Unfair competition

[Avi Greenbury]

Edward avanti wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 5:09 AM, Ernest Doub <hideserted at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> what rubbish, you would find that google is a great reference for
> >> problems,
> >>
> > Some [most] people don't know how to phrase a search to turn up
> > meaningful assistance.
> 
> and thats this lists memberships problem how?

Well, because it's a support list. An inability to work out how to use
Google to answer some question is the lists problem in exactly the same
way as the initial question is.


> > I understand that the bulk of the money to pay for what requires
> > money for Ubuntu to fly comes from one source.  I also understand
> > that the one source has yet to see a dimes worth of monetary return
> > for his
> >
> 
> 
> This amuses me, all ubuntu is, is debian rebadged, majority of package
> maintainers are same, all ubuntu is, is a trade mark name, and a
> service by a company for website and offering support.

This used to be substantially more true than it is now, but even then
it wasn't quite accurate. 
There's some (but not many) fairly big differences between Ubuntu and
Debian that do bite when you try to use a solution for a problem on one
of them to fix that problem on the other.

> ubuntu contributes nothing to linux kernel,

Ignoring patches to the code for now, it's worth considering how many
extra testers (or, if you prefer, users) Ubuntu's sent in the kernel's
direction. And, of course, you need a userland to use that kernel,and
where Ubuntu's made massive contributions there.

> > investment. I'm sure that he is very frustrated with the blowups
> > and temper tantrums that are occurring here.
> > Every one of them is another bruise or black eye to the business he
> > is attempting to develop.
> >
> the money they make is in support, so they be happy to vanish lists
> and get more people pay for help.

Only if they believe that all these community support users would just
pay in the absence of a support list, which is clearly untrue. Nobody
else has managed to make that work so I find it hard to believe that a
flavour of such a traditionally communuty-supported OS would manage it.

Canonical clearly want official support channels, that's why there's so
many of them. They just want them to also be useful.

> shuting down the list, could mean the bandwith and hardware resources
> allocated to far better more productive manor

In the grand scheme of things, this list is not expensive to
maintain. The larger problem is probably its impact upon Ubuntu's
reputation.

-- 
Avi