As hard as it may be to believe, there are times when even I am speechless.
I keep the goings-on of Canonical and the Ubuntu community at an arm’s length — the real reason is to keep my blood pressure down. But actually, the gravity with which Canonical pulls Ubuntu further from its original FOSS orbit is nothing short of tragic, and it’s something that weighs heavily on any FOSS advocate.
Two influential Ubunteros — Martin Owens and Elizabeth Krumbach — weighed in on the situation recently and both of their recent blog posts deserve a good reading.
Martin writes in his most recent
blog item:
“But I have to be honest, there isn’t an Ubuntu community any more. There’s a Canonical community, an ubuntu-users gaggle and maybe an enthusiasts posse. But no community that makes decisions, builds a consensus, advocates or educates. It’s dead now, it’s been that way for a while.”
What’s interesting is the discussion in the comments in Martin’s blog, especially the observations made by Jef Spaleta, who has always maintained an even keel in pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.
In my opinion, Elizabeth’s detailed
blog post
goes into great depth around the current situation, and it sheds a lot of light on it. But I think she’s unnecessarily hard on herself when she wraps up her blog with this:
“As a Community Council member I do feel like I’ve let the community down for not realizing what was happening to the community sooner. The duo of optimism and trust is not always a strength, it blinded me to some serious truths about how things have changed and our responsibility in this new community dynamic.”
Frankly, I am hoping that this works itself out, but I don’t hold out much hope. So I really have nothing to add to the two blog posts above, other than for those who are in this position to think carefully about the future.
This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy, Larry the CrunchBang Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license
. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.
(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)
Article Source:
Nothing to add here | Larry the Free Software Guy.
Note: Sounds like its time for a lot of Ubuntu users to leave the distribution, They should have done so years ago when it stopped standing for what Ubuntu originally stood for, when Ubuntu first came out I was amazed at how it changed Linux. That is now lost, It’s now just a corporate entity trying to make money at the expense of what made them great to begin with, The users and community.
Cutting Edge Linux 
Great article. Makes me glad I went to Linux Mint a few months ago. I agree with the concept of community of doing what WE want not YOU.
Yeah I totally agree with both of your comments. More like Apple or Windows and to be honest I do not accept anything closed source. I believe Apple is actually worse than microsoft because they not only have closed source software but hardware as well. It’s something I just cannot trust. I would not be surprised at all if they were scanning peoples data when their equipment is sent in for things such as battery replacements.
Reblogged this on anthonyvenable110 and commented:
More and more like Apple each day
This is starting too sound familiar. A grassroots OS, developed by enthusiasts more turning pro….. I can think of an OS or two that has done this dance before…..
Yeah, It is sad to see hard working communities that contribute a lot to open source get abused by thier corporate counter-parts.
Here’s your oxymoron phrase of the day! “Altruistic Corporate Governance”