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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

The bigger issue is Ubuntu isn't a product. It's a nice community layer with some high level project management spearheading the direction and a team of core developers adding nifty features. If there is paying for the product then how is that money distributed to Jack John Johnson the guy doing patch fixes on his free time because he enjoys it. Does he get a salary? Some kind of financial bonus? Then you've got the issue of the lower level aspects being a very large part of Ubuntu, is the money in part for them? They're as much the product as Ubuntu One is.

Donations work fine, thats how the community keeps going. You're paying the Ubuntu high level team to continue what they're doing and helping cover the costs. If you like what Ubuntu does, go donate. If they're looking at 3rd party affiliates then maybe they're not getting enough donations, maybe they've been approached and think it's a good fit.

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This idea that what Ubuntu does is just some light packaging is pretty demeaning to their true value. Ubuntu really pushed the state of the art in terms of polish for Linux distributions. You can argue how much of the total product value that is but I don't think it's at all reasonable to say "Ubuntu isn't a product" and that it's just a "nice community layer with some high level project management".

I'm also curious about why you take as a given that money needs to be distributed to "Jack John Johnson"? There's certainly nothing in the licenses that forces it, and when Apple takes BSD software and sells it nobody thinks that's out of line. When RedHat charges for RHEL nobody complains either, even though most of the software is open source as well. What line is Ubuntu crossing here?

I think Ubuntu moved away from "polish for Linux distributions" some versions ago. This was the time they've started making their own user interface with Unity, they're own shop with I-don't-know-what-it's-called (App center ?) and their own online storage with Ubuntu one.

They make decisions you may like or may not like (moving the window controls to the left..) - but at least for me it was time to go - and I don't look back.

The fact that that has happened only gives more weight to the idea that they are in fact producing their own product instead of being a light packaging layer over what everyone else does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Software_Center

RedHat charges for RHEL support, not for the software, they give that for free (see CentOS). Canonical also charges for Ubuntu support.

The fact that you need to strip all the references to Redhat and recompile all packages from source (aka CentOS) and can't actually just get the install image from Redhat like you can with Ubuntu means they don't give RHEL away for free.

I don't know where you get the idea that you need to compile CentOS from source from? They distribute images that are perfectly equivalent to RedHats images. The resulting installed systems are binary compatible - I suspect it's not a coincidence that the strings "RedHat" and "CentOS" are the same length.

The main selling point of RHEL is the stability and long term support that makes software vendors like Oracle comfortable supporting it as a platform. If you install CentOS you get that, perfectly free and open source. How is that not giving RHEL away for free?

Probably because the company that provides RHEL does not provide CentOS.

It could be taken as pretty demeaning, I accepted that as I wrote it, and I don't think of it in demeaning terms. They do a fantastic job, they have as you say pushed Linux forward a lot, I have nothing but respect for them.

I won't however change my opinion. They did push the state of it forward, but so did Knoppix in many ways, and a fairly large amount of other distros. Are they all products? No, they're projects, with varying levels of success. It's a great platform, but I don't think that classing it as a product is helpful. It's a community project, approaching it like RHEL wouldn't work, they have completely different aims.

My argument isn't that Ubuntu is a quick paint gloss improvement, it's that they've taken the core work and improved it rapidly (although Unity could be argued) and teamed it with their biggest marketable quality which is that they've built a community around their work.

Do they deserve money? Yes, of course, thats why they take donations. Should they sell it as a product, as an actual thing? I don't think so.

(if you're working for Ubuntu, I love you and I'm not being mean!)

I don't work for Ubuntu, I'm just a satisfied user, who moved from Debian to Ubuntu and noticed how big of a step change that was. That of course doesn't mean I don't appreciate the value of Debian and the rest of the community. In fact the value of Ubuntu for me is really "Debian with a lot more polish". And the value of Debian for me has always been "a huge collection of free software neatly packaged".

I actually wasn't arguing if they should charge for it or not, I don't really have an opinion there. My objections to your comment were:

1) Ubuntu isn't just a community, it's also a product and a successful one. You can download their new distribution every 6 months and get a lot of value out of it directly without ever engaging with the community. 2) If Canonical were to charge for Ubuntu, that does not mean they need to distribute money to any developers. It's certainly not required by any of the licenses of the software they package or even any of the customs of the community (see RHEL).

Most/all software that Ubuntu gets from others are released under permissive licenses that explicitly permits reselling of the software. So no, there should be no expectation of money to Jack John Johnson for his freely (as in both beer and freedom) contributed software.

I would assume, were Canonical to start selling Ubuntu, that some part of the profits would find its way upstream.

That argument applies to any revenue stream, not just payments to users --- and, in particular, to the controversial deal with Amazon that is making Ubuntu's revenue streams (more precisely, Canonical's) an issue in the larger community in the first place.

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