[Fsuk-manchester] Re: Canonical's bad decisions

[Bob Ham]

On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 11:19 +0000, Tim Dobson wrote:
> Bob Ham wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 12:15 +0100, Lucy wrote:
> >> I
> >> also agree that Canonical have made some really bad decisions
> >> recently, separate discussion though).
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity, which decisions were those?
> 
> Well the one's I'd mention would be:
> The serverside of Ubuntuone being non-free software
> The serverside of Landscape being non-free software

(After some googling..) I was quite surprised to see this.  I've been
suspicious of Canonical from the get-go.  Sadly, it seems I was right to
be.

> Stalling the free software release of Launchpad and not releasing the 
> build system and code hosting bits as free software.

I would just say, that this is kind of what the article from the
original thread was talking about.  If a company wants to be a hermit
and doesn't want to contribute to the community (but follows their legal
obligations under the GPL, etc.) then that's OK.  They shouldn't be
lambasted for that.

This is different from offering proprietary software licenses, however.
That's in competition with free software and they should definitely be
lambasted for it :-)


> I can't think of any other particularly bad decisions off the top of my 
> head though there are some things Canonical do in Ubuntu which I 
> disagree with.

It seems to me that they have taken free software and used its economic
benefits to support a business model that includes the production of
proprietary software.  This implies that they aren't committed to free
software at all; that they are just another company willing to exploit
free software while damaging the ideals behind it.

There's also something very wrong about this.  Canonical seem to have
become very profitable on the back of free software.  They've then taken
this profit and invested it in the production of proprietary software.
This seems different from a proprietary software company jumping on the
bandwagon and buying into the market, and somehow a lot worse.

-- 
Bob Ham <address@hidden>

for (;;) { ++pancakes; }

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