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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?
Tony? Who the fuck is Tony?
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.
I suppose, if they are not segregating the software by license, shouldn't be so difficult to do, just add another column...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
$0BSD is dying.
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.
I do think the Ubuntu Software Center could be better designed for those who care about free software- but ultimately there isn't much positive to be said in the direction Canonical is taking things overall. The company doesn't care about freedom. They care about profits above all else. I wouldn't mind someone introducing a solid distribution with a severely limited set of non-free bits that was a better middle ground for novice users wishing to switch to a completely free system- but for whom it isn't feasible or isn't feasible yet. Trisquel is pretty easy to use, but it's not good enough, for those who're at risk of returning to Microsoft Windows should they find they're unable to cope with the difficulty of living without non-free software.
What we need is a distribution that includes Cinnamon, an Ubuntu base (to ensure smooth upgrades), and only a minimal set of possibly essential non-free software. Ubuntu Mate actually comes pretty close, but it's a dying solution with problems of its own (inherrited from GNOME 2 for which it is built).
"more useful info" is usually just advertising of some sort. Instead of saying *New and Improved*, put the type of license it's under. It's usually just one word, "Open", "Free", or "Commercial". I don't believe it's too much to ask. I do believe the omission is intentional, a bit of quid prop quo going on.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
quid prop quo
Well, you get the gist...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ubuntu repos have non-free packages for $0. It's non-free if you use the freedom definition, not the free beer definition. Those packages are accessible through synaptic.
Free Software is not about being useful, Free Software is about pushing an ideological viewpoint onto people.
Non-Free Software is not about being useful, Non-Free Software is about extracting payment from customers, in one way or another.
If the user experience is for shit (and yes, lots of software behaves like shit) then you have a problem, but it's not the price.
I totally agree. But... in my article I don't complain about USC having non-free software!
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.
And if the proprietary software is declared as such but is *better than* the free software, that's not OK? Not sure you meant to say what your sentence seems to.
The appropriate term would be ethical. It is an ethical, i.e. subjective or untestable objective decision. Of course what your favorite ice cream is an ethical choice too.
I wouldn't know. I use Slackware, and 'taint' the kernel with the Nvidia driver.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sorry:
You mean segregate it like the following?
"Provided by Ubuntu"
"Canonical Partners"
"For Purchase"
Undefined variables... What the hell does "Provided by Ubuntu" and "Canonical Partners" mean? Just spell it out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Do not type and hit a bong simultaneously.
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.
I feel the need to introduce myself. I am Tony Mobily.
Yes we know who you are.
> And if the proprietary software is declared as such but is *better than* the free software, that's not OK?
We ran into this with SCO OpenServer . SCO OpenServer was a pretty good closed source UNIX. The company casually published freeware, open source, and proprietary tools. They then turned on the free software community with fraudulent claims of copyright violation in the Linux kernel, claims made against both other software companies but also against those companies' clients. Much of the legal history of the event is available at http://www.groklaw.net/: one of the problems that extended the lawsuits was SCO's unwillingness to specify, or document, their claims. One of the factors that helped Red Hat in the resulting legal mess was the clear provenance and licensing of every bit of Red Hat code, and Red Hat's very clear careful licensing and segregation of proprietary, closed source tools, and of open source tools for which they could publish the source code and their modifications.
Please read what you comment on.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The mess, as you admit, was a fallacious filing. That has nothing to do with free software being better.
Yes, yes and yes. Thank you.
The mess was _controlled_, and protected from, because the Linux kernel had a clear and open trail for all of its source. This isn't available for closed source software. Litigious companies, especially software copyright trolls and patent trolls, can and do make fallacious claims as a matter of course: the clean and clear provenance of free software, and of most open source software, help prevent exactly such lawsuits. I've faced them and, generally, been able to protect me and my clients from such suits.
The _patent_ trolls are a whole other layer of problem. The GPLv3 was created to help with those, and it has.
Honest question. I want to know.
Because I run Linux on VMs when I'm trying to do platform-specific work (and, as a core developer for a library with rather a lot of platform-dependent - and platform-OS-version-dependent - code implementing those attempting-to-be-mostly-platform-independent APIs, there's a fair bit of that involved).
As a result, I want to spend as little time as possible dicking with the OS, leaving as much time as possible to actually adding new capabilities and fixing bugs. Ubuntu seems to do a good job of that; if you have another distribution to recommend for this, please do. Note that, whilst I haven't yet had to do any kernel work (other people fixed the kernel issues before I got around to building a kernel with my changes), I'd like a distribution where the process of building and installing a new kernel is as simple a process as possible. Fedora fails here. (In the OS on which I last did kernel work, it's pretty much
and it was, as I remember, similarly simple in the previous UN*X on which I did kernel work.)
Hi Shuttleworth, you forgot to log in :)
I can see why you are afraid of Kubuntu but at least you recognised KDE is better than Unity.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Duuuhhhh, only a minority of people speak English, yes it is since the end of WWII the De Facto Lingua Franca of this world but why the hell would we translate everything in English?
If my language preference for the OS is "English" only english books should show up. If I change my language preference to "French" I would only expect French books to show up by default. When you go to Amazon you aren't going to see a bunch of books outside of your native language unless you specifically start searching and teach the site that you speak say Italian.
The overlay ad was there because I am rebooting Free Software Magazine
I encourage you to have a look through the TCDR blog.
You can't handle a simple HTML hyperlink
It's easier said than done. Forums running Slash, Scoop, Lithium, or Vanilla software use an HTML subset to make hyperlinks. But some forums expect Markdown, BBCode, or some other proprietary markup instead of an HTML subset. Other forums censor all posts containing URLs that are posted by anonymous or new users in order to prevent spam. Still others censor all posts containing any URL, such as comment sections below Cracked.com articles and pre-Google+ comment sections below YouTube videos. And many forums don't even offer a preview before posting, including the mobile version of Slashdot last time I tried it.
because the Ethernet support wasn't completely GPL, Debian did not distribute the code in the default installation package to actually put Debian on this server.
A free software purist would use that as an excuse to replace the server hardware with a different machine that is fully compatible with free software. Are there any Respects Your Freedom certified servers yet?
Each Anonymous Coward is rate-limited to post only a small number of comments per hour or per day. Registered users are also rate limited based on their "karma" rating, which is based on moderation of their past comments. So there are probably several users who are posting anonymously.
I typically do this too. Not only does it work faster, it offers way more options. It just works better.... The idea of super easily syncing installed programs through the software center is really cool, but that option doesn't even work for me.
If the software center gets updated to have a better layout, more options, more speed, and perhaps better management of repositories (and the software therein), I would gladly use it. I hope they get around to that, but their tendency to cater to simplicity, I doubt many advanced items will make it in.
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.
I have Skype installed on my Nexus 7 tablet. It has an ARM CPU and a Linux-based operating system called Android. Or by "Linux" did you mean "X11/Linux"? In that case, why can't you run AOSP in a chroot and load Skype.apk into that?
It's just bullshit advertising.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Proprietary software does prohibit running a program except on those few platforms that the publisher has blessed. If a program is available only for x86, you won't be able to run it on your ARM SBC. Free software, on the other hand, can be recompiled for a different architecture.
Or where he's gonna go,
I guess he's got his reasons, but I just don't wanna know
'Cos for twenty four years I've been living next door to...
Tony
Tony? Who the fuck is Tony?
NSFW, 'nuff said. (^_^)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
In general Canonical has never done a good job of highlighting interesting commercial software for Linux (payware or otherwise). Muddling things really isn't their problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I prefer to avoid proprietary software if there is an alternative
You are a Slashdot user. Ubuntu has not and never will target you with their desktop platform. You deserve a better class of distro.
Ubuntu target one kind of user with the desktop distribution, the kind who couldn't give a crap about whether a distribution is or is not proprietary.
If this were Debian or Arch creating this kind of repo then I say we man the pitchforks.
Because some people have different opinions on the usefulness of that information.
What if the people who have those opinions are not the target market for your product in the first place? This is not Debian we are talking about, it's Ubuntu Linux for Grandma v15.0neverstable
You do the Ubuntu crowd a disservice (and yes, I was a user back in the Hoary Hedgehog days, and these days I find Ubuntu-based Mint to be a fairly handy go-to distro when I want a desktop that just works.) Ubuntu users are not synonymous with the Windows or OS X user.
That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.
Even an asterisk for the non-free (as in gratis) would be good. I have not used Ubuntu in a long time but if they have paid software they could use, I do not know, maybe a dollar/pound/euro/etc sign?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Most users do not care about software being free as in speech. Being free as in beer is the major selling (!) point.
Most of the time they are even to surrender any privacy for free (as in beer) stuff.
I'm not doing anything at all to the Ubuntu crowd. I am stating what Ubuntu's own goal was, which was to bring Linux to the masses. To achieve that goal they have considerably dumbed it down and worked a lot on user friendliness. It is one of the most insulating distributions I've ever used, and by that I mean it is a distribution that tries to hide its Linuxness. (Not so much as Lindows but it does it's best).
One of the ways of simplifying things down is to remove things that "people" in general don't care about. "People" (I use quotes to separate it from the Slashdot user base) couldn't care less about openness, and to "people" free has one and only one meaning.
Android is not Linux based. It is Linux hosted. Android is effectively another operating system, an Android developer or user does not see Linux at all. In theory Linux could be replaced by BSD and users and nearly all developers would not notice or care. As for the few developers doing native code, many are making Posix calls, not anything Linux specific, so many of these would not care either.
This is about whether or not proprietary software is clearly identified as such. This is useful for pragmatic reasons, not just ideological..
Now, let's look at this pragmatically:
What do people want when they open the software center? They want to find software (probably do to some specific task).
And they want to know if they can download it for free or if it costs them anything.
The vast majority of people using the software center don't care about licences or source code, as they only want to use the software.
So the pragmatic solution is do make a distinction between free (as in beer) and pay-for software.
Making a distinction between closed source and open source or between limiting and less limiting licences doesn't add anything for the vast majority of users.
Sounds like a good idea or just label them like Google does in play store.
Fair enough; that's a better reason to omit the information than some complaint about wasting screen space.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I'll say it again, the average Ubuntu user might not be tremendously technically proficient but they do tend to understand the difference between proprietary-free and open source-free. Many of them probably don't grasp all of the ramifications of that distinction, but I will say most of them are at least aware that there is a distinction. So, just show it to them and let them decide. It would take up a miniscule amount of screen real estate. Just because you can't imagine people caring doesn't mean none of them will.
The distinction between proprietary and open source is absolutely massive on Windows at the moment. Example: Free proprietary PDF readers (Adobe, Foxit, etc.) are a friggin nightmare, crammed with all kinds of stupid unnecessary features and malware / crapware and then unnecessary functionality changes between releases and perhaps nagware to get a premium version. The solution is simple: install Evince and forget about it. If anything bad ever happens to it (although I doubt there will), it will be forked. I don't have to worry about "creative monetizing" shenanigans and I will never have to waste one minute re-learning anything. Same goes for 7-zip over winzip or winrar, and for VLC player vs. proprietary third party media players, etc. The best advice you can give to anyone looking for a free Windows program for regular use is to try to see if there's an open source project that does what they want.
The situation is generally not quite this dire on Linux at the moment, but this can easily change. The fact is the long-term prospects of any project massively, massively depend on whether or not a for-profit company has total control of it. If it is true that most Ubuntu users don't grasp this, well, the easiest way to educate them is to put a little [Proprietary] stamp on stuff and over the course of 5+ years let them watch as half of their proprietary programs die off or get crapped up, while 90%+ of their [Open Source] stamped programs survive (possibly in forked form.)
Try pure debian.
That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.
Don't confuse knowing the difference with caring about it. I've using Linux since the late 1990's. I have a CS degree and am a programmer for a living. I understand very well the "free in beer vs free as in speech" argument.
HOWEVER, most people really only care about the "zero cost" definition of free. And when it comes to open source most only care about the source actually being available, not whether its under the GPL or not.
"Libre" as it is applied by the zealots is a concept that only a very small subset of computer users care about - even if they understand it. You're not going to get them outraged by explaining it.
Consider the opposite: lets say Ubuntu listed software as "Free", but when you clicked install it prompted you for payment credentials for $5, with the justification being that you're free to modify the source and do as you wish, but the software has a monetary cost. THEN you'd see outrage because it'd be stepping on the definition of free that people actually care about.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
People are anti-Stallman because most people are pragmatists instead of idealists. I applaud the man's ideals. I'm willing to give up a certain amount of my time and treasure to promoting, using, debugging, and creating open source software. I don't consider user software freedoms important enough to be absolutist about. As you say, the primary benefit of open source is that it remains more valuable in the long run, and most people don't have the luxury of only considering the long run.
Personally, I think that distinguishing between open and proprietary licensing sounds simple and sensible. Stallman is in some important aspects a religious figure, and it's worth noting that being a saint or otherwise devoted to a moral principle is historically an excellent way to be stoned to death. Also, as a trivial UI change it's practically guaranteed to lead to weeks-long flamewars. In other words, it's pretty much the raison d'être of slashdot.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
This may or may not be the attitude of the majority of users going in, but if you are clear upfront about which programs are proprietary and which are open source then people will learn on their own that open source programs are simply more reliable in a future-proof sense. (Much less likely to stagnate without a fork, or to be overhauled with a crappy new interface, or suddenly modified to include malware/crapware features.) It might take them a few years to figure this out, but you can assist in the learning experience by clearly labeling what is and is not open source.
See the examples I give in this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
If the quality of the software is otherwise equal, free software is better; I think that's the point that Teun was making. You can build it for any computer you like, and there is less worry about it being abandoned because new people can get the source and run with it. But no, it's not the case that the free software application for purpose X is always higher in quality than the non-free application for X.
First, there is the question of whether non-free software should be in the Ubuntu Software Center at all. The purist camp of free software, personified by Richard Stallman, believe that it should not. Shuttleworth's vision of Ubuntu includes availability of non-free software, so trying to argue that point will not change Ubuntu. People who want a completely free software distribution are free to create one, and many are already available.
The second question is about disclosure. Some of feel that the USC should be more clear about the licensing of software; that it should be clear when you are downloading whether you are getting something with a free software license, something with available source but a restrictive license, or something that is available only in binary form with no source code availability. (Programs that you have to pay for are already easy to tell apart.) I believe that improved license disclosure can be consistent with the mission of Ubuntu, and that the community should urge Canonical to make that happen.
The details page for every piece of software available in the software center includes a "License" line which indicates the type of license, i.e "Proprietary" or "Open Source". If you care about whether your software is proprietary or not, you can just scroll down a bit to find out what license a piece of software uses. If you're the type of person who's willing to go to the effort of only using free-as-in-speech software then scrolling down really shouldn't be too hard.
I wasn't talking about the performance in one single instant in time'; I was talking about using the same piece of proprietary software (remember, this is FREE proprietary, not $$$-proprietary) over the course of several years. Do you have any examples of this working out for you? Because my experience is that free proprietary software does not say free, does not stay updated, does not stay malware-free and/or does not stay usable for very long.