“As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today”
Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams.
Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?
Yeah, tbh I was a little shocked he put that out there. Speaking for myself, I know I wouldn't publicly burn a bridge like that for what seems to be no good reason, and I'd advise anyone leaving a job to try to do so on reasonable terms if possible.
If Canonical is really that bad, people already know (and judging by the comments... yeah... not great).
He needs to explain why he tried to get tons of people to work on Canonical adjacent tech, but is now leaving.
He'd be burning bridges with all his contacts if he didn't off them an explanation as to why Canonical tech is no longer something they should contribute to.
Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works.
So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys!
Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :)
CLAs are a great reason not to contribute to corporate source. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know all the implications of what I'm signing, and I'm not gonna hire a lawyer just to send you a bug fix for your own product. Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs.
> Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs
The less simplistic view of the situation is that major maintainers (corporate or otherwise) pay the price of keeping the project up for the long run, under the defined license, in all senses including the legal one. So the CLA is the way to integrate contributions without strings that remain legally attached to the author of these contributions. So the CLA is, ironically, the way for these major maintainers to say "no strings attached or wait until we fix the bugs" back to you.
When I interviewed with them, they were doing an intelligence test that involved quickly identifying rotated shapes. But later in the interview they acknowledged that they only hire people from the community who have already been contributing. The intelligence and personality tests are a misdirection: they want you to do an unpaid internship.
is this the same laundry list I got twice from its HR? so lengthy that I gave up right way, it asks from high school courses all the way to your adulthood, the stupidest questionnaire I have ever seen for any jobs.
By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.
24 questions, each question describes a situation, you select which adjective describes you most and least. you end up picking random words because non fit.
> Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company.
They also have a really weird focus on your education history when applying, to the point that when I was considering applying there, their application form made me realise I don’t want to work there.
Stephane is a great guy.
I never met him but we had several discussions in the LXC mailing list before the LXD project became a thing.
His knowledge helped me to enter to the linux container world and made a career of it.
I've met Stéphane, he's great in person as well. I briefly considered applying to Canonical despite the stories of poor conditions, just to get the chance to work with him. I hope he does well.
> Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project. That’s the news which we announced last week.
So is this like retaliation? Or an effort to reduce Stephane's influence over LXD? Or was it just that he'd been the one who pushed for developing LXD in the open, and with him gone they figured 'why bother'?
It was always pretty clear that something would have to get adjusted the day Stephane left the company, because it's a major project for Canonical and Stephane preferred to run some of the infrastructure himself. From his own comments in the forum:
"In theory Ubuntu Discourse should be more reliable in that it’s run by Canonical IS who has a 24/7 team of people looking after services unlike this forum where I’m the one running the infrastructure and dealing with outages."
Nothing is changing about how in the open LXD is developed.
I'm sad to see Stephane leaving, but it's lost in me how his departure towards doing whatever else he wants to do suddenly transforms into LXD not being open?
I use it a lot for personal homelab infrastructure. I find it feels a lot more natural than single process containers for the workloads I use (torrent clients, game servers, plex...). I've unfortunately never used it for production workloads, and likely never will after recent news.
I also find lxc system containers better than OCI style immutable containers for dev environments for my personal projects, and LXD is the best way to manage them AFAIK.
- if you have a good hardware , you can easily build digital ocean / aws lightsail like environment with a single install in 5 mins of configuration - A VPS Like experience for both Containers and QEMU
- Quick and easy multi-tenancy
- Very easy to build development enviorment isloated from the system.
- Isolation host for docker containers.
- Automatic networking support with DHCP , OVN or MacVLAN if you have multiple physical IPs.
- Home Made Cluster of containers.
It is literally best way to host multiple docker containers. Isolated from each other.
You wont need K8s in many case , infact if you don't have 10k+ users , do not need to worry about 99.999 uptime and redundancy - LXD is all you need.
Or if you have only one Physical Machine and want to test K8s cluters , you can use LXD Containers for that instead of resource intensive VMs.
He is a great guy , i helped debugging ZFSMount problems with him - which causes LXD Container restarts to fail. It was just solved in previous release ( usual suspect , it is because of snap. ) . I would like to contribute on his new opensource projects.
Can I ask about the unusual punctuation? I’ve never seen a country where you put a space before the comma or where you space around parens like that. I’m only aware of the French adding a space before ! and ?
Readit News
Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams.
Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?
If Canonical is really that bad, people already know (and judging by the comments... yeah... not great).
He needs to explain why he tried to get tons of people to work on Canonical adjacent tech, but is now leaving.
He'd be burning bridges with all his contacts if he didn't off them an explanation as to why Canonical tech is no longer something they should contribute to.
Deleted Comment
So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys!
Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :)
[1] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org
[2] https://ark.fm
The less simplistic view of the situation is that major maintainers (corporate or otherwise) pay the price of keeping the project up for the long run, under the defined license, in all senses including the legal one. So the CLA is the way to integrate contributions without strings that remain legally attached to the author of these contributions. So the CLA is, ironically, the way for these major maintainers to say "no strings attached or wait until we fix the bugs" back to you.
Sample report https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2...
By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.
They also have a really weird focus on your education history when applying, to the point that when I was considering applying there, their application form made me realise I don’t want to work there.
So is this like retaliation? Or an effort to reduce Stephane's influence over LXD? Or was it just that he'd been the one who pushed for developing LXD in the open, and with him gone they figured 'why bother'?
"In theory Ubuntu Discourse should be more reliable in that it’s run by Canonical IS who has a 24/7 team of people looking after services unlike this forum where I’m the one running the infrastructure and dealing with outages."
Nothing is changing about how in the open LXD is developed.
Canonical's general bad attitude towards FOSS is just appalling.
I also find lxc system containers better than OCI style immutable containers for dev environments for my personal projects, and LXD is the best way to manage them AFAIK.
- Quick and easy multi-tenancy
- Very easy to build development enviorment isloated from the system.
- Isolation host for docker containers.
- Automatic networking support with DHCP , OVN or MacVLAN if you have multiple physical IPs.
- Home Made Cluster of containers.
It is literally best way to host multiple docker containers. Isolated from each other.
You wont need K8s in many case , infact if you don't have 10k+ users , do not need to worry about 99.999 uptime and redundancy - LXD is all you need.
Or if you have only one Physical Machine and want to test K8s cluters , you can use LXD Containers for that instead of resource intensive VMs.
It's the closest I've found to Linux-VServer which I still miss to this day.