Automatix

» see getautomatix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A fresh Ubuntu install in 2006 could not play an MP3 or a DVD, because the packages that did those things were either patent-encumbered or closed source and Canonical would not ship them on the CD. Every single one could be added by hand. Doing it by hand meant editing sources lists and knowing in advance which of six packages was the one that actually worked.

Automatix was a menu. It listed 56 "capabilities" with checkboxes next to them, covering the Flash plugin and the multimedia codecs among them, and it installed whichever ones you ticked. For a distribution whose entire pitch was that Linux could be an ordinary desktop, this closed the most visible gap in the first ten minutes of ownership.

Canonical hated it. The complaints were technical and they were not unreasonable: Automatix wrote things into the package system that the package system did not expect, and some Ubuntu developers blamed the first version for breaking upgrades from Dapper to Edgy. On 2 November 2006 Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman said he could not recommend the program and that systems where it had been used could not be supported with a clean and official upgrade path. On 4 August 2007 Matthew Garrett published a technical analysis calling it "a poor quality package which fails to conform to Debian or Ubuntu policy". The Ubuntu wiki carried a warning about it for years afterward.

That fight stayed in English-language Ubuntu forums. The Turkish boards I read in those years were about hardware: donanimhaber and frmtr were full of overclocking threads and signature blocks listing somebody's motherboard and RAM timings, not arguments over whether a shell script should be allowed to touch dpkg. The codec problem was identical everywhere. The quarrel about it stayed where the distribution's developers lived.

That argument is not what killed it. On 24 March 2008 at 18:50, a developer posting as jtbl opened a thread in the announcements forum with "Well the day has finally come, development of Automatix has been discontinued." The reason given was that every developer on the project had become busy with something else.

~ the record ~

~ the announcement thread ~

The post is still readable in the archive and it is unusually candid for a shutdown notice. Jared, the developer who wrote it, explained that Technalign Inc. had asked him to work on the next version of their distribution, Pioneer Warrior, and that he was taking the job. Arnie, the team lead, posted below him that maintaining Automatix required a very good understanding of Debian package management plus the willingness to track every change in a moving target, and that he no longer had the time for it. He apologized on behalf of the team to anybody who felt let down.

One detail in that thread explains the whole ending. Technalign had been paying for the dedicated server Automatix ran on for a year, several thousand dollars of hosting, and had received nothing in return. When the team's remaining energy went anywhere, it went to the company that had been footing the bill. Jared said so directly: Canonical had spent a year giving them grief while Technalign paid their invoices, so a future Automatix 3 would be exclusive to Pioneer Warrior.

~ what the users said ~

The replies are a small, readable panic. Somebody asked whether the site was going down and whether the existing version would keep working; the answer was that the site would stay up for a few more months and Automatix would run for as long as it did. Somebody else offered a dedicated server of his own, with his email address spelled out longhand to dodge the spam harvesters, just to keep the last release downloadable.

Then Technalign's CEO posted to say she was excited about Jared joining, and a user called her a head-hunter who had taken away the one person helping thousands of people. The moderators snipped the personal attacks and left the stubs in place, which is how you can still tell exactly how angry that thread got.

~ the tail ~

The site did stay up for a few more months, as promised. The Internet Archive has getautomatix.com serving its full homepage on 16 June 2008 and serving a Technalign holding page by 5 September, headed "This is the placeholder for GetAutomatix.com" and pointing visitors at Pioneer Linux, which had "an Automatix replacement in the programs folder". A project called Ultamatix picked up the code and shipped for Ubuntu 9.04.

The real inheritance went the other way. Ubuntu eventually built the thing Automatix had been working around, first as a restricted-extras package and then as a checkbox in the installer offering to fetch third-party codecs. The argument of 2006 ended with Canonical agreeing about the problem and keeping its own opinion about the solution.

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