13 ms·

If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

230 points by mkesper 11y ago

pnt12 11y ago
I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company's trademarks when forking their applications. Canonical's relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the shared work, while Ubuntu most of the time paves its own way - there's a lot of Ubuntu only software, such as Unity, Mir, etc. that you just dont see in other distros.
- netheril96 11y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    They are open-source, but they only really work on Ubuntu. Upstart is another example, and it's part of why other Ubuntu-specific things won't work on other distros. Other distros could try to port Ubuntu projects, but why would Canonical accept their patches upstream?
    - rmc 11y ago
      I believe ubuntu is going to change from upstart to systemd soon?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - reddotX 11y ago
        ubuntu is using systemd since 15.04
    - spaceSub 11y ago
      Actually the systemd guys looked at upstart for redhat in the beginning, but choose to rewrite it anyway. That had nothing to do with the Canonical entanglement though. Though I dislike Unity and Mir, I think RedHats understanding of "Open" Source is a lot more disturbing.. https://lwn.net/Articles/432012 https://lwn.net/Articles/432012
      - swills 11y ago
        RHEL 6 (and CentOS 6 by extension) use Upstart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart#Adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart#Adoption Not that I disagree with your comments on Red Hat, but let's get our facts right.
        bkor 11y ago
        RHEL6 starts upstarts, but doesn't make use of any of the functionality. Everything is sysvinit scripts and zero (upstart) jobs. I was administrating a few RHEL6 machines and had to read elsewhere about the change to even notice it. The person you responded to is correct though; a large factor in starting systemd was the CLA of Upstart. Above even highlights this; you cannot really say that RHEL6 used upstart in any way.
        swills 11y ago
        I guess it depends on how you look at it. It uses upstart to start all the sysvinit scripts, no? I know you can create upstart jobs and they'll get started, I've done that. But you're right, it doesn't make "real" use of upstart, in a sense.
      - jerven 11y ago
        That had everything to do with Canonical entanglement. Canonical would only accept patches to upstart with a contributor agreement allowing Canonical relicensing rights. This made it very difficult for outside contributors to work on upstart (especially redhat funded ones) and that led to resources being made available for investigating what would become systemd and friends.
      - deleted 11y ago
  - thiagoharry 11y ago
    Unity for example, needs a forked glib to be compiled and work. And only Ubuntu uses this forked glib. I don't know about Mir.
    - mdeslaur 11y ago
      I don't see any Unity-specific patches in the glib package in Ubuntu. What are you referring to?
  - creshal 11y ago
    They're open source, but they rely on so much ubuntu-specific infrastructure and patches that it's infeasible to get them running anywhere else. Cf. the effort necessary to get Unity running on Arch: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch You have to rip out and replace a lot of software, all the way down to GTK itself, just to make it work.
    - vacri 11y ago
      Sounds like Redhat's systemd: "if you want to run it, you have to replace most everything."
      - creshal 11y ago
        Init systems are, by nature, highly invasive. Systemd's requirements don't fundamentally differ from modern sysvinit derivatives or upstart or whatnot in that regard. Unity, on the other hand, is a bloody desktop environment. You can install dozens of those (or could, if there were that many) in parallel without any modifications… with the sole exception of Unity.
        vacri 11y ago
        Systemd replaces a lot more of the system than other init systems - for example, it has it's own journal format, and also has it's own time tools. Other init systems don't. You can't just drop systemd in and get by just with learning it's config language - you have to change the way you do a number of other things, too. But then again, you don't think that there are dozens of desktop environments. Arch supports nearly two dozen by itself (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_environment https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_environment), and that list doesn't include things like fvwm, or tiling desktops like xmonad or i3. Edit: To clarify, the point being made is "if you have to modify a bunch of stuff, then the software is not free". Systemd requires a lot of modifications - it's not a 'drop in' replacement. Using the same argument, systemd is 'not free'. It doesn't matter how 'invasive' the component is, the argument is about modification effort. I think the argument is wrong - Canonical patches a lot of things for Unity, but those patches are publicly available and are not done to obfuscate the code. Basically the argument here is that no-one should be allowed to publish free software if it can't be simply dropped into $RANDOM_YAHOO's system.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Too many horizontal dependencies on other Ubuntu stuff. Ubuntu should learn how to properly define interfaces and stack stuff vertically rather than to make ties willy-nilly with other Ubuntu specific stuff.
  - rms_returns 11y ago
    The spirit of free-software has died now, it no longer has the spark that did during the time of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. As a result, rather than working towards a united goal of empowering users with the power of FOSS tools, we started having these ego battles of "mine vs your distro", "gnome vs unity", "systemd vs upstart", etc. Its true that Linux has choice and FOSS is all about having choice. But that has gained quite a negative reputation now. Earlier, choice meant: "If you need more features, use X package instead of Y". Now it means: "Since I have got choice, I'll keep switching my distro every couple years, and since I'm a unity fanatic, why should I keep it compatible with other distros? Everyone should use unity and ubuntu." Unity and Mir are no doubt open-source, but if you build a automobile engine that fits ONLY to your car and call that engine open-source, what use is it!
    - kspaans 11y ago
      You mean GNU/Linux. Where is RMS and what have you done with him!?
- delonia 11y ago
  That's repeated all too often and it gets stuck into the mind of people. But is it actually true? Ubuntu is still heavily based on Debian and still reuses most of the packages. There has been a gradual move towards systemd and systemd is default in Ubuntu 15.10. To me, mjg59 comes out as a bitter person. He used to work for Canonical in the early days of Ubuntu. He shared the vision for a usable open-source desktop. Then came the new GNOME 3 and the particular way that GNOME development works. It was not workable to offer to the users a stable and distinct user experience. So, Unity was created and all hell broke loose. Now, when Mark farts, they scream "Terrorist gas attack!". A couple of days ago there was some open-source appreciation day by the Ubuntu community and it looks very suspicious that mjg95 coincided his rant with this. I think the previous rant was also coinciding with some similar positive Ubuntu announcement. It looks even more difficult to get an open-source desktop. mjg59's attitude is like "if it is not ours, let's f* their efforts anyway".
  - greyman 11y ago
    I don't see it as a rant. He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue. Correct me if I am wrong, but how I understood the article, what Canonical did was to take Debian sources licensed under GPL, created a product based on it, but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product [the right GPL license assures], they could be sued for trademark infringement. So in practice they made it non-free software [free as in Stallman definition of free].
    - delonia 11y ago
      The GPL says that the software is "as is", no warranty of any kind. Similarly, I could scream to have the developers to perform some testing and provide a bit of warranty. With Ubuntu and any other software, you get the source and it is up to you to deal with the replacement of any trademark strings. What packages are included in Ubuntu, changes all the time and the code changes as well. How can a policy document be explicit when there is no infrastructure yet in place to deal with those code changes? CentOS was in this same position and they did the work without bitching to Redhat.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  My first GNU/Linux experience was with Slackware 2.0 and I already knew Xenix, DG/UX and Aix by then. Since then I have tried all major distributions. SuSE before it went enterprise, Mandrake before it lost support were the only real alternatives to Ubuntu in terms of consumer desktop experience. Nowadays I only care it works as it is supposed to be, as I don't have the patience any longer to fiddle with configurations, and even Ubuntu has its own quirks that lead to weekend projects. EDIT: Extra words due to copy-paste.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    When I read this it actually screamed OpenSUSE is a great alternative. I seriously can't see any other Distro going out of its way to be easily distributed OS with the https://susestudio.com/ https://susestudio.com/ and https://build.opensuse.org https://build.opensuse.org for packages for SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...
    - akerro 11y ago
      oS is really good, I think it gets too little attention and upvotes than it should. Their YaST system is really good and completely replaces Windows control panel, they provide support for old-packages, openSUSE search panel is something what most distributions need, so far I saw it deployed only for ArchLinux successfully.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      My last SuSE was 6.3. How is the overall OpenSuSE experience nowadays? Since I spend most of my time on Windows anyway, I ended up settling with Ubuntu for my netbook and VMs.
      - baldfat 11y ago
        I really couldn't be happier with a Distro. It is super stable and easy to upgrade. This computer at work has been over 5 years of just sudo zypper dup after a one line command to rename the repos. The ability to install packages with https://build.opensuse.org https://build.opensuse.org is such a better system than ppa. For the last three years I use i3 (Tiled Window Manager) and works great on in VM at my Windows machines. Still sad to see so many people left due to the Microsoft deal and haven't come back to give it a try again. EDIT: If you use a command line package manager zypper is best in class. Fedora actually incorporated zypper features and code into its yum replacement.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Could Canonical do that, realistically? Canonical's primary goal is to produce Ubuntu distributions. Given that, even if Canonical were to try and collect their trademarks into one, three or nine packages, _their_ distribution will not break when there's a bug. And bugs do happen. IMO, the best that Canonical can _realistically_ do is to provide a list of trademarks and to not obfuscate trademarks. No funny escaping just to evade grep. Doing more would be nice, but anyone who forks has to search-and-replace anyway.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation. The FOSS obsession with "community" and "integration" is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies. Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: they leave everyone else alone. They stay in their corner, they don't bother, they don't intervene. They don't start a massive integration effort to drag everyone else in every time they devise something new. We should be commending Canonical for this.
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    >I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. That is why I watch its progress with a certain degree of suspicion (disclaimer: I am a user of Apple and Canonical products.)
  - hohenheim 11y ago
    Canonical's contribution is welcomed as long as people could continue it without getting blocked by their IP. There is no obsession over "community" or "integration" as you stated. It is a valid concern that if others can not contribute freely, we are killing the essential of what made Ubuntu possible.
  - weland 11y ago
    > Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: they leave everyone else alone. They stay in their corner, they don't bother, they don't intervene I certainly get why it would be in their interest to not have much collaboration. But if that's a problem for them, they should not have based their business around GPLd products. All these problems could very easily go away if Ubuntu were a FreeBSD distribution, not a Linux one. This "stay in their corner, don't bother, don't intervene" does bother developers who increasingly have to code for Windows, OS X, Linux and, separately, Ubuntu. It's very unpleasant, and they're getting a lot of hate because users are suffering just because Canonical's business plan was shit.
  - 11y ago
raverbashing 11y ago
Ok the real question is, how does this compares to CentOS/"Prominent Linux Vendor" relationship And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no? Sure, but presumably that took a lot of effort.
  - rincebrain 11y ago
    Actually, the claim made by someone[1] in one of the replies on LWN was that Mint ended up getting a license from Canonical, so if you wanted to spin off from Linux Mint, you too would require a license from Canonical or having to dive in and rip out any Ubuntu trademarks. [1] - https://lwn.net/Articles/665350/ https://lwn.net/Articles/665350/
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Dear God.
- lmm 11y ago
  Did you read Garrett's post? Prominent Linux Vendor segregates its trademarks into three packages and documents that you need to replace those specific packages (and only those) with versions that don't infringe their trademarks if you wish to redistribute.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    I had read it yes (and missed that part), but curiously that part refers to Fedora (which was traditionally more liberal), not RHEL
    - Already__Taken 11y ago
Sniffnoy 11y ago
This seems to basically just be a link to http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html; http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html; I think the link should be changed to that.
- _yy 11y ago
  Yes but there's an interesting discussion on LWN.
paulajohnson 11y ago
I think that you could make a good-faith effort to get rid of as many as possible, for instance by grepping the code tree for the word "Canonical" (with a capital C) and manually scanning all images. Then if Canonical find something you missed you can promptly remove it. At that point any infringement is de minimis and not something they can build a case on.
- delonia 11y ago
  Garrett is proposing another wild goose chase, just because he dislikes Ubuntu so much. Even the GPL licence has a "no warranty clause". The software is "as is", it is your problem to keep the pieces when it breaks. You can imagine a person spinning this into "you cannot trust open-source because they do not offer just a bit of warranty".
delonia 11y ago
"If you are smart enough, you can spin anything towards the direction of your choosing." We see this all the time in online communities and we see it again with all this "hatred" against the Ubuntu community. Here is Mark Shuttleworth replying to Garret: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1474883#cmt1474883 http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1474883#cmt147... So Garret contacted Ubuntu for some unspecified project that he claimed he wanted to start. In reality, he was mining for quotes to misinterpret. Sad git.
- lorenzhs 11y ago
  Your comments in this thread read like you have a personal grudge against Matthew Garrett. Please keep it professional. > So Garret contacted Ubuntu for some unspecified project that he claimed he wanted to start. In reality, he was mining for quotes to misinterpret. Sad git. Trying to create some legal security around derivatives of Ubuntu, he asked for clarification in general, not about any particular project, but about any possible project started by anyone. The question is really quite clear: "What precisely does one need to change for Canonical to be comfortable that one isn't trying to pass it off as Ubuntu". Their answer was "we won't tell you". It looks to me like you're trying to spin this somehow to make Matthew Garrett look bad, accusing him of spinning it to make Canonical look bad. While the whole exchange could have been handled better on both sides, I don't see how Matthew Garret is to blame for Canonical's unwillingness to clarify their IP policy.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Travis-CI is open source, but it's impossible to host.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  How so? All the bits seem to be on GitHub, it's probably super difficult to set up, though.
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  Open source != free
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    The Travis-CI core appears to be under the MIT license, so it would be both open source and free (the definitions mostly overlap).
  - adekok 11y ago
    The ISC DHCP server is "open source", in that the source is available. It's "free" in that anyone can download it and use it. But... try getting patches in. Unless you're a paying member of the ISC consortium, you can't. There are performance problems going back a decade which are firmly in the "won't fix" category. OpenSSL is similar.
    - mkesper 11y ago
      This could be resolved by forking.
    - simias 11y ago
      That's not really the same issue, people are free to accept contributions or not, if you're not happy with the state of things you can fork the project. Like GCC/EGCS back in the days for example. TFA is about ubuntu making forking difficult.
    - bad_user 11y ago
      Open source software (OSS) means the source code is available under an OSI approved license. While the term could not be trademarked due to the process being impractical, we like to be precise in order to not dilute what is otherwise a very useful term. "Free software" also means source-code being distributed under an FSF approved license. Unfortunately English doesn't have an equivalent for "libre", like romance languages do, with "free" being overloaded. So of course, usage of "free" has a long history of being overridden depending on context, going back to freemium/freeware/shareware. This is why context is important and why people then feel the need to be precise about the kind of free we are talking about - free as in beer or as in speech. You're talking about free as in beer and in our context Free Software really refers to FSF approved licensing. And Wikipedia does agree. Of course, the set of licenses that are FSF approved and OSI approved does overlap, though in theory you could have some differences, because the definitions are different. For example I think AGPL should not be OSI approved. But I digress. Back to the point I want to make - source code being able does not make a software open source and having the binaries free as in beer does not make it free software.
liw 11y ago
Relevant: https://plus.google.com/+MatthewGarrett/posts/Vx26ccdtdv6 https://plus.google.com/+MatthewGarrett/posts/Vx26ccdtdv6
agumonkey 11y ago
I'll add to understand and manipulate.
Mikeb85 11y ago
This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others. This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.
- mjg59 11y ago
  Canonical have the right to protect their brand. But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must demonstrate p=np before being able to redistribute it, we'd probably agree that it was non-free. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must replace a single file containing my trademark, we'd agree that it was free. Canonical's requirements are somewhere between these two things, but they won't tell us where. If it's impossible to determine whether a requirement is feasible, it's difficult to figure out what your practical ability to make use of those freedoms is.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    > But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. Your responsibility is to abide by the terms of the license, and trademark law. It's not about what Canonical considers an infringement, but what the law considers infringement based on the interpretation of the license you implicitly agreed to and trademark law.
    - _delirium 11y ago
      What Canonical considers an infringement is still pretty relevant. Civil law is mainly a tool for resolving disagreements between parties, not a system of abstractly judging the conformance of every action to the (very large) body of law. Therefore the first important step is to be able to understand the viewpoints of each party, which would tell you if there is even a disagreement to begin with. Lawsuits are a last resort for when parties are unable to reach an understanding on their own. Canonical doesn't have the final word on things, but they do have a word on things: they can clarify their own position. If what they claim as trademarks goes beyond what trademark law allows, then it's true that they would be unable to enforce that in court, so it's ultimately not their call. But they could simplify the situation and reduce the risk to all parties of needing to resolve disagreements in court by explicitly stating their position on acceptable uses of their trademark, i.e. what they would not consider to be a violation of their protected interest. This would give downstream users at least a better understanding of Canonical's interpretation, which is key to avoiding expensive lawsuits: if you're using Canonical's trademarks only in ways that Canonical itself considers proper, then there's no disagreement that needs to be resolved in court.
amadvance 11y ago
I see a value in this approach. I don't known your experience, but as soon you have a well known OpenSource project with binary distribution, you are going to see it available in a lot of scam download sites. In fact, the OpenSource licenses allow it, and the author is going to have a hard time taking them down. In this regard, OpenSource licenses are too permissive, and are doing a disservice in being too easily abused. Imposing additional restrictions to binaries, seems a good approach to have legal arguments to prevent that in the first place.
- mjg59 11y ago
  All you need to handle that is a trademark. You don't need to impose restrictions on binaries other than those that trademark law already imposes.
  - empyrical 11y ago
    Yeah, and if you try to add restrictions to the software license itself you'll also end up with GPL incompatible code
    - mjg59 11y ago
      Large parts of Ubuntu aren't under the GPL, and as a result Canonical can impose additional restrictions.
EvanPlaice 11y ago
Or... you know. Don't use Ubuntu. I don't understand why the hell anybody would want to fork Ubuntu to begin with. There are already enough linux distros that provide nothing but a thin veneer of look-and-feel over Debian. If you want a high quality alternative to Ubuntu, use Mint. If you want something that's more open-source friendly, build on top of Debian. Canonical is clearly trying to commercialize Ubuntu but does that really matter? It's not like they slapped Linus Torvalds with an gag order.

230 points by mkesper 11y ago

pnt12 11y ago

I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company's trademarks when forking their applications. Canonical's relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the shared work, while Ubuntu most of the time paves its own way - there's a lot of Ubuntu only software, such as Unity, Mir, etc. that you just dont see in other distros.

netheril96 11y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  They are open-source, but they only really work on Ubuntu. Upstart is another example, and it's part of why other Ubuntu-specific things won't work on other distros. Other distros could try to port Ubuntu projects, but why would Canonical accept their patches upstream?
  - rmc 11y ago
    I believe ubuntu is going to change from upstart to systemd soon?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - reddotX 11y ago
      ubuntu is using systemd since 15.04
  - spaceSub 11y ago
    Actually the systemd guys looked at upstart for redhat in the beginning, but choose to rewrite it anyway. That had nothing to do with the Canonical entanglement though. Though I dislike Unity and Mir, I think RedHats understanding of "Open" Source is a lot more disturbing.. https://lwn.net/Articles/432012 https://lwn.net/Articles/432012
    - swills 11y ago
      RHEL 6 (and CentOS 6 by extension) use Upstart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart#Adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstart#Adoption Not that I disagree with your comments on Red Hat, but let's get our facts right.
      - bkor 11y ago
        RHEL6 starts upstarts, but doesn't make use of any of the functionality. Everything is sysvinit scripts and zero (upstart) jobs. I was administrating a few RHEL6 machines and had to read elsewhere about the change to even notice it. The person you responded to is correct though; a large factor in starting systemd was the CLA of Upstart. Above even highlights this; you cannot really say that RHEL6 used upstart in any way.
        swills 11y ago
        I guess it depends on how you look at it. It uses upstart to start all the sysvinit scripts, no? I know you can create upstart jobs and they'll get started, I've done that. But you're right, it doesn't make "real" use of upstart, in a sense.
    - jerven 11y ago
      That had everything to do with Canonical entanglement. Canonical would only accept patches to upstart with a contributor agreement allowing Canonical relicensing rights. This made it very difficult for outside contributors to work on upstart (especially redhat funded ones) and that led to resources being made available for investigating what would become systemd and friends.
    - deleted 11y ago
- thiagoharry 11y ago
  Unity for example, needs a forked glib to be compiled and work. And only Ubuntu uses this forked glib. I don't know about Mir.
  - mdeslaur 11y ago
    I don't see any Unity-specific patches in the glib package in Ubuntu. What are you referring to?
- creshal 11y ago
  They're open source, but they rely on so much ubuntu-specific infrastructure and patches that it's infeasible to get them running anywhere else. Cf. the effort necessary to get Unity running on Arch: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch You have to rip out and replace a lot of software, all the way down to GTK itself, just to make it work.
  - vacri 11y ago
    Sounds like Redhat's systemd: "if you want to run it, you have to replace most everything."
    - creshal 11y ago
      Init systems are, by nature, highly invasive. Systemd's requirements don't fundamentally differ from modern sysvinit derivatives or upstart or whatnot in that regard. Unity, on the other hand, is a bloody desktop environment. You can install dozens of those (or could, if there were that many) in parallel without any modifications… with the sole exception of Unity.
      - vacri 11y ago
        Systemd replaces a lot more of the system than other init systems - for example, it has it's own journal format, and also has it's own time tools. Other init systems don't. You can't just drop systemd in and get by just with learning it's config language - you have to change the way you do a number of other things, too. But then again, you don't think that there are dozens of desktop environments. Arch supports nearly two dozen by itself (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_environment https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_environment), and that list doesn't include things like fvwm, or tiling desktops like xmonad or i3. Edit: To clarify, the point being made is "if you have to modify a bunch of stuff, then the software is not free". Systemd requires a lot of modifications - it's not a 'drop in' replacement. Using the same argument, systemd is 'not free'. It doesn't matter how 'invasive' the component is, the argument is about modification effort. I think the argument is wrong - Canonical patches a lot of things for Unity, but those patches are publicly available and are not done to obfuscate the code. Basically the argument here is that no-one should be allowed to publish free software if it can't be simply dropped into $RANDOM_YAHOO's system.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Too many horizontal dependencies on other Ubuntu stuff. Ubuntu should learn how to properly define interfaces and stack stuff vertically rather than to make ties willy-nilly with other Ubuntu specific stuff.
- rms_returns 11y ago
  The spirit of free-software has died now, it no longer has the spark that did during the time of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds. As a result, rather than working towards a united goal of empowering users with the power of FOSS tools, we started having these ego battles of "mine vs your distro", "gnome vs unity", "systemd vs upstart", etc. Its true that Linux has choice and FOSS is all about having choice. But that has gained quite a negative reputation now. Earlier, choice meant: "If you need more features, use X package instead of Y". Now it means: "Since I have got choice, I'll keep switching my distro every couple years, and since I'm a unity fanatic, why should I keep it compatible with other distros? Everyone should use unity and ubuntu." Unity and Mir are no doubt open-source, but if you build a automobile engine that fits ONLY to your car and call that engine open-source, what use is it!
  - kspaans 11y ago
    You mean GNU/Linux. Where is RMS and what have you done with him!?
delonia 11y ago
That's repeated all too often and it gets stuck into the mind of people. But is it actually true? Ubuntu is still heavily based on Debian and still reuses most of the packages. There has been a gradual move towards systemd and systemd is default in Ubuntu 15.10. To me, mjg59 comes out as a bitter person. He used to work for Canonical in the early days of Ubuntu. He shared the vision for a usable open-source desktop. Then came the new GNOME 3 and the particular way that GNOME development works. It was not workable to offer to the users a stable and distinct user experience. So, Unity was created and all hell broke loose. Now, when Mark farts, they scream "Terrorist gas attack!". A couple of days ago there was some open-source appreciation day by the Ubuntu community and it looks very suspicious that mjg95 coincided his rant with this. I think the previous rant was also coinciding with some similar positive Ubuntu announcement. It looks even more difficult to get an open-source desktop. mjg59's attitude is like "if it is not ours, let's f* their efforts anyway".
- greyman 11y ago
  I don't see it as a rant. He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue. Correct me if I am wrong, but how I understood the article, what Canonical did was to take Debian sources licensed under GPL, created a product based on it, but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product [the right GPL license assures], they could be sued for trademark infringement. So in practice they made it non-free software [free as in Stallman definition of free].
  - delonia 11y ago
    The GPL says that the software is "as is", no warranty of any kind. Similarly, I could scream to have the developers to perform some testing and provide a bit of warranty. With Ubuntu and any other software, you get the source and it is up to you to deal with the replacement of any trademark strings. What packages are included in Ubuntu, changes all the time and the code changes as well. How can a policy document be explicit when there is no infrastructure yet in place to deal with those code changes? CentOS was in this same position and they did the work without bitching to Redhat.
pjmlp 11y ago
My first GNU/Linux experience was with Slackware 2.0 and I already knew Xenix, DG/UX and Aix by then. Since then I have tried all major distributions. SuSE before it went enterprise, Mandrake before it lost support were the only real alternatives to Ubuntu in terms of consumer desktop experience. Nowadays I only care it works as it is supposed to be, as I don't have the patience any longer to fiddle with configurations, and even Ubuntu has its own quirks that lead to weekend projects. EDIT: Extra words due to copy-paste.
- baldfat 11y ago
  When I read this it actually screamed OpenSUSE is a great alternative. I seriously can't see any other Distro going out of its way to be easily distributed OS with the https://susestudio.com/ https://susestudio.com/ and https://build.opensuse.org https://build.opensuse.org for packages for SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc...
  - akerro 11y ago
    oS is really good, I think it gets too little attention and upvotes than it should. Their YaST system is really good and completely replaces Windows control panel, they provide support for old-packages, openSUSE search panel is something what most distributions need, so far I saw it deployed only for ArchLinux successfully.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    My last SuSE was 6.3. How is the overall OpenSuSE experience nowadays? Since I spend most of my time on Windows anyway, I ended up settling with Ubuntu for my netbook and VMs.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      I really couldn't be happier with a Distro. It is super stable and easy to upgrade. This computer at work has been over 5 years of just sudo zypper dup after a one line command to rename the repos. The ability to install packages with https://build.opensuse.org https://build.opensuse.org is such a better system than ppa. For the last three years I use i3 (Tiled Window Manager) and works great on in VM at my Windows machines. Still sad to see so many people left due to the Microsoft deal and haven't come back to give it a try again. EDIT: If you use a command line package manager zypper is best in class. Fedora actually incorporated zypper features and code into its yum replacement.
Arnt 11y ago
Could Canonical do that, realistically? Canonical's primary goal is to produce Ubuntu distributions. Given that, even if Canonical were to try and collect their trademarks into one, three or nine packages, _their_ distribution will not break when there's a bug. And bugs do happen. IMO, the best that Canonical can _realistically_ do is to provide a list of trademarks and to not obfuscate trademarks. No funny escaping just to evade grep. Doing more would be nice, but anyone who forks has to search-and-replace anyway.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation. The FOSS obsession with "community" and "integration" is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies. Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: they leave everyone else alone. They stay in their corner, they don't bother, they don't intervene. They don't start a massive integration effort to drag everyone else in every time they devise something new. We should be commending Canonical for this.
- mannykannot 11y ago
  >I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. That is why I watch its progress with a certain degree of suspicion (disclaimer: I am a user of Apple and Canonical products.)
- hohenheim 11y ago
  Canonical's contribution is welcomed as long as people could continue it without getting blocked by their IP. There is no obsession over "community" or "integration" as you stated. It is a valid concern that if others can not contribute freely, we are killing the essential of what made Ubuntu possible.
- weland 11y ago
  > Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: they leave everyone else alone. They stay in their corner, they don't bother, they don't intervene I certainly get why it would be in their interest to not have much collaboration. But if that's a problem for them, they should not have based their business around GPLd products. All these problems could very easily go away if Ubuntu were a FreeBSD distribution, not a Linux one. This "stay in their corner, don't bother, don't intervene" does bother developers who increasingly have to code for Windows, OS X, Linux and, separately, Ubuntu. It's very unpleasant, and they're getting a lot of hate because users are suffering just because Canonical's business plan was shit.
- 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago

Ok the real question is, how does this compares to CentOS/"Prominent Linux Vendor" relationship And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no?

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no? Sure, but presumably that took a lot of effort.
- rincebrain 11y ago
  Actually, the claim made by someone[1] in one of the replies on LWN was that Mint ended up getting a license from Canonical, so if you wanted to spin off from Linux Mint, you too would require a license from Canonical or having to dive in and rip out any Ubuntu trademarks. [1] - https://lwn.net/Articles/665350/ https://lwn.net/Articles/665350/
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Dear God.
lmm 11y ago
Did you read Garrett's post? Prominent Linux Vendor segregates its trademarks into three packages and documents that you need to replace those specific packages (and only those) with versions that don't infringe their trademarks if you wish to redistribute.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I had read it yes (and missed that part), but curiously that part refers to Fedora (which was traditionally more liberal), not RHEL
  - Already__Taken 11y ago

Sniffnoy 11y ago

This seems to basically just be a link to http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html; http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html; I think the link should be changed to that.

_yy 11y ago
Yes but there's an interesting discussion on LWN.

paulajohnson 11y ago

I think that you could make a good-faith effort to get rid of as many as possible, for instance by grepping the code tree for the word "Canonical" (with a capital C) and manually scanning all images. Then if Canonical find something you missed you can promptly remove it. At that point any infringement is de minimis and not something they can build a case on.

delonia 11y ago
Garrett is proposing another wild goose chase, just because he dislikes Ubuntu so much. Even the GPL licence has a "no warranty clause". The software is "as is", it is your problem to keep the pieces when it breaks. You can imagine a person spinning this into "you cannot trust open-source because they do not offer just a bit of warranty".

delonia 11y ago

"If you are smart enough, you can spin anything towards the direction of your choosing." We see this all the time in online communities and we see it again with all this "hatred" against the Ubuntu community. Here is Mark Shuttleworth replying to Garret: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1474883#cmt1474883 http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1474883#cmt147... So Garret contacted Ubuntu for some unspecified project that he claimed he wanted to start. In reality, he was mining for quotes to misinterpret. Sad git.

lorenzhs 11y ago
Your comments in this thread read like you have a personal grudge against Matthew Garrett. Please keep it professional. > So Garret contacted Ubuntu for some unspecified project that he claimed he wanted to start. In reality, he was mining for quotes to misinterpret. Sad git. Trying to create some legal security around derivatives of Ubuntu, he asked for clarification in general, not about any particular project, but about any possible project started by anyone. The question is really quite clear: "What precisely does one need to change for Canonical to be comfortable that one isn't trying to pass it off as Ubuntu". Their answer was "we won't tell you". It looks to me like you're trying to spin this somehow to make Matthew Garrett look bad, accusing him of spinning it to make Canonical look bad. While the whole exchange could have been handled better on both sides, I don't see how Matthew Garret is to blame for Canonical's unwillingness to clarify their IP policy.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Travis-CI is open source, but it's impossible to host.

voltagex_ 11y ago
How so? All the bits seem to be on GitHub, it's probably super difficult to set up, though.
purpled_haze 11y ago
Open source != free
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The Travis-CI core appears to be under the MIT license, so it would be both open source and free (the definitions mostly overlap).
- adekok 11y ago
  The ISC DHCP server is "open source", in that the source is available. It's "free" in that anyone can download it and use it. But... try getting patches in. Unless you're a paying member of the ISC consortium, you can't. There are performance problems going back a decade which are firmly in the "won't fix" category. OpenSSL is similar.
  - mkesper 11y ago
    This could be resolved by forking.
  - simias 11y ago
    That's not really the same issue, people are free to accept contributions or not, if you're not happy with the state of things you can fork the project. Like GCC/EGCS back in the days for example. TFA is about ubuntu making forking difficult.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    Open source software (OSS) means the source code is available under an OSI approved license. While the term could not be trademarked due to the process being impractical, we like to be precise in order to not dilute what is otherwise a very useful term. "Free software" also means source-code being distributed under an FSF approved license. Unfortunately English doesn't have an equivalent for "libre", like romance languages do, with "free" being overloaded. So of course, usage of "free" has a long history of being overridden depending on context, going back to freemium/freeware/shareware. This is why context is important and why people then feel the need to be precise about the kind of free we are talking about - free as in beer or as in speech. You're talking about free as in beer and in our context Free Software really refers to FSF approved licensing. And Wikipedia does agree. Of course, the set of licenses that are FSF approved and OSI approved does overlap, though in theory you could have some differences, because the definitions are different. For example I think AGPL should not be OSI approved. But I digress. Back to the point I want to make - source code being able does not make a software open source and having the binaries free as in beer does not make it free software.

liw 11y ago

Relevant: https://plus.google.com/+MatthewGarrett/posts/Vx26ccdtdv6 https://plus.google.com/+MatthewGarrett/posts/Vx26ccdtdv6

agumonkey 11y ago

I'll add to understand and manipulate.

Mikeb85 11y ago

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop. Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution. Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others. This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.

mjg59 11y ago
Canonical have the right to protect their brand. But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must demonstrate p=np before being able to redistribute it, we'd probably agree that it was non-free. If I release software under a BSD-style license with an additional proviso that you must replace a single file containing my trademark, we'd agree that it was free. Canonical's requirements are somewhere between these two things, but they won't tell us where. If it's impossible to determine whether a requirement is feasible, it's difficult to figure out what your practical ability to make use of those freedoms is.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  > But what Canonical are doing is being so unclear about your obligations around their brand that it's impossible to know whether they'd consider a derivative an infringement of their rights. Your responsibility is to abide by the terms of the license, and trademark law. It's not about what Canonical considers an infringement, but what the law considers infringement based on the interpretation of the license you implicitly agreed to and trademark law.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    What Canonical considers an infringement is still pretty relevant. Civil law is mainly a tool for resolving disagreements between parties, not a system of abstractly judging the conformance of every action to the (very large) body of law. Therefore the first important step is to be able to understand the viewpoints of each party, which would tell you if there is even a disagreement to begin with. Lawsuits are a last resort for when parties are unable to reach an understanding on their own. Canonical doesn't have the final word on things, but they do have a word on things: they can clarify their own position. If what they claim as trademarks goes beyond what trademark law allows, then it's true that they would be unable to enforce that in court, so it's ultimately not their call. But they could simplify the situation and reduce the risk to all parties of needing to resolve disagreements in court by explicitly stating their position on acceptable uses of their trademark, i.e. what they would not consider to be a violation of their protected interest. This would give downstream users at least a better understanding of Canonical's interpretation, which is key to avoiding expensive lawsuits: if you're using Canonical's trademarks only in ways that Canonical itself considers proper, then there's no disagreement that needs to be resolved in court.

amadvance 11y ago

I see a value in this approach. I don't known your experience, but as soon you have a well known OpenSource project with binary distribution, you are going to see it available in a lot of scam download sites. In fact, the OpenSource licenses allow it, and the author is going to have a hard time taking them down. In this regard, OpenSource licenses are too permissive, and are doing a disservice in being too easily abused. Imposing additional restrictions to binaries, seems a good approach to have legal arguments to prevent that in the first place.

mjg59 11y ago
All you need to handle that is a trademark. You don't need to impose restrictions on binaries other than those that trademark law already imposes.
- empyrical 11y ago
  Yeah, and if you try to add restrictions to the software license itself you'll also end up with GPL incompatible code
  - mjg59 11y ago
    Large parts of Ubuntu aren't under the GPL, and as a result Canonical can impose additional restrictions.

EvanPlaice 11y ago

Or... you know. Don't use Ubuntu. I don't understand why the hell anybody would want to fork Ubuntu to begin with. There are already enough linux distros that provide nothing but a thin veneer of look-and-feel over Debian. If you want a high quality alternative to Ubuntu, use Mint. If you want something that's more open-source friendly, build on top of Debian. Canonical is clearly trying to commercialize Ubuntu but does that really matter? It's not like they slapped Linus Torvalds with an gag order.