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

[Bob Ham]

On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 17:16 +0100, Lucy wrote:
> 2009/6/17 Tim Dobson <address@hidden>:
> > 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
> 
> I think you mean Launchpad here? UbuntuOne and Launchpad were the main
> two I was thinking of. Although, the creation of Landscape as well
> indicates that their business model is going in the wrong direction.
> 
> > Stalling the free software release of Launchpad and not releasing the build
> > system and code hosting bits as free software.
> 
> I don't blame them for being slow in releasing the Launchpad code.
> They are a small company taking the time to do it properly and
> releasing non-trivial non-free code under a free license is always
> going to be difficult - much better to start free :/

Launchpad strikes me as more of a cathedral vs bazaar issue.  I can
imagine there being valid strategic reasons for them to delay the
release of the launchpad code; they definitely seem to have one up on
Red Hat et al. in terms of building a community around their products.
As long as they don't then release it under a proprietary license, it
all seems good.

This is in contrast to Ubuntuone, where I see the label "Proprietary"
being used in the launchpad projects associated with it and to
Landscape, which is only available to licensed subscribers.

-- 
Bob Ham <address@hidden>

for (;;) { ++pancakes; }

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