So, I’ve just been (implicitly) quoted bashing the Mark Shuttleworth / Canonical business model. (The rating on my ZDnet post is a stunning -21 as I write - my most negatively rated comment anywhere ever - but, strangely enough, no-one’s replied to refute my argument). I thought it was worth expanding my point from my own tiny pulpit.
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aboutblank
15 years 25 weeks 15 hours 15 min ago
This person doesn't like
This person doesn't like Canonical because:
1. He opinions that Canonical is unstable as a company as it doesn't recuperate investment costs based upon highly plausible speculation from the facts
2. He doesn't trust Mr Shuttleworth's officially stated goals and opinions for Canonical
3. The existance of Ubuntu and Canonical in their current state has essentially killed the market for paying customers of "Linux distributions" because of "unfair competition within the Linux distribution market".
4. Should Canonical die, the effort going into Ubuntu would not continue as people would be less likely to be interested in doing unpaid software development work.
I believe this person's mistake is the opinion that other GNU/Linux distribution communities would be harmed when Ubuntu loses its commercial funding. I am yet to understand why other communities would hurt at this probable event.
All in all, I find this issue of Canonical trivially useless as the freedom provided by free software allows us to do as we wish - as long as we are willing to help ourselves; the people that do nothing to help themselves get nowhere.
Another thing that I happen to disagree with is the use of the term ecosystem to describe the free software community. A community of free software supporters do not have to live in the same rules as those that exist in an ecosystem.