The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts
The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts
Posted Aug 25, 2008 15:46 UTC (Mon) by jejb (subscriber, #6654)In reply to: The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts by cyfaill
Parent article: In defense of Ubuntu
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.