Sad.
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| r_a_trip Mar 26, 2010 7:27 AM EDT |
Too bad that Lucid seems to be attractive. While this should be a boon to any Linux distro and a reason to celebrate for all who love Linux, it's just that I think that over the last 6 months Canonical has started to show its true colors. (Or have I opened my eyes?) Canonical and Mark S. seem to be no different than Redmond or Cupertino. The early warnings from the Debian community were true. Canonical just leached (and leaches) from Debian to get an early start. Mark S. launched a very succesful hype campaign and created the illusion of community involvement. The most vexing part of it all is that I was asleep at the helm and just accepted all that community smoke and mirrors unquestioningly. Now we have a company that takes open code, dresses it up as a community distro, but behind the marketing it is under tight control. Worst of all, it is focussed on capturing new Linux users and their first taste of Linux will be a smoke and mirrors afair of openness and they won't even recognise it as such, as they are unaccustomed to being truly in control. A brilliant move from Mark S., but in a Gatesian way. I shudder when I see the first lock in signs between Ubuntu One and the piggybacking Ubuntu One Music Store. Windows refugees won't see the danger of a UO account. It will look convenient and free enough. They won't realize that Canonical now controls their data and has a foot in the door to tie more stuff together under the Ubuntu One banner. Canonical can then conveniently up the space requirement to make a for free UO account practically useless and extract revenue on the for fee UO dependency. Get your Ubuntu free, but Ubuntu One makes you pay for eternity. The real, deep tragedy here is that Lucid will be plugged relentlessly on the net and in print left and right, but the true base of it, Debian Squeeze will be hardly mentioned once released. Testing/Squeeze really shaped up. Running it is a pleasure and it is clear that a lot of what is attributed to Ubuntu is really Debian. I'm really mad at myself for having been blind and for having been part of the group pushing a thin for profit veneer to prominence, while being oblivious to the true source. Now I feel the weight of six years of unnecessary damage to real freedom. |
| jacog Mar 26, 2010 7:30 AM EDT |
Lots of straw there Mr. trip, care to add some meat to your statements? |
| tracyanne Mar 26, 2010 7:37 AM EDT |
I wonder if mr trip has actually tested Ubuntu One.It would seem not, if his commants are anything to go by. |
| jacog Mar 26, 2010 7:45 AM EDT |
Well as far as I know, the Ubuntu Music Store will be available on non-Ubuntu systems also. Would be awfully silly of them to try and use it as an Ubuntu lock-in. Not saying they are incapable of silly, but in this case it's silly that'd cost them money. |
| azerthoth Mar 26, 2010 11:14 AM EDT |
Barring the 4th paragraph (and I take issue with 'cloud computing' to begin with) I see no straw. @jacog, careful bub, you have pronounced yourself heretic and will probably draw the wrath of the believers of 'teh one!!11!1' |
| r_a_trip Mar 26, 2010 11:36 AM EDT |
Fourth paragraph: See corroboration on linux-magazine. Up in the clouds Note that the new shop is not called "7digital Music Store" or just Ubuntu Music Store, but Ubuntu One Music Store. Thus Canonical is implementing the cloud in its context. The DRM-free songs in MP3 format with a bitrate of at least 256 kbits/second are not loaded on the local machine, but in the Ubuntu One cloud. From there the Ubuntu One service copies it to .local/share/ubuntuone. Music thus appears on all computers that have Ubuntu One accounts, but it does exclude users who don't want Ubuntu One cloud access, either because they're skeptical of online storage or don't have access because they're not Ubuntu users. http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Ubuntu-One-Music-S... |
| jhansonxi Mar 26, 2010 2:52 PM EDT |
Canonical monetizing their brand and market position with Ubuntu services doesn't bother me. Their music store isn't anywhere near iTune's size and considering where Zune is with ridiculous amounts of money thrown at it, they won't be dominating the market anytime soon. |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 26, 2010 5:56 PM EDT |
Canonical is in this both to spread the gospel and make money. For every person like us that they turn off, they'll probably get 10 to 100 people from the Mac and Windows world who will appreciate Ubuntu One, the music store and the purple, PPAs, Mac-style buttons, etc. I'm not saying it's right, but that the way it's going to break, I think. |
| tuxchick Mar 26, 2010 6:21 PM EDT |
I think that when Canonical does start to show a profit, which they will thanks to OEM deals, that is when all the hype and baloney about "yay we're a big happy family and everyone counts" is going to fall apart, and unpaid volunteer contributors are going to wonder why they're working for free for a rich man selling a for-profit product. Unless there is some plan to reward contributors in some way. It's bad enough to have a lot of nonsense about meritocracy spewed forth, when it becomes a money issue it should get interesting. |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 26, 2010 6:51 PM EDT |
I guess Fedora, the kernel, GNOME, MySQL, etc., get around this by having their developers paid by companies. The more people who hear about and subsequently use Ubuntu, the more that will be receptive to the many dozens of options out there for their OS and application choices. |
| herzeleid Mar 26, 2010 8:50 PM EDT |
@ra_tripp - wow, ubuntu sounds really evil. So how do they compare on the scale of evil, to, say, microsoft, or apple, or oracle? @tc - whoa, that's harsh, condemning canonical for something you think they might do at some point in the future... |
| hkwint Mar 26, 2010 9:30 PM EDT |
Harsh or not, there are communities and there are communities. OOXML, Moonlight / Mono / OpenSuse / Fedora / OpenSolaris communities: They are all communities, but they're not ideal-centered communities like FSF(E), FFII, EFF, RepRap or the like - and they are communities created to help some company, and as a side effect help society. There are also communities which probably fall in between like Mozilla, OLPC et all. |
| tuxchick Mar 26, 2010 9:50 PM EDT |
herzeleid, that's not condemning Canonical, it's no secret that their goal has always been to turn a profit within a reasonable time frame. More an observation on human nature-- money changes everything. |
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