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The Free Software Foundation's Statement On Canonical's Updated Licensing Terms
New submitter donaldrobertson writes: After two years of negotiations, Canonical has updated the intellectual property rights policy for Ubuntu Linux to address a disagreement over how the software is licensed. The FSF announcement reads in part: "In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical's attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many conversations with Canonical's management and legal team proposing and analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides their expert analysis in a statement published today." Richard Stallman thinks there are still other issues to address saying: "While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process solves the most pressing issue with the policy ... the policy remains problematic in ways that prevent us from endorsing it as a model for others."
Debian was probably the worst choice of a distro to migrate to. It may have been convenient due to Ubuntu being based off of it, but Debian has its own very serious set of problems. Since Debian switched to systemd some time ago, many users have reported many serious problems. The mailing lists and bug tracker are full of these reports. The switch to systemd itself was very disruptive, and went against the wishes of a huge part of the Debian community. This ended up fracturing the community, and caused a lot of animosity between the Debian collaborators. This is such a divisive issue because systemd is such a critical part of a Linux system, yet its flaws are numerous and its benefits to users are few. As I'm sure you're aware sysadmins can't have Linux servers that don't boot properly.
FreeBSD would have been a better choice to migrate to. It gives many of the advantages of Linux distros, but with a much, much slimmer chance of systemd or a systemd-like system ever being used. The few attempts to suggest such systems have been rejected by the FreeBSD community at large. Many of the best Debian users and sysadmins ended up switching to FreeBSD after the whole systemd disaster pretty much ruined Debian for them.
I think you've just gone from one set of problems to another set of very similar problems, I am afraid to say!
He may not be the only voice in the free software world, but he is one of the most proactive.
Linus is sometimes willing to give his $0.02 about something outside the kernel, if you ask directly. RMS may be highly opinionated and abrasive, but at least he's out there pushing back at those that would take away rights. That's certainly more than a couple complaints on some tech forum (said the AC).
What's the GPL do for third party driver developers? It's a boat anchor.
That means BSD has terrific hardware support then, right? Oh wait, they have generally had fairly crappy support (especially a few years back) and the only BSD that has had great support is, of course, the completely proprietary and locked down OS X that legally requires the purchase of overpriced hardware to use. Yay permissive licenses!
Also, Google's Apache fetish is something to be viewed with great concern. There is no reason for them to spend so much money and effort replacing GPL components with Apache except to give them a kill switch for AOSP, which they will use the moment they feel the OSS crowd is more of a threat than a boon.