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Comment by PabloOsinaga | Hacker News Reader

This comes across as bad but it is actually not that bad.

Those packages are from the universe repo, which includes ~23,000 packages that historically have been best effort maintained (unlike the main repository with ~2,300 packages that have guaranteed maintenance).

Ubuntu continues providing guaranteed maintenance for the main repo for free as it always have.

Now they are adding additional maintenance guarantees for 23,000 packages (which is a positive addition IMO), and making that available via Ububntu Pro

You can opt to not use Ubuntu Pro and you would continue getting the same guarantees as you were getting from Universe as before (which largely tracks Debian)

More details here in the "What's new with the Ubuntu Pro plan" section of https://ubuntu.com/pro

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> This comes across as bad but it is actually not that bad.

It's actually pretty bad. If you're running Ubuntu anywhere there's a bit of bureaucracy, like a government or large business, you get backed into a corner.

You can never use any of the packages from 'universe' unless you're buying Ubuntu Pro because if you ever get hit with an exploit where there was a patch available, regardless of the circumstances, you'll get crucified.

The insurance company, admin staff, ambitious peers, security analysts, etc. will bury you for not patching a known vulnerability. This is the end of Ubuntu's 'universe' repo for businesses that can't afford $500/year/server. It's just that no one has realized it yet.

Well, yeah. This has always been the case, but now you can pay to not have this be the case. They're not taking anything away. If you had these concerns about the universe repo before Ubuntu Pro, you should not have been using it in the first place.

Nothing changed really. Microsoft or Apple don't provide updates for third party software and people install stuff on it.

> If you're running Ubuntu anywhere there's a bit of bureaucracy, like a government or large business

> businesses that can’t afford $500/year/server

Pick one

> More details here in the "What's new with the Ubuntu Pro plan" section of https://ubuntu.com/pro

Not sure about how they show things which are in "universe" and therefore unsupported. Packages like: Python, Perl, Go, Docker, and more...

If those aren't included in the base OS, that is a bit concerning.

So its basically rpmfusion with security support.

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