Originally Posted by
koenn
As everyone knows, some bugs in Ubuntu just don't get fixed. As everyone knows, every upgrade to a new Ubuntu release causes trouble and breakage.
This is not a coincidence. Canonical wants those bugs, and its developers are probably instructed not to fix certain bugs. This is clear from the fact that Ubuntu developers' mainly work with upstream Gnome and Xorg : it's precicesly in Gnome that some bugs never get fixed, and Xorg is notorious for breakage - the Ubuntu developers see to that.
Now why would that be ? Because Ubuntu's main support is community support. So bugs and breakage drive people to Ubuntu websites and forces them to search the web for sollutions, and as a result Ubuntu scores extremely well in poplularity contests such as distrowatch and Google Trends.
The 6 months release cycle is, obviously, instrumental in all this.
This popularity helped Canonical to get the Dell deal. Dell in turn benefits from it as well. They're prominently present on Ubuntu.org so they get exposure in the numerous visits to that site.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a secret part of the Dell-Canonical deal that states that Ubuntu should continue to provide bugs and breakage in updates/upgrades.
The ubuntu forums moderators are in on it as well. The association between Dell and a buggy Ubuntu might reflect bad on Dell, so it's the moderators task to counter that by stating that pre-installed OS'es are rock solid and don't suffer from install / upgrade trouble. Another line the frequently (have to) use is that most bugs have to do with hardware and drivers, and the reader is supposed to come to the conclusion that an Ubuntu pre-installed and supported by a hardware vendor is the better choice. Who benefits from that? Dell.
And all moderators happily play along, except for RAV-TUX, who was critical of the Dell deal and got demoted to ordinary forum member as a result.
Dell in turn has to keep Microsoft happy, because Microsoft's main source of income desktop OS market share is in pre-installed OEM versions of Windows. Microsoft therefore doesn't like hardware vendors offering other operating systems than Windows.
Dell benefits from Ubuntu being buggy as demonstrated above, and can use the same buggyness to pacify Microsoft : Windows shouldn't fear the compitition of a desktop OS that can't even get the bugs out of its GUI, and forces its users to go through upgrade trouble every 6 months.
Microsoft is slowly beginning to fear Linux as a competing OS, but a deal such as the Canonical-Dell deal is something it favors : it helps to keep the status-quo, and in the status-quo, Microsoft keeps its lion share of the marker and its source of income. It stands to reason, then, that Microsoft would even be willing to fund Canonical to continue to distribute Ubuntu (with bugs and upgrade breakage, but that's a given). Thats possibly what Marc Suttleworth hinted at when he said that Canonical would not give in to patent litigation threaths, but that he is willing to co-operate with Microsoft in other ways : a "gentleman's agreement" between Canonical, Dell and Microsoft to keep the status-quo and share the benefits.
It would be interesting to see how new events pop up to support this theory. The "sudden" announcement that Kevin Carmony, of Linspire fame, suddenly converts to Ubuntu and makes a big deal out of it on these forums, is certainly something to keep an eye on. It is a little known fact that Linspire has a patent license on some propriatary software that most Linux distributions can't include legally. Linspire acquired those licenses in a settlement over the use of the "Lindows" name, in which Linows had to drop that name, and became Linspire. The other party in the dispute was ... Microsoft.
I'm not sure of the significance of Kevin's move yet. Is it just to introduce the notion of licensed proprietary software to the Ubuntu community, through posts on the forums ? He does have the required marketing skills ...
Or is it something else entirely ? Time will tell - and I'll be listening.
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I remember that. I used to play that all the time
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