Comments on: Is Ubuntu Commercially Driven?

By: ajlec2000

ajlec2000 — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:40:08 +0000

I believe what’s truly important is that the community development phenomenon continues to grow. Ubuntu is taking some interesting steps that I believe gives that phenomenon greater depth. At the same time those who move from one distro, in this case Ubuntu, to another are looking for something that works for them. This gives strength to other ideas and concepts and I believe everyone benefits as this happens. Its what happened with the inception of Ubuntu. So long as more users come to this community we will all will continue to enjoy those benefits. However these new users come to join us and whatever keeps them in it, we all win.

By: madura

madura — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 06:42:14 +0000

In my personal view linux should be in the commercial arena, too. I don’t want linux to be free as in ‘free beer’. I don’t think programmers will code up big serious programs for free they too need some wage for their work. Canonical is handling this well(relatively, its not perfect) I think people would pay a fair amount of money for the programs they want, with the freedom included that’s all. Ubuntu will package commercial services with it since it needs some income but you shouldn’t blame it on Ubuntu, I mean if you come from windows you really should know Adwares. Now those are the real pain in the neck, may be some of you are fearing that Ubuntu will go that way too I don’d think so because Ubuntu is Open a guy can easily rip the unwanted stuff off and redistribute it, Ubuntu can’t be a full grown adware since it’ll shutdown Ubuntu. Everything should be in balance.

About user opinions, I’m afraid that I have to agree with Mark. Since Ubuntu is redistributable and open, Canonical has all the right to decide what they are distributing, again its not a democracy.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:37:47 +0000

Martin,
point taken. I should have put that line in my signoff to encapsulate as an aside. I’ll do it correctly this time.

-jef”I’ve just have this thing for dead horses since I was a kid. I think it was my way of balancing out my sisters’ obsessive interests in live ones.”spaleta

By: doctormo

doctormo — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:45:30 +0000

Jeff: I don’t think English is the first language of Shermann and he might not be able to communicate in a way that doesn’t sound a bit odd. I appreciate your specific and well targeted start of your debate and fully agree with your rationale, but less dead horse towards the end would have been good.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:58:04 +0000

Are you freakin kidding me? Canonical _more_ transparent about its business decisions than Red Hat. Both companies have their secret business plans. Both companies make press releases about new business initiatives. Canonical just likes to say the word transparent a lot because they know people like hearing it. Repeat something enough and it becomes a truism..but not the truth.

You have _zero_ information about Canonical’s _actual_ business. You have _zero_ information about what OEM customers are telling Canonical what they want to see in Ubuntu. Those conversations are happening and they most definitely impacting what’s going on in Ubuntu and aren’t part of the public record. OEM partners are at the table with Canonical well ahead of a public statement about stuff like Unity. You were told about Unity well after development of it was begun in consultation with OEM customers. C’mon.. stop drinking the koolaid. Is there a public development roadmap for UbuntuOne? Did you forget that UbuntuOne was a private hush internal canonical thing well before it was publicly announced? Is there a public roadmap for Landscape? Hell, it took years of public beatings to get Canonical to open up Launchpad development and even then it took another round of public beatings to get them to change their mind about keeping packaging building bits closed. How quickly we forget the dark times when Shuttleworth repeatedly told people that Launchpad was going to stay closed for unspecified business reasons.

I’ve already pointed on a specific instance when Canonical did something less than transparent in Ubuntu with regard to eucalyptus pre-releases. It’s your turn now to point out a specific example of Red Hat failing to be transparent enough with regard to business decisions. Stop defending your personal preference for one company over the other with general statements. Point to specific business decisions that Red Hat has made that you feel fail to meet the standard set by Canonical or back away from the comparative statement which holds Canonical up as somehow better in this regard. I’m more than prepared to argue the merits of such an opinion with multiple specific examples that would support the opposing viewpoint to the one you have expressed. If you want to trot out the dead horse, I’m more than happy to flog it. And trust me, the argument that Canonical is somehow a more transparent corporate entity is a dead horse.

-jef

By: shermann

shermann — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:22:30 +0000

@Jef, I didn’t say “RedHat does secret things in Fedora”.
What I said is, that RedHat doesn’t sponsor Fedora because of unselfishness.
Fedora is the testbed of upcoming “new” technologies, which needs a wider audience and many many developers. For RHEL there are business goals (e.g. improvements of the virtualization layer, better cluster/pacemaker support etc.pp.) . When those goals are set, I’m sure that some of the Fedora Devs who are on the payrole of RedHat do have the order to add this to the next fedora release, and they have to work on those goals. To have a better testbed for the goals, you need a large userbase, which Fedora has. But you will never here from RedHat that they want to do that and that on Fedora, because they want to have it for RHEL.

The difference between RedHat and Canonical is, that RedHat always had a “box product” which they are selling for over several years now. Canonical doesn’t have such thing, they have “Ubuntu” as Distro and they not pretending to not earn money with Ubuntu. RedHat should just say “Fedora is the Ubuntu for RedHat, we are testing new things which will going to be in one of our new RHEL releases”.

Again, I never said “RedHat does secret things in Fedora”. RedHat as commercial sponsor of Fedora doesn’t do this, but they aren’t as transparent as Canonical and their business decisions are for Ubuntu.

And, last but not least, I know many RedHat Devs/Fedora Devs and Novell/OpenSuSE Devs, and they are all doing really a great bunch of OSS work, which I really appreciate from my Heart.

I just criticize the dual moral of some people. Canonical always said, they want to earn money with Ubuntu, and we all know RedHat and Novell want to earn money with their distros, but sadly, they are not as public transparent as Canonical is right now. And I also think, that most of the critics about the commercial point are raising, because Canonical and Ubuntu right now is bigger hype then RedHat/Fedora and/or Novell/OpenSuSE is.

Counting in Linux Years, RedHat is an old fart, Novell was just a rider on the Linux train when they bought SuSE, and now Novell is also an old fart. Therefore, the awareness of Canonical in the public is much higher then the awareness of RedHat or Novell.

No offence,

\sh

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:23:13 +0000

@Juanjo:

You know what my favorite _secret_ thing is to date. Canonical spinning up publicly consumable release candidate eucaluptus packages for public release in Universe from a _private_ launchpad source tree making it impossible to verify that the checksum of the sources in their package correspond to a particular branch revision. That was awesome. All for the sake of being able to be the only vendor releasing binaries of eucalyptus 1.6 so it could be a PR bullet point.

Canonical talks the talk.

Red Hat walks the walk.

By: valentin

valentin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:57:17 +0000

Ubuntu is commercially driven but that isn`t the problem … the problem is the community isn`t really minded and it can`t be minded since it really hasn`t any way to contribute financially to Ubuntu.
This problem could be solved if canonical would create the infrastructure for users and businesses to pay for desired features or designs … this could be developed by the community and canonical can charge a commission and use the money to develop Ubuntu as a great platform for the community to develop for .
But i`m sure this is something really surreal because maybe Mark Shuttleworth is to proud or to many say it just wont work.
As for paying for FOSS or other software … i know i wont pay … i would contribute for it`s creation but not once it is created maybe i`l donate if it`s really helpfull

By: Juanjo

Juanjo — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:00:27 +0000

@Jef: I guess he won’t answer because it’s secret

It sound to me like APple’s strategy with the antenna issue: blame others of doing the same.

By: Jef Spaleta

Jef Spaleta — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:07:17 +0000

Red Hat does stuff in secret inside Fedora? What? News to me.

Hell man, Red Hat’s Community Arch team has gone above and beyond and even reveals budgetary information to help community people help be part of the decision making process on how to spend money on events and outreach. That’s how committed Red Hat is to openness.

What secret Red Hat doings inside the Fedora project space are you personally concerned about?