The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts [LWN.net]

The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

Posted Aug 21, 2008 0:15 UTC (Thu) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
In reply to: The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts by jejb
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu

Canonical has made the strategic decision to include non open source technology in the Ubuntu distribution if such inclusion can be justified on the grounds of accelerating linux adoption.

Ubuntu made a strategic decision to make today's users happy AT ANY COST.

Imagine what would have happened differently if Red Hat (as the largest Linux distributor) accepted binary-only drivers many years ago?

Intel would likely have not become a true community partner in X and kernel development, which turned out to make them a technology leader as well as *the* favored for Linux hardware because their stuff just works. AMD and VIA would definitely not have followed Intel's example. Now you see all three releasing specifications, hiring full time employees to work with the community, and upstreaming drivers.

Storage drivers: Remember the bad old days where many storage controllers had terrible add-on drivers made by manufacturers as a one-time engineering effort, without upstream inclusion? Now many of these hardware companies pay engineers full-time to work on drivers and improving underlying device-mapper and other kernel components in the upstream kernel.

Wireless drivers:What if we accepted binary blobs, closed-source regulatory daemons and NDISWRAPPER as acceptable? Today most wireless drivers are open thanks to the refusal to accept this. Intel for a while has been great here. You recently saw ath9k released by the company for upstream inclusion. All of these examples are due to companies realizing the technical and market advantages of being a true community player.

This refusal to accept short-term convenience of binary drivers has been painful at times. But liberty is not free, nor is it often comfortable. We would NOT have achieved most of today's driver liberty if Ubuntu were the dominant Linux distributor in past years, giving the hardware companies the wrong message that proprietary binary-only drivers are acceptable.

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The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

Posted Aug 24, 2008 21:21 UTC (Sun) by cyfaill (guest, #42384) [Link]

What this means that somehow those who steward Ubuntu have a fundamental flaw in their understanding of how they got to were they are.

Liberty and the concept of freedom itself are tied at the umbilical cord of the mutual concepts of each.

I have been a long time Debian user and occasionally build desktop systems for sale to new Linux user clients... I do not install Ubuntu because I detect that at the core of its organization their is the hinting of a deviation of implementation of many of the core concepts that make a strong Linux build.

Perhaps they see gold in front of their eyes and are thinking of "trying to" sell the sole of Linux to try and reach for it.

And I am most sure that as Ubuntu becomes ever more popular... the ways of using Ubuntu which are deviations of proper Linux administration and use will have the inevitable corruptions of - How To - and - Why, To Do - become even more distorting of their already "different" users basic ways of understanding how to build a Linux.

Ubuntu uses much of Debian as its innards but one thing has always seemed to me to be also obvious...
Debian tries to reach into the spirit of perfection as a goal which it would try to reach for, even though it is not possible. They try hard. This is why Debian is what it is.

Ubuntu sells its soul to the most common denominator, dependent on the work of many others of high caliber thinking to keep it glued together. However, its very human nature of inherent corruption will degrade its core concepts to the base of those goals, based on simple expediency.

That is the difference between those who understand how liberty works and those who do not but are very willing to exploit its existence to further their own goals to the point of the loss of liberty itself.

Ubuntu users are mostly from the migration from Windows and hence they know not what Liberty is or what it demands to keep it.

Sorry if this offends, but I believe it is what is at the core of the problem.

The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

Posted Aug 25, 2008 15:46 UTC (Mon) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]

Thanks for the party political broadcast, can we now return to regularly scheduled programming?

liberty really has very little to do with whether something's upstream or not. A vendor who produces an out of tree but GPL licenced module (and full source) is in full compliance with the GNU four freedoms (and hence with "liberty") but certainly not with upstream first.

Some vendors really get Open Source .. to them, upstream first comes naturally (it even came naturally in 2.4). Some have to be persuaded about the business merits, but get it in the end. Some firmly refuse to see there's any justification but do it anyway because their business model requires that they play in the Linux sandpit. This latter group stay with upstream first because they can't afford to ignore the Linux market although they complain bitterly about the burden it places on them. Finally there's companies who can't ignore the Linux market but decide they can ignore the conventions and address it with things like binary modules.

The only reason the latter two groups stay with us is because of the market size, nothing else. Mark and Canonical's argument is that increasing that market size will pull more companies reluctantly into these groups, plus it will bind their business models more tightly to linux to the point at which it's uneconomical to disengage. As that happens, companies can be moved from group 4 to group 3 because we effectively have them over a barrel.

Note that upstream first only works on the third group because of the market size ... they'd be very happy to dump Linux and what they perceive as it's attendant problems and costs were it not for all those nice, paying, customers using it.

One of the problems that Ubuntu's Adoption first policy is causing is that all the vendors in group 3 want out of upstream first and they use Ubuntu as a club to try to beat other distros into seeing their point of view.

This last is where I'm not sure the future gains promised by adoption first outweigh the current benefits of upstream first ... but it's certainly a valid debate to have.