Actually that's not true... [LWN.net]

Actually that's not true...

Posted Oct 20, 2008 11:01 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Re: Ubuntu DOES create something by tialaramex
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

Ubuntu is terrible at doing half of what a distribution is supposed to do (mediating between users and upstream)

But Ubuntu's business model practically depends on this. If you'll look at Ubuntu's site you'll find that they sat that "every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees" - and they follow on this promise. Yet they don't say "every computer user should have the freedom to whine to us and we'll help him". This feature is sold separately. How many users who complain that bugreports are ignored and communication is one-sided are actually paying for support?

Ubuntu quite explicitly separated these two issues - it has nothing to do with being popular or unpopular. Since Ubuntu is popular they can offer you palliative: ask users for help - sometimes it helps, sometimes does not. But if you want to have non-zero priority for your bugs - you should pay for the privilege. Looks pretty logical to me.

There is no reason Ubuntu can't fix their mess and stay popular.

But can they fix their mess and still be profitable? That's the question.

There's no reason to believe that people who don't like Ubuntu because it is /causing them problems/ will still not like it if those problems are fixed.

But there are reason to believe that people who are happy with free support will not bother to pay.

P.S. I'm not saying Canonical created this problem on purpose. But since they have no incentive to fix this problem and every incentive not to... Why bother? IMO sensible approach for them will be to ignore bugreports for most of the cycle then early after release check if they still persist and fix them if they do for the next version of Ubuntu. Unless these are security-related problems, of course.

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