:
"Distrowatch's annual web rankings claim Ubuntu's top spot has been snatched by ... during the last 12 months. In the past month alone Ubuntu's been kicked to fourth place by ... and ..., who slid in to take the second and third spots behind ..."
So, where does this leave the 99.999% of us that are actually a part of the Ubuntu consumers|developer|contributor|LoCo-team|core|cct|Canonical|member Community?
We are left with two choices:
1) We ignore it and hope that the noise goes away and that people don't buy the hype.
2) We do something about it.
I vote for #2. Here's what we should do:
a) Don't spread the article. (I didn't link to it. I hope you won't too.)
b) Fix the web browsers in Ubuntu to accurately report user-agent strings with the word "Ubuntu." (Drop the L word while we're at it please. Developers, we need you to help with this one.)
c) Get over to Distrowatch ASAP and register your vote. Tell 500 of your Ubuntu friends to do the same. (Everyone in the community please.)
d) Ubuntu California: Embrace Gavin. Teach him what Ubuntu really is. He works in your city, not in some remote anonymous tube on the interwebs. Have an Ubuntu Hour. Invite him. Throw a party. Invite him. Maybe even buy him a nice computer with Ubuntu pre-loaded on it. Gift wrap it. It's Thanksgiving.
In conclusion, we can let this stuff spread or we can fix it. Let's choose to fix it before the horse is dead. Amplify the signal.
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What is Ubuntu Community? What is the Ubuntu Non-Consumer Community? For a precise definition, please refer to the Ubuntu Community Lexicon depicted here.