Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Software Center Criticized For Mixing Free and Non-Free Software
An anonymous reader writes: Tony Mobily has been watching the evolution of the Ubuntu Software Center for quite a while now. He had doubts about its interface and its speed, but liked the fact that it offered an easy, down-to-earth interface that allowed users to install software conveniently. However, the evolution of USC is worrying him a lot. Mobily is against confusing proprietary software with non-proprietary software, which USC seems to be doing. USC plays an important role — especially for newbie users, who can use it to discover new software more readily than via the package management system. But is there room for improvement?
He is also the editor of "Free Software Magazine", and too dumb to understand that if you want people to read your articles, you shouldn't cover the content with a big gray box. He is apparently trying to launch a whine-fest that USC, which distributes both free and proprietary software, uses the word "Free" in the price column instead of $0 for closed source software that is free as in beer. I am personally feeling a distinct lack of outrage about this.
Most people don't care. Specifically: Most people just want to be able to get work done, they don't care about your moral highchair.
More like an anti-proprietary fetish, or political extremism, than anything to do with morality. If a person chooses to use a proprietary program there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Sorry, cut&pasting from another comment I wrote, I cannot work out how to link to specific comments.
Dumb? Maybe. I care because I actually write free software. This is the rest of the comment...
I feel the need to introduce myself. I am Tony Mobily. I started Free Software Magazine back in 2004 (!). I wrote about 200 articles on FSM (and many others for Linux Journal and other magazines); some of my articles were published here on Slashdot a few years back
I am also a very active free software coder [github.com]. Amongst my repos, the most exiting one is Hotplate [hotplatejs.com]. I am in the process of documenting Hotplate as we speak. However, I am especially proud of JsonRestStores [github.com].
I have been promoting free software since 1994, and have installed Ubuntu _countless_ times for friends, relatives, and for people I didn't even know.
The overlay ad was there because I am rebooting Free Software Magazine, and I am considering _all_ venues in terms of financing articles -- articles which are then released under a free license. However, since I am not here for the quick buck and I anticipate a lot of hits from Slashdot, I turned the ad off.
I love Ubuntu as a distribution and I think Canonical is doing a lot of things right. However, I feel very uncomfortable with app stores confusing free, zero cost, in app purchases, etc. Seeing such a confusion un _Ubuntu_ itself is particularly painful to me.
I hope that answers the question. I happen to be travelling right now, and comments will come during my night time.
Why bother taking screen space from more useful info?
Because some people have different opinions on the usefulness of that information. In my experience, a piece of Free/Open software will continue to be updated for a while, and eventually abandoned if the developer(s) lose interest, or if the project loses popularity for whatever reason. Later, someone finds a use for it and either forks the project to fix it up or just compiles from source as-is, and the capabilities are there for them to use. Open software provides more options in the long run.
As a practical example, look at all the ARM SBCs around. People would like to use them as a little always-on Skype phone, or as a Teamspeak client so their gaming system doesn't have to bother with it. Those programs don't have compatible, open alternatives, and they don't have ARM Linux versions available.
Having those programs available is valuable, but in my experience, being closed is a risk factor for not working on all of my computers, being picky about library versions in a way that's difficult to fix, and being prone to have support dropped by the developer (or at least lagging distantly behind the Windows version of the software).
I'm not a zealot. Almost all of my machines that have Linux have a Windows partition as well, and I do have some closed/proprietary software that I run under Linux. There are more practical reasons to care about something's license than obsession with software freedom.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Try reading the summary again. This is not about whether or not Ubuntu includes proprietary software--it ALWAYS has.
This is about whether or not proprietary software is clearly identified as such. This is useful for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological. I prefer to avoid proprietary software if there is an alternative, simply because it tends to be considerably less future-proof. If it's an end user application, I don't want to waste my time learning an interface that is more likely than not going to stagnate (with no possibility for a fork or a manual build) or get loaded up with crapware features. If it's a driver then I'm a little less likely to go out of my way to avoid it, but I will certainly look at the alternatives if it's a binary blob and I will make a mental note of what hardware doesn't have a good open source driver for future purchases, purely on the basis of future proofing, compatibility and security concerns.
Call me paranoid, but I really have to wonder what the motivation of the anti-Stallman brigade is. His ideas, like them or hate them, aren't negatively affecting anyone at this point. (This is assuming we ignore the fools who insist the GPL is killing Linux; the GPL has enabled access to a plethora of corporate-sponsored contributions that otherwise would have certainly been closed source. If you want to count OS X as a win for the BSD community that is your prerogative, but it is nowhere near customizable enough for my needs. If you want to pretend that Google would have open sourced Android out of the goodness of their heart even if they had been building on a 100% permissive-licensed codebase from the very beginning, you need to pull your head out of the sand.)
Proprietary stuff is and has been widely available. Nobody uses Gnewsense. There is no significant movement to remove proprietary software from the vast majority of distros. But there is every reason in the world to clearly indicate which pieces of software are proprietary... not so we can try to mindlessly boycott it, but so we can take into account how this might affect us in very real, non-ideological ways.