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

[Lucy]

2009/6/17 Bob Ham <address@hidden>:
> 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.

Just to correct a few things. Canonical have been massively committed
to few software, they created Ubuntu and give back to many existing
free software projects. They also released several aspects of
Launchpad as free software some time ago.

What people don't realise is that Canonical are a very small company,
much smaller than Red Hat or Suse so aren't able to commit as much
back to upstream projects.

> 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.

Canonical don't make a profit and aren't expected to for another few
years. They are using some proprietary software to try to make some
money, a business model which is becoming outdated. They are also in
danger of causing confusion by mixing free and non-free software in
together (e.g in Launchpad and UbuntuOne).