4 ms·

I work for Canonical (but I'm speaking for myself; I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway). I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At

by rlpb 4y ago

I work for Canonical (but I'm speaking for myself; I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway). I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers. Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing. There's a huge bunch of work that's needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done. So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it's one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all. Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn't properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn't claim that Debian couldn't stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can't really discount it either. Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has never actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical/Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide more.

noobermin 4y ago
Look, I am sympathetic to Canonical, and a lot of those on the other side of the debate do feel a but scummy. They do strike a certain impression of people who just want something for free, like a cartoonish stereotype of a freeloader. That said, I do feel like a lot of the pushback that Canonical got would have been avoided if they just didn't try to advertise in terminal output, as benign as it was in my opinion. I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.
- rlpb 4y ago
  The current complaint about "advertising" is telling users about further updates that they can receive for free, because Canonical has customers paying to make them available. Telling users about updates that are available to them for free seems like a reasonable thing to do when they run the CLI tool designed for humans that checks for updates ("apt", vs. "apt-get" which is for scripting). It's only speculation that this will be a general advertising channel. But that speculation seems to have turned into (false) fact through the grapevine. Because Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu's leader, and Canonical's CEO) has publicly committed the following: "I do think it would be reasonable to expect the news to be related to updates and changes in the archive that are interesting for someone using apt, rather than general news, so can happily agree to set that policy and expectation amongst the folk who have write access to the news." (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026/comments/18 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...) So now, when someone complains about "advertising", I'm never sure if they're complaining about what's actually present, or this speculation about the future that Mark has committed to not doing anyway.
  - jabl 4y ago
    If apt printing out a small message about Ubuntu Pro, or some short commercial about Ubuntu Pro or Canonical's cloud offerings/whatever show up in motd, I think that's a small price to pay if that ensures the financial wellbeing of Canonical and thus a sustainable future for Ubuntu. Arguably the Amazon search thing Canonical had in Unity some years ago was sleazy, but the above isn't AFAIU doing any data mining on users or such.
    - noobermin 4y ago
      I think this is a reasonable perspective. Perhaps part of the paranoia (beyond FOSS kids' usual neuroses) was the Amazon search debacle, and thus this fits a pre-existing narrative about Canonical being a scummy corporation or whatever. If the events were reversed--or rather, the Amazon search never happened--the extreme fringe of FOSS users would be more easier to ignore.
  - 4y ago

by rlpb 4y ago

noobermin 4y ago

Look, I am sympathetic to Canonical, and a lot of those on the other side of the debate do feel a but scummy. They do strike a certain impression of people who just want something for free, like a cartoonish stereotype of a freeloader. That said, I do feel like a lot of the pushback that Canonical got would have been avoided if they just didn't try to advertise in terminal output, as benign as it was in my opinion. I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.

rlpb 4y ago
The current complaint about "advertising" is telling users about further updates that they can receive for free, because Canonical has customers paying to make them available. Telling users about updates that are available to them for free seems like a reasonable thing to do when they run the CLI tool designed for humans that checks for updates ("apt", vs. "apt-get" which is for scripting). It's only speculation that this will be a general advertising channel. But that speculation seems to have turned into (false) fact through the grapevine. Because Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu's leader, and Canonical's CEO) has publicly committed the following: "I do think it would be reasonable to expect the news to be related to updates and changes in the archive that are interesting for someone using apt, rather than general news, so can happily agree to set that policy and expectation amongst the folk who have write access to the news." (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026/comments/18 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...) So now, when someone complains about "advertising", I'm never sure if they're complaining about what's actually present, or this speculation about the future that Mark has committed to not doing anyway.
- jabl 4y ago
  If apt printing out a small message about Ubuntu Pro, or some short commercial about Ubuntu Pro or Canonical's cloud offerings/whatever show up in motd, I think that's a small price to pay if that ensures the financial wellbeing of Canonical and thus a sustainable future for Ubuntu. Arguably the Amazon search thing Canonical had in Unity some years ago was sleazy, but the above isn't AFAIU doing any data mining on users or such.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    I think this is a reasonable perspective. Perhaps part of the paranoia (beyond FOSS kids' usual neuroses) was the Amazon search debacle, and thus this fits a pre-existing narrative about Canonical being a scummy corporation or whatever. If the events were reversed--or rather, the Amazon search never happened--the extreme fringe of FOSS users would be more easier to ignore.
- 4y ago