Comments on: Upstreams, Downstreams, and Revenue Streams in Ubuntu

By: fugu

fugu — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 01:47:29 +0000

If you don’t like Apple’s terms, no one forces you to ship on their platform. Closed platforms (Xbox, Playstation, etc) have been around a long time, and Apple is considerably more open than they are. If you do not like their terms, go ship on Android, Windows 7, or BB instead.

That said, the upstream/downstream issue is interesting. It would be nice to see some clear solution proposed. Linux needs both upstream AND downstream to be funded and functional – and not only those that have tracking cookies, but it certainly would be a good place to start.

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Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:07:05 +0000

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By: TkJH

TkJH — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 04:31:50 +0000

“But I think people are forgetting where Ubuntu’s users are coming from, or what they’re coming for. Nobody installs Ubuntu just to look at a pretty brown desktop. They come for applications. Applications, mind you, that are generally developed by third parties and with most of the packaging work done by Debian.”

Not necessarily true in all cases. I choose to use Ubuntu (or other Linux distribution) mostly because of the OS. The bloat on Windows, long boot times, and absolutly obnoxious intrusion of dialog boxes on my work process frustrates me… Ubuntu has really cleaned that up. With regard to applications, I can use the same applications on Windows, Mac or Linux for the majority of the work I do… In short, I can choose the OS independent of the applications.

While I agree with the big picture that we need to keep pressure on the corporation side to be responsible, I generally think this will work itself out. If Canonical gets too greedy, its easy to jump ship— especially with Linux where there are numerous distributions.

By: bjorn.madsen

bjorn.madsen — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:13:24 +0000

Human decisions are always systematically biased. no news here.
But how does Canonical utilize the possibility to allow users to vote what goes in and what does not?
Isn’t that the most relevant user statistics of them all?
I’m just thinking it might even reveal that there are multiple user clusters and not ‘just’ netbook, desktop and server.
A path worth thinking about :-)

By: bnight

bnight — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 01:02:19 +0000

Liking what ClearFoundation (non profit) and ClearCenter (for profit) are doing to curb these natural conflicts. ClearOS is a solid and stable open source gateway, network and server distribution dating back to the ClarkConnect days.

http://www.clearfoundation.com/

http://www.clearcenter.com/

It’s simple… use ClearOS as you would like from ClearFoundation. Pay ClearCenter nominal amount for desired add on services if your customers ask for them.

By: chdslv

chdslv — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:41:04 +0000

“But when the corporate interest and community interest butt up against one another, it appears that the community loses.” How true! Its all about money!

We have distributions, but not operating systems, and that’s the problem. If we have a GNU/Linux operating system, (one or many) that would boot into WM/DE and have some simple applications and a download manager for other applications, the end user will download anything he/she likes, Banshee or whatever…no 75% or 30% or whatever. It is the community, which really makes these applications/packages for Linux, etc, not a commercial company, as such a commercial venture MUST have profit to exist, but the community can exist without profit, as actually all the devs lose is their much needed sleep!

By: znmeb

znmeb — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:40:21 +0000

“I’d like to think that companies in the FOSS space can do better than elbowing community projects out of the way for a slice of affiliate monies. If Linux is going to succeed long term on the desktop or on consumer devices, we need vendors that are doing what Canonical does well without getting hoggy with the community or ISVs that make applications users want.”

I’d like to think that too, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I think we’re seeing a consolidation in the Linux *business*, and the lawyers and accountants are making sure they get paid first. ;-) That’s what’s behind Oracle suing Google over Java, Oracle’s decision to drop Ruby support from NetBeans and probably Nokia’s decision to put MeeGo on the back burner.

I don’t think in today’s environment that any major open source project can survive without strong corporate backing. Linux exists today because of Red Hat, SUSE / Novell / Attachmate, Canonical, IBM, Dell, Oracle, Intel, Google, etc. It exists because it solves problems for people with the money to pay for solutions.

By: bobwya

bobwya — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:05:11 +0000

Well a lot of people are already muttering about jumping ship to Linux-Mint Debian…
Personally I would have more respect for Canonical if they were using their weight to push for Developers/Manufactures to produce paid licenses for SPDIF-DTS/DD-live decoding drivers, BluRay playback, etc. All the sort of stuff that a modern OS needs…