[SOLVED] Interesting blog about Debian and Ubuntu

[Knome_fan]

http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2005/06/07?seemore=y#2005-06-07-ubuntu

Quite long but well worth the read.

[poofyhairguy]

http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2005/06/07?seemore=y#2005-06-07-ubuntu

Quite long but well worth the read.


I was just reading that. I found this interesting:


In particular, it was fascinating to be able to just go in as an outsider and sit in and watch Mark, Mako and Jdub, have a fairly serious argument about the community consequences of the last minute Nautilus changes, with Jane (Canonical’s business manager, more or less) watching on and chipping in.

Basically, Mark told the desktop team early on that Nautilus should work one way, which everyone else in the world apparently thinks is stupid, it got implemented but not turned on by default, Mark didn’t notice and got no feedback until a week or two before release, and pointed out that the boss’s directions aren’t optional, it got done, Mark was happy, and a whole bunch of Ubuntu users weren’t. Solutions to the problem ranged from “the desktop team knows what it’s doing, trust us”, “follow Mark’s directions early, so that if they turn out to be stupid they can be changed later”, and the issue fluctuated from “there’s fallout, how do we deal with that?” to “this is horrible, how do we ever avoid fallout like this ever again?”

Please keep the posts sensible please.

[nocturn]

It talked a great deal about LaunchPad in a critical way.

What's the deal with that? I'm not up to speed with what exactly LauchPad is supposed to do.

[az]

It talked a great deal about LaunchPad in a critical way.

What's the deal with that? I'm not up to speed with what exactly LauchPad is supposed to do.

Quote:
"And that’s pretty much the point where Canonical’s not a free software company, but a vendor providing proprietary services for the free software community. I’m thus not at all sure how much its free software development is a core activity, or if Canonical will end up relying on its user community to do Ubuntu development for gratis once it moves from “start up” to “sustainable” mode. "

He seems to forget that you are able to make money in the free software business. There is nothing wrong with that. How else are they supposed to make money?


Quote:
"Of course, LaunchPad seems like a pretty risky project. It aims to do everything, it aims to completely reimplement complicated existing systems, and it’s being developed from spec rather than trial and error. To my mind, that spells disaster in the making; but on the plus side, it’s got money and management behind it. From the meetings I sat in on, LaunchPad sounded like Canonical’s #1 priority for their 5.10 release, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes of that. If nothing does, it’ll be very interesting to see how Canonical reacts to that as an organisation. "

It seems to be a fuzzy project. Canonical seems to be different from Progeny in that it focuses on building a community as opposed building packages. Mark Shuttleworth seems to find more importance in making tools to facilitate the community interaction than Ian Murdock. Progeny is pretty much happy with reusing the existing tools and just bunching packages together.

The fact that Lauchpad is not free is pretty much irrelevant. The difference between using software that is non-free and distributing software that is non-free is a matter of personnal choice.

Look up the affero-GPL, an extented GPL that requires you to make public the changes you made to software even if you do not distribute that software.

Currently, the GPL (and free software) refers only to source code and building software, not the freedom of then end-user to see the source code of a modified version. For example, if you log into your bank's website and they use GPL software, under the affero-GPL, they would be obliged to make public any changes they make to the code they are running, even if they do not contribute these back upstream.

I do not know much about Launch Pad. I may be way of base...