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Ubuntu Community Manager: RMS's Post Seems a Bit Childish To Me
spacenet writes "As a response to RMS speaking out against Ubuntu about its privacy-violating integrated Amazon search results, which he considers to be spyware, Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has addressed RMS's statements. In his reply, Jono claims that Stallman's views on privacy do not align with Canonical's, that some of his statements are worded in order to 'generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Ubuntu' and that 'it just seems a bit childish to me.' The comments on the post itself are well worth a read."
Doesn't Amazon pay Canonical if people make purchases? (I might be wrong about this -- if I am, please correct me.)
*If* Amazon does pay Canonical, and Bacon doesn't mention that in his post, I kind of feel like Bacon loses the argument. I mean, if they're getting paid, and he's making posts that say, "We're doing this only because we want you to have the best search experience," it seems a little disingenuous.
I think that is exactly their problem. As I posted in the other related story here, they seem to be hoping that they can make an OS with an 'oooooh, shiny' factors that makes people drop their principles. Asking their users for money is a much better approach than defaulting to sending search results to Amazon, and I think they'd get more money long term. By all means, have one of the 'lenses' installable so that people can do Amazon searches if they want, but having it as a default is not going to make very many people happy.
His big mouth is a counterweight.
No, his big mouth is a liability for the open-source community. He is not a passionate but outspoken advocate of a movement; he is a single-minded, uncompromising advocate for his own opinions at the expense of everyone else's. Either you agree with him, or you are wrong.
Have you ever encountered one of the Free Software Foundation's articles about a particular software topic, like copyright or patents or the advantages of free software? Ever notice that, typically, at least 80% of the citations in the article are to other articles by Richard Stallman? Like this one? The only opinion Richard Stallman really recognizes as objective or authoritative is his own earlier opinion.
Debian isn't too bad, and it's what Ubuntu is based upon, though it's not as "bleeding-edge" while still being stable. Others might suggest Fedora, Arch or Slackware if you want that, and I've heard good things about Sabayon as well, especially in the eye candy department, though it has been a few years.
In all honesty, I keep going back to Debian. My needs aren't too difficult to satisfy, and I can compile something myself if I really need to. I'd recommend using virtual machines to test them first. Why overwrite a perfectly good installation just to find you don't like something?
I have been a captive in America my entire life. Everybody and everything uses customary units instead of metric.
"strongly believe"
Its not a belief thing. He is either wrong or he is not. He has a good track record of being proved right, given time.
"over-the-top rhetoric"
He has in fact given the tools and a legal framework to operate under to enable exactly that, freedom from propriety software.
This importance of software freedom could be the key to preserving the other freedomds you mention, without it the others fall.
It would seem that the "sell outs" always attack the messenger. The movement is just fine whilst the foundations of its formation remain strong and are actively defended. Changing it into something else to achieve growth hardly helps the original organisation grow now does it.
You sound like the established church bashing the messiah. If only he could have been more reasonable, a little less sermonising on the mount and attention seeking, if only he'd just grown up a little. It's just not they way we do things around here.
Ubuntu is ultimately there for Canonical's profit. We thought we could work with folks like that, but obviously we were too optimistic. The goals of the Free Software community are important, and will only be achieved if people like you devote your free time to making the non-profits work as the direct path to users.
Bruce Perens.
No, RMS has a valid complaint.
The concept of being more useful to the consumer is fine. After all, we ALL buy things online. Most of us use the computer for ecommerce of some sort. a feature that makes it easier would be useful.
However, its not the what, but the how which make this pretty dangerous to your freedoms:
1. The user doesn't have a choice of the backend. They don't have the right to select the online purchase service of choice. This is going to make the Ubuntu experiance as one giant advertisement to get you to buy partner related shit-you-don't-need.
2. Targeted ads, at the operating system level. While targeted ads are good, as they reduced the obnoxious system destroying ads of 10 years ago, they do so by spying on the users habit, and compiling dossiers on users. These profiles are then bought and sold on the open market. They are the biggest gross violation of privacy that perhaps exists today.
At least a few specialize in identifying complainers, and critics(silencing them?), to companies.
Having this at the OS level, would make Ubuntu 13.04 potentially worse than MS Windows on the default install for privacy. This is certainly an entire OPERATING SYSTEM on par with the shovelware(removable) that comes with windows.
Instead of selling you an operating system, or selling you service and support on an opperating system. Ubuntu is now selling YOU to the advertising/PR Companies, and through them, anyone else who has the money to pay.
On the bright side, there are more GNU/Linux distro choices, and it should be easy to remove the spyware via apt.
http://linuxmint.com
...but his desire to prioritize the "freedom" of systems over those systems actually doing anything useful is totally unreasonable.
I do have to agree there.
While I believe that the computing world would be a better place if all software was Free, Stallman's approach to advocating it does little to move things in that direction. He divides everything into "entirely Free" and "not entirely Free", and everything in the latter category is demonized. A more useful approach would be to advocate mostly Free systems (ie, Free aside from the odd wireless driver or whatnot, such as Ubuntu) over entirely non-Free ones (ie, Windows). As these mostly Free systems gain actual wide use and further developer attention, their quality improves and it becomes easier to replace the non-Free bits with completely Free.