SFC and FSF Achieve GPL Compliance for Canonical IP Policy | Hacker News Reader

SFC and FSF Achieve GPL Compliance for Canonical IP Policy

sfconservancy.org

You guys don't even want to know what triggered this, suffice to say, canonical is not a happy open source love fest.

You SAY that, but your saying that makes me want to know what triggered this.

Let me rephrase - I can't actually say what triggered at least one of these complaints, since it would violate my ethical obligations.

Suffice to say, as the press release says, it turns out that was not even the only complaint they received, and it turned out the FSF had received other complaints as well.

So yeah.

That was confusing until I read your profile:

"I'm an open source lawyer who hacks on compilers."

Makes much more sense that way. And is also a much more enticing tease, incidentally.

What an unfair pile of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to lob such a vague accusation. Downvote.

I'll start with: It's not an accusation. It's a statement. One you clearly disagree with, which is fine.

There was a clearly implicit accusation of some sort of misbehavior on the part of Canonical.

Again, there is no implicit accusation. I am stating outright there was misbehavior. That is a statement.

What do you think the complaints to the SFLC and FSF from multiple parties were about ?

I don't see you complaining that neither of these parties gave details :)

I'm not complaining about anything but the claim that you made no accusation. A statement that there was misbehavior is an accusation. I'm open to the notion that it was explicit rather than implicit...

Thanks alot for raising these issues with the FSF, really, it seems like very few people actually care about these issues :(

Well here's an explicit accusation of misbehavior to sate your hunger: Canonical has deliberately gone out of its way to stomp on its users, taking advantage of Ubuntu's once-upon-a-time reputation as being "community-driven" to prey upon and exploit that community for failed commercial gain. The Amazon Shopping Lens is but one example of this.

You're delusional if you honestly believe Canonical has any semblance of morality. I'm pretty sure cosmic rays zapped the neurons in Shuttleworth's brain, causing him to take on all the downsides of a Jobs-sized ego without any of the benefits, and now Ubuntu has gone from an excellent modernization of Debian to the second-worst distro (behind only Fedora, though this is increasingly marginal).

Hyperbole does not help anyone, even if it's hyperbole for the purpose of reinforcing some more reasonable point (which I have no way of knowing is the case here). Saying Canonical has no "semblance of morality" is over the top to say the least. I'll take dry boring truth over exciting made-up drama any day.

Oh, how much I wish my remarks were hyperbole. If anything, I'm understating it.

You seem to believe I was making a dramatically broader point than I was. I was narrowly objecting to the claim that there was no accusation.

> to prey upon and exploit that community for failed commercial gain.

AFAICT, Ubuntu doesn't really make money: it's basically Mark Shuttleworth funneling some of his fortune into a Linux distribution. That's a pretty good deal for us end users in many ways, and I don't really blame them for trying to at least break even.

I'm well aware of this, which is why I indicate that it's for failed commercial gain. IIRC, they're making some modest money in a support and administration role (with things like Landscape and what not), but I've yet to see a big Ubuntu-based project actually be successful by any measure.

I should probably make an absolute accusation, then:

Canonical's IP policy was in direct conflict with the GPL. Canonical were distributing GPLed works that I hold copyright on. Canonical refused to discuss the issue with me. Eventually I talked to the FSF and discovered that I was not the first person to raise concerns about this. It's difficult to square the idea that Canonical is an open-source friendly company with its behaviour towards the people who wrote the software they depend upon.

From what I remember, these changes happened around the time Mint started gaining traction and were redistributing Ubuntu packages wholesale.

I'm not sure how I view Canonical any more. It seems to be consciously trying to be a Microsoft.

It wasn't just mint they threatened.

I don't, actually, because I don't really care.

The GPL has held back open source and left the door wide open for Apple and Microsoft to push a locked-down cloud future in which general purpose computing has been or is in the process of being destroyed for 99% of the population.

It's a stupid license that grew out of naive politics, and has done nothing more than made the world suck more; quibbles over pointless GPL licensing minutia are a waste of resources and fail to inspire in me a dramatic response.

I'd be interested in how the GPL has held back open source and what license would be better. Haven't the licenses like BSD/MIT just made it easier to take open source code and lock it down?

Apple's cloud is based on BSD-licensed software.

So no.

I wonder if attitudes such as yours actually hold "open source" back. In my mind it can't be good to gin up infighting for no good reason, especially on a forum thread like this one that is not at all related to the topic of permissive vs. copyleft licensing.

I'm not sure what your age is... but I suspect you might not remember the world of personal computing before the GPL and free software were everywhere. If you do remember those times... it is very difficult for me to put myself in your shoes and understand how you come to the conclusion that the GPL has made the world suck more.

I suspect that if the Linux kernel was published under a BSD-style license, Canonical would provide binaries without source, and their patches would be proprietary. My suspicions are based on the fact that Canonical are trying to make it difficult to redistribute their work, so much so that they were violating the GPL before introducing the trump clause mentioned in the article.

I think sfconservancy sums it up pretty well with "full permission to redistribute Ubuntu as a whole remains in question."

While I'm happy that there is full GPL compliance, there are other parts of the stack such as X11 which are not GPL and don't mention anything about not adding additional restrictions ontop of the binaries.

Just a quick follow up to this, I just had a look at the X11 license ( https://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy#X11_Licen... ) which mentions a 'copy' of the software. In my interpretation of the license it also means a binary copy.

A few followups:

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/07/15/ubuntu-ip-policy.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35969.html http://jriddell.org/2015/07/15/ubuntu-policy-complies-with-g...

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