Ubuntu One - was GNOME vs Canonical

Tue Mar 15 17:27:22 UTC 2011

 AFAIK, Ubuntu One client has always been open, but the server site is
closed (which if nothing has
changed from what I last heard, still the case).

The problem with this is that it really should be called Canonical ONE
or whatever, since it is
a service offered by Canonical that has not a lot to do with Ubuntu.
This makes it somewhat
confusing for the users. Many have raised that issue at the time, but
Canonical owns the trademarks
for Ubuntu, so there is not a lot that could be done about it.

It some ways, it is not different than i.e. dropbox.

You can always discuss the merits of this, however, this is a form of
business model that is pursued
by lots of companies who claim to be advocates for FOSS. Some examples:
RedHat, Novell, IBM who spend
a lot of money for development and advocacy of real FOSS, but also
pursue other business models using
proprietary software.

In some ways that are the strings that are attached when corporations
are donating some or lots of their
resources. Not everybody is commercially successful by staying 100% FOSS.

Could Canonical do it differently? I do not know. Since it is a private
corporation, the public has no
right to see their balance sheets and hence it would be difficult to
make such a determination. At least
Canonical is not disingenuous about it. It would be very easy for
Canonical to start a third party corporation
run by a black knight doing the same thing without people knowing the
association. Instead you know what the deal is.

Would it be better if all of Ubuntu ONE would be FOSS. For FOSS overall
it probably would be. The reason why
it is done is to some extend an attempt to "monopolise" the market or at
least gain advantages. However, since
the client is already open, anybody could reverse engineer the API for
the server and develop a similar
server application and still compete. Hence, it is not strictly a
monopoly, and it is not clear if
just the association with Ubuntu would for Ubuntu ONE be the same
advantage irrelevant if the server is open or not.

I think, without defending Canonical, these issue are less important
than a lot of patent-troll nonsense that is
going around. Surely, it let's at least some people claim that Canonical
is hypocritical, but in the end, there is
no hard prevention for anybody to provide competing servers for Ubuntu
ONE clients or forks thereof. Maybe the time
is better spend to develop something like this then spending lots of
time discussing it.

Just my 2 cents (Canadian!)
- Ralph

On 03/14/2011 11:37 PM, James wrote:
> I've installed 11.04, and it's pretty horrible(unity) IF I do install
> ubuntu 11.04 I think I'm going to install cli and then install
> gnome-shell..Personally thinking of installing arch linux on my
> i7(mostly because mdadm package is out of date)
>
> I don't like how Canonical "contributes" to the FOSS community, they
> privatise their version for 1-2 years and then release the source code
> afterwards(see: Ubuntu one)
>
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre
> <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com <mailto:mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 5:04 PM, george.standish at gmail.com
>     <mailto:george.standish at gmail.com>
>     <george.standish at gmail.com <mailto:george.standish at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     > Darcy,
>     >
>     > Regarding your statement about Gnome 3s "install-ability", you may
>     > want to see
>     https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/690045
>     >
>     >> 3) I don't imagine there will be any problems getting Gnome 3
>     running
>     >> in Natty (or Oneiric if it's not packaged in time for Natty) with a
>     >> click of a button in Software Centre, if that's what you prefer.
>     >
>     > Looks like gnome-shell is blacklisted, for the moment.
>
>     Well, that's partly true, but there is still a way to install
>     gnome-shell on natty: through a PPA. The Desktop team provides a PPA
>     for the gnome3 stack, including gnome-shell, and theboard, linked
>     here:
>
>     https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team
>     <https://launchpad.net/%7Egnome3-team>
>
>     Note that it goes as usual for PPAs; if it breaks your computer you
>     get to keep the pieces. I haven't tested it myself, but this is
>     probably in the PPAs I'd trust a bit more than the others, given its
>     source. Re:
>
>     Regards,
>
>     Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com
>     <mailto:mathieu-tl at ubuntu.com>>
>     Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl
>     <http://mathieu.tl>@gmail.com <http://gmail.com>
>     4096R/EE018C93 1967 8F7D 03A1 8F38 732E FF82 C126 33E1 EE01 8C93
>
>     --
>     ubuntu-ca mailing list
>     ubuntu-ca at lists.ubuntu.com <mailto:ubuntu-ca at lists.ubuntu.com>
>     https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ca
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> 外に遊びに行こう！
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-ca/attachments/20110315/3854500a/attachment.html>