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In defense of Ubuntu

Posted Aug 20, 2008 0:48 UTC (Wed) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793)
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

To me all this is just the need people have for a pet enemy, even between Linux distros.

In the old days Red Hat served that role (the commercial company that was profiting from
Linux) but with the Fedora community and the employing of big Linux figures/developers that
"enemy" disappeared and never was fully replaced by a single distribution big enough for
people to join against.

If Canonical didn't appeared, probably we would be talking in "defense" of Novel, or people
would actually care about Xandros, Linspire, or any other distro that simply doesn't get
enough attention today.

What Canonical needs is just employ some big Linux figures who stand by the more controversial
decisions (and work on the things actually wrong). Then people would not be so light to
criticize everything.

They already have the community fan boys, so that part is covered.

By the way, great article.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Aug 20, 2008 14:52 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link]

I'm sure that ingroup/outgroup psychology is a valid explanation of part of the phenomenon of
why some people have irrational loyalties but you're ignoring a simple, pragmatic reason why
many of the examples you mention were considered undesirable. At various stages and in various
ways they have failed to demonstrate a commitment to Free Software.

* Back in the pre-Fedora days there was a certain amount of disquiet at Red hat because they
used to distribute an extra "applications CD" which contained a Macromedia Flash player, Adobe
Acroread and some other stuff like that.  They were still aware of the issues though. This
link is from RH 8.0, but I'm nearly certain I remember this from as far back as 5.2 though:
http://www.redhat.com/advice/speaks_80mm.html

* Novell, pretty obvious and it's not ancient news

* Canonical and the Ubuntu project has been covered well here on LWN in terms of contributions
of Free Software, the closed nature of Launchpad and of course the desire of have Aunt Tilly
run non-Free software to her heart's desire

Anyway, no point in going over Linspire and Xandros, the point is that the main criticism of
all those distros or companies has been their distribution of non-Free software.

Trivializing this objection as a simple group psychology phenomenon is to ignore some very
valid objections.

In defense of Ubuntu

Posted Aug 22, 2008 11:48 UTC (Fri) by miahfost (guest, #51602) [Link]

Red Hat was vilified in the linux community because it took a very popular product (Red Hat
Linux) and made it proprietary. New updates to Red Hat Linux required paid subscription. They
quickly realized their folly and created Fedora to soothe angry users.

Personally I am suspicious of a distro that starts free and becomes closed. This is why I use
debian which will _always_ be free.

In defense of Ubuntu

Posted Aug 23, 2008 23:44 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Red Hat started the Fedora project as the replacement for the discontinued Red Hat Linux; if you look at their release history, you'd find that at no time do Red Hat users lack a free-to-use option.

The difference between the RHL and Fedora days is that previously, you could actually get paid support from Red Hat for running RHL on your desktop. With the RHEL/Fedora split, Red Hat is actually making it *harder* for individual users to give them money. Try getting an individual subscription to RHEL if you think Red Hat is chasing after your money. They make it easy for clones like White Box, CentOS etc. as well, by releasing the SRPMs for RHEL and making sure their trademarked artworks are easy to remove.

In defense of Ubuntu

Posted Aug 29, 2008 7:11 UTC (Fri) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link]

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

You have a point in that Red Hat is no longer going after the home desktop market, but it is still fairly easy to get an individual desktop subscription to RHEL if you want.