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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

This comment touches on something I've noticed in our community over the last few years that is greatly accelarating. It's not without reason either as the corporate belt-tightening brought on by covid and high interest rates has led to corps making decisions that aren't in the users' interests. But swinging the pendulum all the way to the side of "only community stuff, no corporate" is not a good solution. It makes a whole lot more sense to just judge the project and the commercial entity by its merits: is it actually doing harm to the project? if they're being good stewards, I see no reason not to support (and even praise) them for their open source work.

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Eh - the world is never black and white, just shades of gray.

Canonical have done most of the work for LXD (including directly employing the main developer for years). Until now, they've been doing it under an umbrella project that was specifically not Ubuntu focused (to quote linuxcontainers.org: "The goal is to offer a distro and vendor neutral environment").

Now they've moved the project directly under Ubuntu, why?

The answer to me seems to be that they still going to do development, but they will no longer try to support anything but Ubuntu (and really, my guess is it will go the route of microk8s and become snap only/first, so more of a middle ground).

And I don't really blame them for that - they're doing the work, they can focus on themselves. But it does mean there is now a need for someone to do the work to become the packager for other distros. That development has to happen somewhere else now.

That may well be this repo, it might not.

We have no plans to drop support for any other distro. I like that open source serves more users and use cases than its creators imagined :) We've moved our development to the Canonical github repos because that's the only way we can continue to set the policy for the project, but we have not lost interest in LXD, nor are we forking it (we're the upstream), nor are we opposed to contributions that enable other distros that we haven't got to.

I'm not sure I agree. Any project run by a commercial entity can be broken beyond recognition by said entity trying to squeeze out every ounce of money. This danger is not present with a community-led version. Sure, development might slow down or stop, but the same will happen once the commercial entity loses interest.

If you use commercially-led software, you have to trust the publisher to stay aligned with your interests for the entire duration of you using it. This might go okay, but it might not - and there isn't any commercial entity who won't start squeezing when they feel necessary. So why expose myself to the whims of someone who might flip at any second?

It's quite right that commercial entities tend to focus on commercial imperatives. But Canonical is unusual - I founded it precisely to support a more open approach to open source than I was seeing from the other enterprise Linuxes in the early 2000's. We have a nearly 20 year track record of balancing community and company interests in Canonical and Ubuntu, in part because I have sufficient control of the company to stay true to that original vision.

Of course, things may change at Canonical if I am no longer involved. That's a reasonable risk to think about and have a plan for. Some paranoia is constructive. One of the nice things about open source is that you can fork it if you want to. But to do so just because Canonical might in future take a different view than we have to date seems like its paying too high a price for that paranoia :)

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