4 ms·

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

by 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.
  - weland 11y ago
    I don't necessarily agree with how mjg59 chooses to resolve his issues, but it's hard not to get the impression that he's a little right about this. The problem is precisely this: > 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. (Emphasis mine) That's not true of any other software! I'm not sure how things are for RHEL, but I imagine they're basically similar to Fedora. Fedora doesn't fuzzily require you to "remove and replace all trademarks". It explicitly requires you to remove the branding -- i.e. repository information, change logs and logos. They even provide a nice list of what you have to remove. Everything that you must replace is in three packages. Now, I'd normally just suspect mjg59 of bitterness, were it not for Canonical's PR dance around the issue. The accusation is clear: mjg59 thinks that Canonical is intentionally keeping the wording vague so that they can have a word to say in who is developing products based on Ubuntu. Anyone who wants to use something based on Ubuntu has to ask for approval. Otherwise you might end up in court because you didn't remove "Removed spurious call to foo_frobnicate() to fix crashes on Xubuntu" from an upstream changelog. Canonical has been handing out these approvals for free so far, but I don't think any requests came from current or future competitors. There's no reason to believe that Canonical would be as eager to approve a direct Ubuntu Phone competitor. Yes yes, it's in their interest to not be as eager, but if this was such a big problem, they should have thought twice before basing their business around a bunch of GPLd products. It's hard to suspect Canonical of good intentions when every single answer they handed out managed to answer another question. The dialog so far has basically been: Q: Oh hi guys, look... I'd like to make an Ubuntu derivative, can you tell me what I have to remove? A: All trademarks. Q: What do you mean by all trademarks? A: Or you can ask us for approval instead. Q: I get it, but I'd rather just remove all trademarks... what exactly do you mean by that? Do I have to remove e.g. mentions of Ubuntu from an upstream changelog, or the @ubuntu.com e-mail address of a contributor listed in an about dialog or a CONTRIBUTORS file? A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval. Q: But I'm not an evil hacker! A: Then we'll approve your request. Q: BUT I DON'T WANT TO ASK YOU, I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO REMOVE! A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval. It kind of gets in an infinite loop at this point. Canonical could clarify the wording without opening themselves up to Evil Hackers. Their unwillingness to do so is (somewhat insultingly) veiled in arguments that are about as childish as they're trying to imply mjg59's are. It's hard to suspect them of good intentions under these conditions.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  > So in practice they made it non-free software [free as in Stallman definition of free]. Not at all. RMS isn't philosophically pro-trademark, but he has said that trademark and free software are separate issues (meaning that 'free software' doesn't confer on the user the ability to rip off a trademark). > but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product You CAN redistribute Ubuntu, but only in its whole form. You just can't rip out/add pieces to it and still call it Ubuntu, because then it infringes trademark. If you want to change it, you can, but then it can't be "Ubuntu". > He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue. Which is stupid, because trademark is a legal term, defined by the laws of the land. Canonical can't change the way a country interprets 'trademark'.
  - greyman 11y ago
    > Which is stupid, because trademark is a legal term, defined by the laws of the land. Canonical can't change the way a country interprets 'trademark'. No, he just wanted them to clarify, what specifically are the things which should be removed from Ubuntu distribution, so it can be then declared as completely stripped from Ubuntu trademark. (other Linux distributions mentioning in the article do provide such information).
weland 11y ago
> 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. I decided to take Ubuntu 15.04 out for a ride a few months ago. I haven't really used Ubuntu since 7.something (but I liked 4.10 a lot), but I did occasionally work with it (e.g. helping out colleagues who used it). I desperately tried to like Unity, but nope: its development seems to be done pretty much the same way that Gnome development is done. A lot of effort goes into creating a distinct experience. Very little seems to go towards listening to users, and options are basically non-existant. Changing the GTK theme, for instance, is no longer easy (you need unity-tweak-tool). Changing the buttons on the titlebar is outright impossible because now they're hardcoded. This is... very much against the spirit of people who were involved in the open source movement a while ago. A lot of us switched to Linux because we wanted more control over our systems. Free software that locks down your options is... missing the point a little.
- silon7 11y ago
  +1 I really don't understand the fights about GNOME3 and Unity UI. They both suck for me. KDE is okay-ish, but needs a lot of polish compared to Gnome 2.
bkor 11y ago
Please don't rewrite history. There was a usability hackfest in England to decide on what the desktop should look like. Canonical designers didn't agree with the GNOME designers and went off to do their own thing though didn't really communicate much (never said they'd go their own way). This was way before GNOME 3.0 was released. I have no clue who you mean with "they scream". You mean GNOME contributors? Then again on history: Canonical committed to developing Wayland. Then changed direction, didn't communicate and came out with Mir 6 months later. This included all kinds of incorrect statements plus left out that they committed to develop some things for Wayland. The backlash has been documented many times, was pretty logical, was not limited to GNOME and mostly: it could've been avoided! I quite appreciate Canonical, but there's a fair bit of "wtf" that went on over the years. You seem to like speaking on GNOME's behalf; you're so terribly incorrect that I ask you to stop it. Further, mjg59 doesn't do much at GNOME. In his own words: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2014-May/msg00016.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2014-Ma.... Now on Unity: to package Unity for many years you had to apply lots of big patches to various other components. Unity was pretty much a Ubuntu-only thing and not meant to be shared easily across distributions (I asked).
mjg59 11y ago
> 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 posted it the day after I got a reply from Canonical telling me that they wouldn't be answering my questions about the rights of downstream recipients. > mjg59's attitude is like "if it is not ours, let's f* their efforts anyway". I'm willing to do the technical work required to split the trademarks into separate packages as long as Canonical are willing to accept that.

by delonia 11y ago

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.
- weland 11y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with how mjg59 chooses to resolve his issues, but it's hard not to get the impression that he's a little right about this. The problem is precisely this: > 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. (Emphasis mine) That's not true of any other software! I'm not sure how things are for RHEL, but I imagine they're basically similar to Fedora. Fedora doesn't fuzzily require you to "remove and replace all trademarks". It explicitly requires you to remove the branding -- i.e. repository information, change logs and logos. They even provide a nice list of what you have to remove. Everything that you must replace is in three packages. Now, I'd normally just suspect mjg59 of bitterness, were it not for Canonical's PR dance around the issue. The accusation is clear: mjg59 thinks that Canonical is intentionally keeping the wording vague so that they can have a word to say in who is developing products based on Ubuntu. Anyone who wants to use something based on Ubuntu has to ask for approval. Otherwise you might end up in court because you didn't remove "Removed spurious call to foo_frobnicate() to fix crashes on Xubuntu" from an upstream changelog. Canonical has been handing out these approvals for free so far, but I don't think any requests came from current or future competitors. There's no reason to believe that Canonical would be as eager to approve a direct Ubuntu Phone competitor. Yes yes, it's in their interest to not be as eager, but if this was such a big problem, they should have thought twice before basing their business around a bunch of GPLd products. It's hard to suspect Canonical of good intentions when every single answer they handed out managed to answer another question. The dialog so far has basically been: Q: Oh hi guys, look... I'd like to make an Ubuntu derivative, can you tell me what I have to remove? A: All trademarks. Q: What do you mean by all trademarks? A: Or you can ask us for approval instead. Q: I get it, but I'd rather just remove all trademarks... what exactly do you mean by that? Do I have to remove e.g. mentions of Ubuntu from an upstream changelog, or the @ubuntu.com e-mail address of a contributor listed in an about dialog or a CONTRIBUTORS file? A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval. Q: But I'm not an evil hacker! A: Then we'll approve your request. Q: BUT I DON'T WANT TO ASK YOU, I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO REMOVE! A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval. It kind of gets in an infinite loop at this point. Canonical could clarify the wording without opening themselves up to Evil Hackers. Their unwillingness to do so is (somewhat insultingly) veiled in arguments that are about as childish as they're trying to imply mjg59's are. It's hard to suspect them of good intentions under these conditions.
Mikeb85 11y ago
> So in practice they made it non-free software [free as in Stallman definition of free]. Not at all. RMS isn't philosophically pro-trademark, but he has said that trademark and free software are separate issues (meaning that 'free software' doesn't confer on the user the ability to rip off a trademark). > but now if anyone wants to do binary redistribution of their product You CAN redistribute Ubuntu, but only in its whole form. You just can't rip out/add pieces to it and still call it Ubuntu, because then it infringes trademark. If you want to change it, you can, but then it can't be "Ubuntu". > He criticized Ubuntu for unwillingness to clarify the trademark issue. Which is stupid, because trademark is a legal term, defined by the laws of the land. Canonical can't change the way a country interprets 'trademark'.
- greyman 11y ago
  > Which is stupid, because trademark is a legal term, defined by the laws of the land. Canonical can't change the way a country interprets 'trademark'. No, he just wanted them to clarify, what specifically are the things which should be removed from Ubuntu distribution, so it can be then declared as completely stripped from Ubuntu trademark. (other Linux distributions mentioning in the article do provide such information).

weland 11y ago

> 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. I decided to take Ubuntu 15.04 out for a ride a few months ago. I haven't really used Ubuntu since 7.something (but I liked 4.10 a lot), but I did occasionally work with it (e.g. helping out colleagues who used it). I desperately tried to like Unity, but nope: its development seems to be done pretty much the same way that Gnome development is done. A lot of effort goes into creating a distinct experience. Very little seems to go towards listening to users, and options are basically non-existant. Changing the GTK theme, for instance, is no longer easy (you need unity-tweak-tool). Changing the buttons on the titlebar is outright impossible because now they're hardcoded. This is... very much against the spirit of people who were involved in the open source movement a while ago. A lot of us switched to Linux because we wanted more control over our systems. Free software that locks down your options is... missing the point a little.

silon7 11y ago
+1 I really don't understand the fights about GNOME3 and Unity UI. They both suck for me. KDE is okay-ish, but needs a lot of polish compared to Gnome 2.

bkor 11y ago

Please don't rewrite history. There was a usability hackfest in England to decide on what the desktop should look like. Canonical designers didn't agree with the GNOME designers and went off to do their own thing though didn't really communicate much (never said they'd go their own way). This was way before GNOME 3.0 was released. I have no clue who you mean with "they scream". You mean GNOME contributors? Then again on history: Canonical committed to developing Wayland. Then changed direction, didn't communicate and came out with Mir 6 months later. This included all kinds of incorrect statements plus left out that they committed to develop some things for Wayland. The backlash has been documented many times, was pretty logical, was not limited to GNOME and mostly: it could've been avoided! I quite appreciate Canonical, but there's a fair bit of "wtf" that went on over the years. You seem to like speaking on GNOME's behalf; you're so terribly incorrect that I ask you to stop it. Further, mjg59 doesn't do much at GNOME. In his own words: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2014-May/msg00016.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2014-Ma.... Now on Unity: to package Unity for many years you had to apply lots of big patches to various other components. Unity was pretty much a Ubuntu-only thing and not meant to be shared easily across distributions (I asked).

mjg59 11y ago

> 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 posted it the day after I got a reply from Canonical telling me that they wouldn't be answering my questions about the rights of downstream recipients. > mjg59's attitude is like "if it is not ours, let's f* their efforts anyway". I'm willing to do the technical work required to split the trademarks into separate packages as long as Canonical are willing to accept that.