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Comment by dustinkirkland | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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