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

[MJ Ray]

Lucy <address@hidden> wrote:
> 2009/6/18 MJ Ray <address@hidden>:
> > Lucy <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> >> 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.
> >
> > Canonical has "over 200 employees" according to their website. [...]
> Compared with Red Hat's 3,000 employees and revenue of $401m [...]

Sure, they're "much smaller than Red Hat", but still not "very small"
in itself.  software.coop is much smaller than Canonical and even
smaller than Red Hat, yet we still spend a high proportion giving back.

> > [...] this blind love for Canonical and their proprietary software
> > business models increases the pressure on the rest of us to cut back
> > on committing upstream because, after all, being a bit anti-social
> > isn't hurting the famous Canonical's reputation much, is it?
>
> I think this 'blind love' for Canonical is not as prevalent as you
> might want to believe. They seem to be under very intense scrutiny and
> get a lot of criticism from the FOSS community. I also wouldn't really
> call them anti-social,

They are "a bit anti-social" in this context: "A non-free program, a
proprietary program, tramples your freedom. The social system of its
distribution and use is unethical.  Those programs are not a
contribution to society, not when judged by the scale of freedom,
they're not. They're an attack on our freedoms and our social
solidarity.  So non-free software should not exist. It is a social
problem that there is non-free software and in the free software
movement, we hope to put an end to that problem." Excerpt from
Copyright vs. Community by Richard M. Stallman, 12 Sep 2007.

> they are trying to get the Ubuntu community to
> contribute more upstream and I think they're not doing badly given
> their size and inexperience.

That's the 'blind love' for Canonical right there!  Does size and
youth excuse everything?  So, 200 people means you can restrict users
and still be defended by FOSS activists?  At what size does
patent-trolling become acceptable?  Could my 5-man company do it and
be "not doing badly"?  ;-)

> FWIW, I think that software companies, particularly ones involved in
> free software should be scrutinised by the community, but we shouldn't
> lose sight of the facts either.

Exactly, but there really does seem to be some suspension of disbelief
in the minds of both FOSS community people and the wider world when it
comes to Canonical, such as that illustrated above.  Criticising the
serious mistakes as well as praising the successes is *not* to "lose
sight of the facts".  Canonical *should* be 100% FOSS, but there
aren't enough people willing to insist on that.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
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