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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?
$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.
You are assuming that I have a problem with people using proprietary software.
What I *DO* have a problem with, is a program that mixes the free software I write with proprietary software, in the same screens, with the same "free" tag attached to it. As an _author_ who spent close to three years developing free software, I DO care. I think there are good reasons why I should care.
Of course it's their choice to do that. But I can at least point out that, as a free software author, I feel that what they are doing is not ideal.
I also write free software. And I have a software patent. I could not possibly care in the slightest if software is free. If it does the job, that's all that matters.
Removing non-free software from the USC is removing user's choices, and thinking for users by imposing your moral/political code on them. That's presumptuous and wrong.
Let the users choose what they want to use. The free stuff is there. If they care, they can use it. If not, they have more choices.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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.
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.
Not only do mot people not care but his criticism is empirically wrong:
Some of them are marked as "free": they are not free as in freedom, but as in cost. So, a more accurate way of writing it would be "$0".
No where else in the world do people expect "Free" things to also mean that they then own the copyright. If I write "Free" on a sign by my couch by the street I'm not implying that the couch design is free of all copyright encumbrance I'm saying the it costs no money. Open Source redefined "Free" to add the additional degree of freedom to software, but nobody can claim that it's a "more accurate" definition when the existing definition is the broadly known and accepted definition.
You can't "withdraw" free software. Duh. It's free, people can use and distribute it as it pleases them (according to the limitations of the free license you released it under).
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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.
Your problem is english. Users of software (slashdot crowd being the exception) expect one thing and one thing only when they hear the word "free", guess what, proprietary vs non-proprietary is not at all on their minds.
You should be advocating a special indication for "open source". Not that your "free" software is not displayed along some other company's "free" software, as surprise surprise the end user is usually "free" to use both.
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.)