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Is Ubuntu Selling Out or Growing Up?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the six-of-one dept.

AlexGr notes an article by Jeff Gould where he says " Sometimes I wonder whether Ubuntu is really an open source software company any more. Yes, yes, I realize Ubuntu is not a company at all but a free Linux distribution, GPL'd and open source by definition. But still, the Ubuntu distro is sponsored by a traditional for-profit company. The answer that has recently emerged to this question is, "yes and no." Yes, of course, because Ubuntu's web site promises that the distro "will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates." But Ubuntu the enterprise ecosystem — understood as the collection of desktops and servers running Ubuntu in a given organization — is not."

4 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. I really have no idea what you're talking about by jimicus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Shuttleworth has never pretended Ubuntu was purely about being nice to the community - he always planned that one day it would bring some money in.

    It follows that Canonincal has to offer something that they charge for. And seeing as they've pledged that the distribution itself remains free, it makes sense that the things they charge for are the kind of things a business might need and might be prepared to pay for - support and bells and whistles that aren't in the free version and frankly aren't terribly relevant to the individual with one or two systems.

  2. Re:Just how is Canonical making money, anyway? by wild_quinine · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is this one of those internet boom style companies that only makes money in theory, or do they actually have an income source? They've figured out a way to power light aircraft using only the condensed ire of militant slackware users.
  3. Should web-apps be open source? by JustinOpinion · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It takes the author quite awhile to get to his point about the greater Ubuntu ecosystem being non-free. His point is:

    Canonical has introduced a new twist into the Ubuntu business model with the launch of its Landscape systems management and monitoring tool. Basically Landscape is very similar to Red Hat Network. It allows you to track the configurations and status of all your Ubuntu desktops and servers, and to install updates under central control (though with full customization options). And the catch is? This is completely proprietary code. It's not GPL'd, you can't see the source, and you can't get it for free. In fact, you can't even have the binary, because Landscape is provided as an online service only. Only the Landscape client is free and open source, which it has to be of course because it cohabits physically with the kernel on each of your Ubuntu machines. (emphasis added)

    So his complaint amounts to: "Sure they give you the source code for all distributed binaries, but they don't give you the source code for a subscription-based online service that they run."

    For those of us who believe in software freedom, the question is really "does software freedom extend to web services?" Is providing someone with a web service akin to providing them with a binary? That is, you should give them access to the source code (where I'm using "should" as shorthand for "it's the free software thing to do").

    The fact is that this is a point of contention in the community. It was debated considerably during the writing of GPLv3. Both sides have valid points: on the one hand, an online service isn't distributing software to end-users. On the other hand, this may be a "loophole" that allows companies to modify free software, but deny the eventual users of that software the ability to use the changes or further modify the code.

    The author was inherently assuming that not providing code for web services was non-free. But really that's an unfinished debate, and he should have pointed out the nuances.
  4. They don't make money by sentientbrendan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Canonical was founded by the billionaire Mark Shuttleworth.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

    He's basically putting up all the money for the operation on the vague hope that it will pay off someday. They really don't have a business model, just a really generous investor/CEO.

    So... it's basically a charity based operating system.

    Which raise the point, why is this douchebag
    http://www.interopnews.com/news/is-ubuntu-selling-out-or-growing-up.html
    writing an article about how the company is "selling out" by making some very small moves to make money off of an operating system they spend large amounts of money on, and give away for free?

    It kind of pisses me off that random internet idiots who don't make software for a living call anyone who tries to a "sellout."

    The article mentions that they are trying to recoup a small amount of the money they are dumping into Canonical by selling some proprietary software.

    So what? I'm sick and tired of internet morons tearing apart people that actually have to work for a living. It's not enough that they give away most of their software for free and under an open source license, but if they charge for *anything*, if you develop one line of proprietary code and sell it to make a buck, some random jerkoff will mouth off at you about how "software wants to be free," and you're "oppressing" them with your price tag and your non-gpl license.

    Free software isn't a business model. None of the distros that don't make you pay money *per install* make any money. Canonical loses money, Suse loses money. The only people who make money making operating systems do so by selling some proprietary code, or (as with red hat) devising schemes to make people pay money for shrink wrapped copies of open source code. Ubuntu has by far taken the least obnoxious approach, i.e. giving away most of their software, and letting you use their repository for free updates (which others don't do), but developing some proprietary stuff they let you buy separately.