Last Friday, Mark Shuttleworth posted a big troll he also sent to the OpenSuSE mailing list. While the Novell/Microsoft deal has raised many legitimate concerns, I really think the Canonical leader should take the mote (in France, that would be a beam) out of his own eye first. As expected, the reactions from OpenSuSE developers were strong. But I was really shocked by two of them.

According to JP Rosevear, Mark Shuttleworth is, among other things, preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because [he has] hired him, and trying to simultaneously supplant Debian's community with "Ubuntu" while relying heavily on the Debian community to be successful.

According to David Canar, Ubuntu's anti-community practices are well-known.

Yes, I was shocked to see these reactions. Not because of their strength, as they are perfectly justified. I was shocked to see that developers in the OpenSuSE community seem to be better informed than Debian developers about Canonical's dealings. When talking with random fellow developers, I see many of them who truly believe Mark Shuttleworth when he says he's just doing the best for Debian, despite everyday's proof of the opposite in Canonical's employees actions.

Shouldn't we be concerned at all about Ubuntu sucking the blood out of the Debian project? It strikes me that OpenSuSE developers care more about it than ourselves.