Canonical 75% Gnome Foundation(via Banshee) 25%? Amazon affiliate madness

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I have to say I saw this and was slightly disgusted with Canonical in this respect. Read the ENTIRE article, not just the summary as it does shed light on both sides, sort of...

I guess as they contribute all that code back upstream to Gnome they felt they deserve 75% of what little money the affiliate program earns for Gnome.

 

That's one of the prices you have to pay with "free" software...

If we look at it as Ubuntu being the Linux desktop monopolist among Linux distros this looks really bad: Ubuntu is misusing its market position to stifle competition and exploit weaker "partners". (just replace Ubuntu with Microsoft if you have trouble following this argument.
I know, I know...)

If we look at it what's "fair", i.e. if Canonical's motto was "Do good" (note there's a HUGE difference to a certain other slogan) what would they do?
Ubuntu is often criticised for only taking and not giving back. Compared to its size their contributions upstream are very limited. If they didn't do the work, why should they get paid for it?
On the other hand, if it wasn't for Ubuntu the Linux market share on desktops/latops would maybe half as much and that also affects GNOME, Banshee and their revenues.

I think 75% is faaar too much given the "Ubuntu philosophy" and the whole community spirit. 50:50 maybe but 75% the other way round would have made sense. And by that I mean both morally and business because this news now must be bad PR - I certainly won't be using Ubuntu ONE (but then I never was planing on).

I can't really understand the whole Ubuntu deal. If debian got their act together to release instead of "testing" a desktop focused distro that is up to date, with live CD installer, a "real" firefox and good fonts there'd be no need for Ubuntu. They are the same under the hood and Debian can do anything Ubuntu does yet it's absolutely no viable alternative for the ubuntu user base.
What I also don't understand is that while in terms of polish and bugs Ubuntu sucks pretty hard it's still the best desktop experience out there (apparently going by market share and all that).

 

I'm not sure I understand what's this about.

Is it about the nature of the deal (Canonical alike Microsoft)?
Or about the revenue distribution (25% vesus 75%, affiliates, etc)?

Mrk

 

That's what I'm saying, as in my opinion - a bit exaggerated to get it across...

Banshee was forced to decide between two options that both suck for them. They had no chance to bargain for a fair deal. Canonical basically said my way or the highway.

 

You forget Debian is also built to run on servers so the word Stable means really means EXTREMELY STABLE. I find that their testing branch is extremely stable for desktops and for the most part is just as stable if not more stable then ubuntu..

 

Off topic, I'm sorry. It's his, noons' fault

No, I didn't forget anything. Ubuntu LTS is a very solid server OS too and it comes without any of this political nonsense attached (like Unity or Ubuntu One), it's close to upstream and doesn't pretend to be more than it is (a Debian mod), it only makes a bit of promoting for their landscape offering but that's unobtrusive (iirc a single line in motd).

The main problem of stable and testing is that the apps people care about don't receive feature updates. Hassle free office workstations I understand but it's a showstopper for most desktop users.
The ppas for Ubuntu show that it's possible that you can keep a stable LTS kernel and system yet run the "latest and greatest" of desktop apps on top of that which btw is the model of Windows, MacOS and FreeBSD. It should say something if only Linux distros that traditionally were only focused on servers persist on this backporting business (and that affected all the later distros that are based on them, including distros than only have desktop editions)

Instead of the 6 month cycle in Ubuntu I'd prefer a 1-2 year release cycle, no LTS, same support for every version. Release when it's ready (within reason, i.e. preferably not like squeeze), make some "SP" every half a year to support new software, new xorg and video drivers. Instead of ppas they should officially supply the major (as per popcon) end user facing apps in their latest configuration. In other words the firefox support model for GIMP, O^h^h^LibreOffice, VLC, whatever else too. I know, bundled libs are "bad" but just look at Fedora, it cannot support Firefox long term just like Debian FAILs too (because Mozilla doesn't support stable versions for very long like it used to), and it can't support Chromium AT ALL. Explain that to your users <-
http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html "the Chromium code (on Linux) is not yet doing stable code releases" - it most likely never will, since Chrome was released Firefox is going that direction too. I wonder who will follow suit...

Just one more comment about the Fedora link: They argue how it's more secure to use system libs but fail to mention that Fedora often ships with vulnerable packages that can't be upgraded to the latest version in any reasonable time frame because backporting to the system libs is a tiny bit more complex than just shipping upstream code. This goes for Ubuntu and Debian too. Having said that I also want to remind everyone of the Debian openssl "incident" that was caused exactly because distros mess with upstream code they don't understand.

This is not a rant

 

katio, that blog post was written on 2009-11-30! I'm not familiar with Fedora, so I don't know if the situation there has changed. For Ubuntu, though, stable releases are available from

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/ archive/stable

Quote from that site:"Stable Channel of Chromium for Ubuntu, matching the Google Chrome Stable Channel for Linux"

 

This shows a lack of understanding of what debian is about. It makes no assumptions, it's up to the user how they run their system, as in free. It offers a stable base that isn't constant state of change so the user can get on with the real reason we use computers - to get something done.
Debian can be just like ubuntu if that's what you want. That's the point, do with it want you want, make it what you want it to be. All the tools are there. You've just got to work a bit harder for it. Want firefox? Then install it. Want good fonts? Install patched cairo.
If ubuntu is so great then why would it's user base seek a viable alternative?

 

Does it really? There are always Ubuntu users who want to try something else (e.g., a rolling distro), of course. But the opposite is also true as I've seen in many cases.

 

katio seems to think so.

 

Nothing has changed

Same goes for Gentoo, hell I can make LFS make look and work exactly like Ubuntu...
In case it isn't obvious, most Ubuntu users don't care about that freedom to do whatever they want. They want a system that works, out of the box just like they are used to from Windows and OS X. Nice eye candy buttons for "doing stuff".

That's not the category I count myself to btw. However I certainly wouldn't want to use Debian on a desktop system for numerous reasons.

I don't have any numbers but Ubuntu is often regarded as a "noob distro" for people starting with Linux. I guess actually most of them stick around and only some percentages move to something else these days.

I only expressed my wish that Debian would cater for the Ubuntu user base too, gain traction and become the major distro out there. That's because unlike Canonical the Debian Project still has values and doesn't act like a mini Microsoft, Google or Apple - full circle back to the topic.

 

On the contrary. I find that users just want software that works with the minimum of hassle, not the latest and greatest and in a constant state of change. Real, day to day users want something stable for their workstations and laptops. Newer is not necessarily better.

 

Canonical seems to be concentrating mainly in revenue sharing deals. First they have to fix ubuntu. From version 10, ubuntu live cds don't boot to desktop in my systems running the so called heavier vista without any sluggishness. So I have switched over to Mandriva.