14 ms·

Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time

174 points by ihuman 11y ago

legulere 11y ago
I somehow have the feeling that the longer the software licenses are the more licensing-related drama is happening.
- jordigh 11y ago
  There was a lot of drama between BSD and AT&T even though the licenses were short too. There is also drama over MPEG formats due to patents, again, even despite the short licenses, which led to webm. A short license does not mean that it will have fewer problems. It just means it addresses fewer concerns. At any rate, the mjg is not complaining about software licenses, but about trademark policies. Trademarks are a very different set of laws than the copyrights that software licenses typically handle.
SeanDav 11y ago
I am only a casual user of Linux and have no axe to grind or sacred cows to protect. From my point of view, one of the biggest issues with Linux is fragmentation - which of the 2000 flavours of Linux do I choose for my home use and why. My perception of Canonical/ Ubuntu as an outsider, is they have come along and tried to make a one-stop shop for Linux for the masses. This is a good thing. If you are an expert you can still use one of the other flavours or even branch Ubuntu. They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus.
- infinity0 11y ago
  I don't think you properly understood the article or FOSS in general. It is not about protecting a "sacred cow", it is about protecting the principles without which there will be no FOSS in the first place. We FOSS devs rightly care less about market share because market share is not, and never has been, what sustains the FOSS ecosystem. What sustains it is the code content that attracts developers from all over the globe to look at it, learn from it, be interested and inspired by it, and the principles of freedom enables them to contribute to it and sustain this cycle. (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)
  - privong 11y ago
    > (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.) I didn't downvote your post, but your statement about downvoting isn't true. It's certainly not in the guidelines[0]. And if one needs an appeal to the HN operators, as others have pointed out on separate occasions where your claim has been made, pg has previously said downvoting for disagreement is fine[1]: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
    - infinity0 11y ago
      I don't know what the effect was historically but right now if there's too many downvotes a comment gets greyed out. Furthermore you have to have over several hundred karma to be able to do it in the first place. In other words, the behaviour isn't symmetrical with upvoting, so I find it very uncomfortable, even for myself, to downvote merely for disagreement (i.e. the opposite of an upvote).
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Same here. I reserve downvoting for unhelpful comments. One litmus test for unhelpful commenting is, that the word 'you' is used. I try to keep it on topic, and the topic is never the other commenters.
        smcl 11y ago
        There's gonna be tiny exceptions, but this is an excellent guideline for comments that I will try to follow in future
    - throw12812 11y ago
      People quoting the guidelines won't change a thing. There'll always be threads like this one if downvoting is clearly abused. And hardly anyone cares about pg's opinion, especially in a thread about FOSS, to which he has contributed fairly little.
- zymhan 11y ago
  > they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus. The entire point of free software is to allow it to be endlessly copied, modified, and distributed. This is why we have things like Android and WebKit and the firmware on your home router. They're all based on free software. It may not be "good branding" for there to be hundreds of Linux distros, but that's not what any of this is about.
- baldfat 11y ago
  I think we are at the end of the Fragmentation Era. It use to be that different distros were so different that you would get only specific versions of software and you couldn't get the newest version of OpenOffice on X but with Y. The main Desktop distros are all fairly equal now. Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE (My favorite), and Fedora are all fairly straight forward and ready to be used and abused. Arch Linux goes out of their way to just make it hard but that has even stopped, heck their community has changed drastically over the past five years. I still use it on my ancient machines (32 bit is dying though). I want to install just about anything I can do OpenSUSE's one click or the SUSE build service, go through the pain of PPA or Fedora's flavor of the year installer of outside packages. In Arch you have AUR. It is vastly different then the way it was just 8 years ago or the way Slackware currently is made. Heck even the RPM vs DEB stupidity is mostly over. I think it has been over a year since someone said I don't do RPM based systems due to dependency hell which was just a issue from 10 years ago that got fixed but that stupid line kept getting repeated all the time!!!! I always told them build a DEB and an RPM and you will see why this is an non-issue.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    It's not the end of fragmentation for me, since I'm completely uninterested in all those major distros ever since NixOS came along—I'm happily fragmenting along.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      Well that is 100% my point. Your NixOS (Which I really LOVE the idea of their package manager) Still isn't as fragmented. You get your Linux packages differently but the software is still there. Also it uses systemd by default.
- andmarios 11y ago
  There aren't 2000 flavors of Linux. I would guess there are about 10 GNU/Linux distributions that matter to most people. Given that there are about 7+ billion people on earth, I have a very difficult time trying to understand what “linux fragmentation” is. If you think we should all use the same OS, does the same thought process applies to governments, shoes, food, etc?
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    Careful about oversimplification there. To put it another way: would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Perhaps people care less about operating system choice than you think. Remember, people within our domain of knowledge represent a very small minority of those seven billion people.
    - pessimizer 11y ago
      I missed the suggestion that everyone should build their own OS, and note that there are hundreds of largely incompatible models of car successfully sharing the road.
    - zlatan_todoric 11y ago
      I don't think you understood what he meant. AFAICT he said that there is not that big fragmentation considering how big community is - and not that everyone should use different OS. Maybe people do care less about OS choice than car choice but that doesn't mean it is less important. Btw, people from almost any domain represent small minority compared to seven billion people.
    - marcosdumay 11y ago
      > would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Not sure where are you going with that. There are several hundred different models of car for sale around the world. And still several hundred that count. There are some tens of Linux distros that count. That is indeed evidence that people mostly don't care about them, and that's what the GP was arguing.
- mjg59 11y ago
  > They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. In 2004, the entire Ubuntu distribution team fit into a small conference room and still managed to produce a new distribution that was significantly more compelling than any other available at the time. They were able to do this because Debian provided a convenient base and was released under a license that made this possible. If Canonical had been forced to modify every package in order to remove every reference to Debian, there would be no Ubuntu. The same might happen again. There's no reason to believe that Ubuntu is the final stage in the evolution of desktop Linux, but right now it's probably the most credible. If someone wants to be able to experiment then they should be able to do so. We don't produce better software by stifling creativity for no reason other than brand protection.
reitanqild 11y ago
My bigger problem with Ubuntu was that they went away from creating a really nice and easy-to-use distro that I wanted to throw money at to breaking everything just to be like Apple (don't get me wrong on this, I'm an Apple fan, I just find their ux hard to use and think people should copy the rest of what they do, not the menus etc.)
nwah1 11y ago
I notice that there's an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on. In a way, it mirrors the difference between free markets and command economies. Free markets tend to be resilient, offer individuals the most power, and tend to favor those with skill at the expense of lots of market fragmentation and inefficiency. Command economies, by contrast, can have everything working together towards one common goal, and allow for every individual to have some measure of equality and security. They can operate with either far more efficiency than a free market, or far less... and the fortunes can rapidly change. Democracies respond by then copying the innovation of the risky dictatorial/command experiments. Ubuntu is trying to do a little of both. It tries to be like Apple, and thus doesn't try to conform to the general FOSS community initiatives if it thinks they aren't innovating correctly or quickly enough. That is why they created Unity, Mir, and many other in-house projects. Tightly integrating branding into the products is just par for the course. By not trying to go along with the program, they annoy everyone else. But since the Debian Technical Committee, X Foundation, Linux Foundation, and W3C committees are not like the Comintern or the Apple board of directors, they have no power to enforce that program. Hence the fragmentation.
- sbuttgereit 11y ago
  An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market. We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities. Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market. Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way? Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.
gcb0 11y ago
so, just use Debian.
pekk 11y ago
If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should it? If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built. This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using weasel words.
- caf 11y ago
  The post needs to be read in the context of the series of which it forms a part, eg. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html
- mjg59 11y ago
  > If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should it? You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies. > If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built. Because it's entirely unnecessary? Building the entire archive is a huge amount of effort. > This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using weasel words. The terms are at http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-... - I probably should have linked them, I've just been writing about this enough lately that it's easy to forget that people might read a single post without context.
  - lmm 11y ago
    > You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies. If the shipped source doesn't contain enough information to actually perform a build surely that's a straight-up GPL violation (and a far more serious one than any possible ZFS issue, and one that you're in a position to do something about as a copyright holder). If the shipped source doesn't include whatever their developers actually use to build (and I refuse to believe an organization like Ubuntu wouldn't have a unified "build it all" script, or at least a README that described the steps you needed to take) then how can it possibly be the preferred form for making modifications?
bryanlarsen 11y ago
I find criticism of Canonical interesting. They are one of the most freedom respecting software companies out there. But people don't compare them to almost any company, they compare them against Red Hat. It seems that Ubuntu gets criticized not so much because they are really bad but because Red Hat is so awesome.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Red Hat is energetically criticized on many fronts. I think early growth in Ubuntu on servers was entirely due to Red Hat hatred.
- Shorel 11y ago
  They are so awesome they basically took over the OS by creating systemd.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I think its because most people do not notice the RH behavior. they used to release patch sets for the kernel along with its source. this made it easy for CentOS to roll a "clone" of RHEL. but that changed when Oracle did the same as CentOS and produced Oracle Linux. And now CentOS is part of the RH "family". frankly i think Canonical is trying to avoid a "Oracle Linux" scenario happening to Ubuntu.
  - bonzini 11y ago
    > this made it easy for CentOS to roll a "clone" of RHEL This makes no sense. Having patch sets or a single huge tarball is exactly the same as far as CentOS is concerned. Also, the patch sets for RHEL6 would be around four times the size of the kernel itself so there are also practical reasons to stop distributing them (of course Oracle _is_ a reason, I'm not denying that). The delay in CentOS 6 was due to personal reasons, not to the change in the distribution policy for kernel patch sets. CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat needed CentOS as the base for community development of its RHEL-based products (oVirt for RHEV, RDO for RH OpenStack, and so on).
- valarauca1 11y ago
SkyRocknRoll 11y ago
I don't give a fk about this guy. Ubuntu is the stable desktop os i had for the last 8 years.
- ossreality 11y ago
  What on Earth would compel you to think that posting this was a good idea?
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
I miss when Ubuntu was the unqualified choice if you wanted to recommend a Linux distro to a non-techie.
- baldfat 11y ago
  I still recommend OpenSUSE all these years and still think it has the best distro for new users and people who want to use it in a work environment. Ubuntu had its break through when it was the first one to get things to be more standard. Now with Systemd and easy build systems https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/ just about anyone can get a basic computer going quickly and easily. I still think Windows is the hardest and longest OS to install.
  - majewsky 11y ago
    > I still think Windows is the hardest and longest OS to install. But they have gotten way better, too. The last Windows that I regularly used was XP, and I remember it being a pain in the ass to set up (on the scale of "I'll dedicate the whole weekend to getting the OS and drivers installed"). Just recently, though, I set up a dual-boot on my desktop PC, with Arch Linux as default, and Windows 10 for the few games in my Steam library that are not Linux-compatible. I explicitly chose Windows 10 for enabling my DirectX-12-compatible card. The setup process was surprisingly straightforward and despite the very new hardware, it found all drivers out of the box and everything went smoothly. The only annoyance is the gazillion spying features that you have to disable, and the other gazillion spying features that you cannot disable. But since I'm only playing games on that OS, and the other OS with all personal data is on an encrypted disk, I don't care anyway.
    - moystard 11y ago
      Could you please list (or give a summary) of those gazillion spying features?
      - baldfat 11y ago
        Perhaps this? http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/ http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-o... A reasonable response: http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-you-with-windows-10/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-y...
tajen 11y ago
Many groups are trying to reuse Ubuntu recently. I'm thinking about Linux Mint and Elementary.io. One day, one new group will be more focussed on graphics and hire UX designers, and publish a polished, paid version of Linux. As in, you can redistribute, but if you want to subscribe to the repository which contains the latest bugfixes and the awesome UI design upgrades, you'll have to pay - and this is perfectly legal with free software, even GPL. We've only avoided that until now because so many groups have a huge disdain to making money off products (which is an awesome value - but just a value). So it is understandable that Ubuntu tries to raise barriers of entry.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > One day, one new group will be more focussed on graphics and hire UX designers, and publish a polished, paid version of Linux. As in, you can redistribute, but if you want to subscribe to the repository which contains the latest bugfixes and the awesome UI design upgrades, you'll have to pay - and this is perfectly legal with free software, even GPL. We've only avoided that until now because so many groups have a huge disdain to making money off products (which is an awesome value - but just a value). That reminds me of what elementary did, with their forced payments.
  - verbify 11y ago
    You don't have to pay for elementary - you just have to put in '0' as the amount you're paying. Recently I tried a bunch of Linux flavours, and it still pissed me off. No other distro forced me to do that. Elementary claim making software takes effort, but how much are they contributing upstream - to Debian or to the kernel creators? In the end, I ended up with Mint, which has a better UX anyway imo.
    - reitanqild 11y ago
      > Recently I tried a bunch of Linux flavours, and it still pissed me off. No other distro forced me to do that. We are closing in on the definition of privilege here, aren't we? Being annoyed because you have to explicitly had to write (ok, update) a form to inform that you didn't want to pay?

174 points by ihuman 11y ago

legulere 11y ago

I somehow have the feeling that the longer the software licenses are the more licensing-related drama is happening.

jordigh 11y ago
There was a lot of drama between BSD and AT&T even though the licenses were short too. There is also drama over MPEG formats due to patents, again, even despite the short licenses, which led to webm. A short license does not mean that it will have fewer problems. It just means it addresses fewer concerns. At any rate, the mjg is not complaining about software licenses, but about trademark policies. Trademarks are a very different set of laws than the copyrights that software licenses typically handle.

SeanDav 11y ago

I am only a casual user of Linux and have no axe to grind or sacred cows to protect. From my point of view, one of the biggest issues with Linux is fragmentation - which of the 2000 flavours of Linux do I choose for my home use and why. My perception of Canonical/ Ubuntu as an outsider, is they have come along and tried to make a one-stop shop for Linux for the masses. This is a good thing. If you are an expert you can still use one of the other flavours or even branch Ubuntu. They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus.

infinity0 11y ago
I don't think you properly understood the article or FOSS in general. It is not about protecting a "sacred cow", it is about protecting the principles without which there will be no FOSS in the first place. We FOSS devs rightly care less about market share because market share is not, and never has been, what sustains the FOSS ecosystem. What sustains it is the code content that attracts developers from all over the globe to look at it, learn from it, be interested and inspired by it, and the principles of freedom enables them to contribute to it and sustain this cycle. (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.)
- privong 11y ago
  > (edit: downvotes are not for comments you disagree with. That's what responses are for. Stop abusing the system selfishly.) I didn't downvote your post, but your statement about downvoting isn't true. It's certainly not in the guidelines[0]. And if one needs an appeal to the HN operators, as others have pointed out on separate occasions where your claim has been made, pg has previously said downvoting for disagreement is fine[1]: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
  - infinity0 11y ago
    I don't know what the effect was historically but right now if there's too many downvotes a comment gets greyed out. Furthermore you have to have over several hundred karma to be able to do it in the first place. In other words, the behaviour isn't symmetrical with upvoting, so I find it very uncomfortable, even for myself, to downvote merely for disagreement (i.e. the opposite of an upvote).
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Same here. I reserve downvoting for unhelpful comments. One litmus test for unhelpful commenting is, that the word 'you' is used. I try to keep it on topic, and the topic is never the other commenters.
      - smcl 11y ago
        There's gonna be tiny exceptions, but this is an excellent guideline for comments that I will try to follow in future
  - throw12812 11y ago
    People quoting the guidelines won't change a thing. There'll always be threads like this one if downvoting is clearly abused. And hardly anyone cares about pg's opinion, especially in a thread about FOSS, to which he has contributed fairly little.
zymhan 11y ago
> they are not making it easy. From my point of view this seems to be a plus and not a minus. The entire point of free software is to allow it to be endlessly copied, modified, and distributed. This is why we have things like Android and WebKit and the firmware on your home router. They're all based on free software. It may not be "good branding" for there to be hundreds of Linux distros, but that's not what any of this is about.
baldfat 11y ago
I think we are at the end of the Fragmentation Era. It use to be that different distros were so different that you would get only specific versions of software and you couldn't get the newest version of OpenOffice on X but with Y. The main Desktop distros are all fairly equal now. Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE (My favorite), and Fedora are all fairly straight forward and ready to be used and abused. Arch Linux goes out of their way to just make it hard but that has even stopped, heck their community has changed drastically over the past five years. I still use it on my ancient machines (32 bit is dying though). I want to install just about anything I can do OpenSUSE's one click or the SUSE build service, go through the pain of PPA or Fedora's flavor of the year installer of outside packages. In Arch you have AUR. It is vastly different then the way it was just 8 years ago or the way Slackware currently is made. Heck even the RPM vs DEB stupidity is mostly over. I think it has been over a year since someone said I don't do RPM based systems due to dependency hell which was just a issue from 10 years ago that got fixed but that stupid line kept getting repeated all the time!!!! I always told them build a DEB and an RPM and you will see why this is an non-issue.
- mbrock 11y ago
  It's not the end of fragmentation for me, since I'm completely uninterested in all those major distros ever since NixOS came along—I'm happily fragmenting along.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Well that is 100% my point. Your NixOS (Which I really LOVE the idea of their package manager) Still isn't as fragmented. You get your Linux packages differently but the software is still there. Also it uses systemd by default.
andmarios 11y ago
There aren't 2000 flavors of Linux. I would guess there are about 10 GNU/Linux distributions that matter to most people. Given that there are about 7+ billion people on earth, I have a very difficult time trying to understand what “linux fragmentation” is. If you think we should all use the same OS, does the same thought process applies to governments, shoes, food, etc?
- bovermyer 11y ago
  Careful about oversimplification there. To put it another way: would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Perhaps people care less about operating system choice than you think. Remember, people within our domain of knowledge represent a very small minority of those seven billion people.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    I missed the suggestion that everyone should build their own OS, and note that there are hundreds of largely incompatible models of car successfully sharing the road.
  - zlatan_todoric 11y ago
    I don't think you understood what he meant. AFAICT he said that there is not that big fragmentation considering how big community is - and not that everyone should use different OS. Maybe people do care less about OS choice than car choice but that doesn't mean it is less important. Btw, people from almost any domain represent small minority compared to seven billion people.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    > would you suggest that everyone build their own car? Not sure where are you going with that. There are several hundred different models of car for sale around the world. And still several hundred that count. There are some tens of Linux distros that count. That is indeed evidence that people mostly don't care about them, and that's what the GP was arguing.
mjg59 11y ago
> They are not making it impossible to create "yet another Linux flavour" but they are not making it easy. In 2004, the entire Ubuntu distribution team fit into a small conference room and still managed to produce a new distribution that was significantly more compelling than any other available at the time. They were able to do this because Debian provided a convenient base and was released under a license that made this possible. If Canonical had been forced to modify every package in order to remove every reference to Debian, there would be no Ubuntu. The same might happen again. There's no reason to believe that Ubuntu is the final stage in the evolution of desktop Linux, but right now it's probably the most credible. If someone wants to be able to experiment then they should be able to do so. We don't produce better software by stifling creativity for no reason other than brand protection.

reitanqild 11y ago

My bigger problem with Ubuntu was that they went away from creating a really nice and easy-to-use distro that I wanted to throw money at to breaking everything just to be like Apple (don't get me wrong on this, I'm an Apple fan, I just find their ux hard to use and think people should copy the rest of what they do, not the menus etc.)

nwah1 11y ago

I notice that there's an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on. In a way, it mirrors the difference between free markets and command economies. Free markets tend to be resilient, offer individuals the most power, and tend to favor those with skill at the expense of lots of market fragmentation and inefficiency. Command economies, by contrast, can have everything working together towards one common goal, and allow for every individual to have some measure of equality and security. They can operate with either far more efficiency than a free market, or far less... and the fortunes can rapidly change. Democracies respond by then copying the innovation of the risky dictatorial/command experiments. Ubuntu is trying to do a little of both. It tries to be like Apple, and thus doesn't try to conform to the general FOSS community initiatives if it thinks they aren't innovating correctly or quickly enough. That is why they created Unity, Mir, and many other in-house projects. Tightly integrating branding into the products is just par for the course. By not trying to go along with the program, they annoy everyone else. But since the Debian Technical Committee, X Foundation, Linux Foundation, and W3C committees are not like the Comintern or the Apple board of directors, they have no power to enforce that program. Hence the fragmentation.

sbuttgereit 11y ago
An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market. We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities. Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market. Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way? Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.

gcb0 11y ago

so, just use Debian.

pekk 11y ago

If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should it? If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built. This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using weasel words.

caf 11y ago
The post needs to be read in the context of the series of which it forms a part, eg. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html
mjg59 11y ago
> If you have the source, it shouldn't be difficult to build binaries, should it? You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies. > If you are building a new Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, I don't even understand why you would want to reuse binaries they built. Because it's entirely unnecessary? Building the entire archive is a huge amount of effort. > This post would be more meaningful if it literally quoted from unfavorable license terms used by Ubuntu to actually prevent people from making derivatives. Saying that Canonical "appears to require" something is using weasel words. The terms are at http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-... - I probably should have linked them, I've just been writing about this enough lately that it's easy to forget that people might read a single post without context.
- lmm 11y ago
  > You'd think, but no - there's no guarantee that the shipped binary packages can be built with the shipped toolchain or shipped dependencies. If the shipped source doesn't contain enough information to actually perform a build surely that's a straight-up GPL violation (and a far more serious one than any possible ZFS issue, and one that you're in a position to do something about as a copyright holder). If the shipped source doesn't include whatever their developers actually use to build (and I refuse to believe an organization like Ubuntu wouldn't have a unified "build it all" script, or at least a README that described the steps you needed to take) then how can it possibly be the preferred form for making modifications?

bryanlarsen 11y ago

I find criticism of Canonical interesting. They are one of the most freedom respecting software companies out there. But people don't compare them to almost any company, they compare them against Red Hat. It seems that Ubuntu gets criticized not so much because they are really bad but because Red Hat is so awesome.

pessimizer 11y ago
Red Hat is energetically criticized on many fronts. I think early growth in Ubuntu on servers was entirely due to Red Hat hatred.
Shorel 11y ago
They are so awesome they basically took over the OS by creating systemd.
digi_owl 11y ago
I think its because most people do not notice the RH behavior. they used to release patch sets for the kernel along with its source. this made it easy for CentOS to roll a "clone" of RHEL. but that changed when Oracle did the same as CentOS and produced Oracle Linux. And now CentOS is part of the RH "family". frankly i think Canonical is trying to avoid a "Oracle Linux" scenario happening to Ubuntu.
- bonzini 11y ago
  > this made it easy for CentOS to roll a "clone" of RHEL This makes no sense. Having patch sets or a single huge tarball is exactly the same as far as CentOS is concerned. Also, the patch sets for RHEL6 would be around four times the size of the kernel itself so there are also practical reasons to stop distributing them (of course Oracle _is_ a reason, I'm not denying that). The delay in CentOS 6 was due to personal reasons, not to the change in the distribution policy for kernel patch sets. CentOS was acqui-hired because Red Hat needed CentOS as the base for community development of its RHEL-based products (oVirt for RHEV, RDO for RH OpenStack, and so on).
valarauca1 11y ago

SkyRocknRoll 11y ago

I don't give a fk about this guy. Ubuntu is the stable desktop os i had for the last 8 years.

ossreality 11y ago
What on Earth would compel you to think that posting this was a good idea?

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

I miss when Ubuntu was the unqualified choice if you wanted to recommend a Linux distro to a non-techie.

baldfat 11y ago
I still recommend OpenSUSE all these years and still think it has the best distro for new users and people who want to use it in a work environment. Ubuntu had its break through when it was the first one to get things to be more standard. Now with Systemd and easy build systems https://build.opensuse.org/ https://build.opensuse.org/ just about anyone can get a basic computer going quickly and easily. I still think Windows is the hardest and longest OS to install.
- majewsky 11y ago
  > I still think Windows is the hardest and longest OS to install. But they have gotten way better, too. The last Windows that I regularly used was XP, and I remember it being a pain in the ass to set up (on the scale of "I'll dedicate the whole weekend to getting the OS and drivers installed"). Just recently, though, I set up a dual-boot on my desktop PC, with Arch Linux as default, and Windows 10 for the few games in my Steam library that are not Linux-compatible. I explicitly chose Windows 10 for enabling my DirectX-12-compatible card. The setup process was surprisingly straightforward and despite the very new hardware, it found all drivers out of the box and everything went smoothly. The only annoyance is the gazillion spying features that you have to disable, and the other gazillion spying features that you cannot disable. But since I'm only playing games on that OS, and the other OS with all personal data is on an encrypted disk, I don't care anyway.
  - moystard 11y ago
    Could you please list (or give a summary) of those gazillion spying features?
    - baldfat 11y ago
      Perhaps this? http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/ http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-o... A reasonable response: http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-you-with-windows-10/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-microsoft-is-not-spying-on-y...

tajen 11y ago

Many groups are trying to reuse Ubuntu recently. I'm thinking about Linux Mint and Elementary.io. One day, one new group will be more focussed on graphics and hire UX designers, and publish a polished, paid version of Linux. As in, you can redistribute, but if you want to subscribe to the repository which contains the latest bugfixes and the awesome UI design upgrades, you'll have to pay - and this is perfectly legal with free software, even GPL. We've only avoided that until now because so many groups have a huge disdain to making money off products (which is an awesome value - but just a value). So it is understandable that Ubuntu tries to raise barriers of entry.

kuschku 11y ago
> One day, one new group will be more focussed on graphics and hire UX designers, and publish a polished, paid version of Linux. As in, you can redistribute, but if you want to subscribe to the repository which contains the latest bugfixes and the awesome UI design upgrades, you'll have to pay - and this is perfectly legal with free software, even GPL. We've only avoided that until now because so many groups have a huge disdain to making money off products (which is an awesome value - but just a value). That reminds me of what elementary did, with their forced payments.
- verbify 11y ago
  You don't have to pay for elementary - you just have to put in '0' as the amount you're paying. Recently I tried a bunch of Linux flavours, and it still pissed me off. No other distro forced me to do that. Elementary claim making software takes effort, but how much are they contributing upstream - to Debian or to the kernel creators? In the end, I ended up with Mint, which has a better UX anyway imo.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    > Recently I tried a bunch of Linux flavours, and it still pissed me off. No other distro forced me to do that. We are closing in on the definition of privilege here, aren't we? Being annoyed because you have to explicitly had to write (ok, update) a form to inform that you didn't want to pay?