Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 3, 2008 0:32 UTC (Sun) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287)
In reply to: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld) by Beineri
Parent article: Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

"If Canonical/Shuttleworth isn't willing to invest the necessary money to be able to support Kubuntu LTS for 3 years (in the worst case alone) but on the other side wants to earn money by selling support contracts for a version labelled LTS then this is a problem of Canonical/Shuttleworth's understanding of how "selling support as added value" works in the Open Source business and not of upstream/the KDE project!"

Er, are you willing to pay Canonical extra for KDE in your 8.04 LTS support contract? Are you willing to pay them at all? Do you know anyone who is?

to post comments

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 3, 2008 8:12 UTC (Sun) by Beineri (guest, #39002) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm for sure not within the target audience of Canonical. :-) If Canonical 
has no (potential) Kubuntu LTS customers then why can't they openly and 
honestly say that instead of spreading something like "we would like to 
sell a Kubuntu LTS product but upstream/the community doesn't support us"?

Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

Posted Feb 3, 2008 15:38 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Both situations are not mutually exclusive. The middle ground could be something like "we would like to sell a Kubuntu LTS product but upstream/the community doesn't support us -- to the extent that the product would be profitable". Maybe they would need to hire x additional KDE developers, but the number of expected Kubuntu customers would only pay for x-2. I think it is coherent with what they are saying.

Talking about your projections of the expected number of customers in public is not always a smart thing to do.