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I'm not sure I agree. Any project run by a commercial entity can be broken beyond recognition by said entity trying to squeeze out every ounce of money. This da
by Timon3 3y ago
I'm not sure I agree. Any project run by a commercial entity can be broken beyond recognition by said entity trying to squeeze out every ounce of money. This danger is not present with a community-led version. Sure, development might slow down or stop, but the same will happen once the commercial entity loses interest.
If you use commercially-led software, you have to trust the publisher to stay aligned with your interests for the entire duration of you using it. This might go okay, but it might not - and there isn't any commercial entity who won't start squeezing when they feel necessary. So why expose myself to the whims of someone who might flip at any second?
- markshuttle 3y agoIt's quite right that commercial entities tend to focus on commercial imperatives. But Canonical is unusual - I founded it precisely to support a more open approach to open source than I was seeing from the other enterprise Linuxes in the early 2000's. We have a nearly 20 year track record of balancing community and company interests in Canonical and Ubuntu, in part because I have sufficient control of the company to stay true to that original vision. Of course, things may change at Canonical if I am no longer involved. That's a reasonable risk to think about and have a plan for. Some paranoia is constructive. One of the nice things about open source is that you can fork it if you want to. But to do so just because Canonical might in future take a different view than we have to date seems like its paying too high a price for that paranoia :)