Hey, this post is really old.

It was published and/or last updated over 3 years ago. It may be very out of date; as the world, and I, may have changed a lot since I wrote it. I could have completely changed my mind about the below in the intervening time. I don't make a habit of revisiting old posts to update them. If I had, you would see the updated timestamp above, and likely a note about what I changed at the bottom of the article. That being said, if any views I've expressed here are particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

As CNR ships proprietary software, does it use DRM? Is CNR going to be shipped by default in Ubuntu?

For me, those would be real killer-arguments against Ubuntu and Canonical. I mean, Canonical has the right to make money with Ubuntu but then they should please do so supporting or selling Ubuntu and not integrating third party applications.

The question that I ask myself is: “Is Canonical evil?”

I mean,

• Launchpad is closed source in order to compete with Red Hat and other Linux vendors [1]
• Mark does a lot of FUD against Red Hat, who contribute a lot to the FOSS community (also on the upstream side) which Canonical does not do.
  Ubuntu kills Debian by taking it’s packages to universe, modifying them and not contributing back (there would be other ways fixing bugs in Universe, for example, fixing bugs in Debian and then syncing).
• Rosetta destroys upstream translations: Some nice users think “Hey, let’s translate this application / change some string” and translate it using Rosetta. The translations do not have any quality and upstream does not receive the changes. In most cases, Ubuntu gets bad translations. Yes, I already posted that and a possible “fix” to Rosetta-users ML.
• Dapper-commercial: Canonical surely gets money for doing d-c and not few. It fears me that one single company can say “Hey, let’s make a dapper-commercial repository and let’s ask our developers to modify gnome-app-install in a stable release so that it automatically adds a new repository on Canonical server”.

This and some things that I can’t remember are the reasons for not contributing to Ubuntu anymore on the side of fixing bugs. Though, I will still use it as my OS, since it is the best one I ever used. I think that since Canonical is the financier of Ubuntu, they can drive it the way they want. But it does not strength the trust me (maybe the community) if they do such things.

[1] http://charismacode.blogspot.com/2007/01/powers-and-repositories-ubuntu-and.html Over time, it will be open sourced. Right now we compete with Progeny and Red Hat and other companies, so we need to have a unique offering to do so effectively, and that’s Launchpad.

[2] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/77

Some links about that:
http://forums.lugradio.org/viewtopic.php?t=2271&view=previous
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/cancomical-lynchpad
http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2005/09/04
http://charismacode.blogspot.com/2007/01/powers-and-repositories-ubuntu-and.html

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