Daniel> Did Canonical somehow interrupt your work on GNU Arch? Do you Daniel> feel they are responsible for your not having been an active Daniel> Arch developer for well over a year now? If so, can you Daniel> please list how? Be specific.
For background, Stephen's account gets some details wrong but is close enough for now. (It is especially wrong about the nature of negotiations between Canonical and me.) I have two views of the events, one about ethics, the other about economics. I think that Canonical behaved with poor ethics. I also think that they shot themselves in the foot, economically speaking. I don't think that Canonical is alone among free software businesses who make similar mistakes -- they just happened to effect me, personally, in this case. Ethically, the situation began with a public project. The project was endorsed as part of the GNU project by the FSF. The project was supported by busking revenues and, during part of the time, earmarked contributions to the FSF. By "public project" I mean one that is administered in the interest in the public and paid for by public support. For example, feature design was aimed to benefit "everyone in general" rather than, say, a specific company. While I was not myself an NPO when getting busking revenues, none of those revenues were donated as part of a contractual exchange -- they were analogous to money put in the instrument case of a street musician. (Later, the funding situation changed a bit -- as did how I spent my time. Most of my funding at this later stage came from an "angel investor" friend. Some of that funding worked as busking revenues -- leaving me (reduced) time to spend on the public project. Some, however, was spent on a private-interest project of trying to rescue a start-up opportunity for the mess. I mention this for completeness. One early sale resulted from this -- code I wrote for Arch for a private interest rather than as the most efficient available means to advance the public project. Canonical's harm predates this shift. We were of course very careful to make sure that the code written for private a interest did, above all, no harm to the public project and, additionally, provided benefit.) As Stephen notes, Canonical arrived on the scene and perceived that they had a private interest in using the code base of Arch in ways that I expressed grave concerns about. Of course, they are free to use the code in any GPL-permitted way. Nothing per se unethical about forking and doing whatever the heck you like with the code (consistent with the GPL and the values of software freedoms). However, Canonical pursued its plans using a tactic of participation in the public project. They solicited volunteers from the project to work on their fork. They solicited users of the public project to switch allegiance. The rhetoric employed by representatives of Canonical in public forums to do these things was not, as we might say, specifically good. I think that people were misled about Canonical's dedication to the public value of the project -- an opinion confirmed by the outcome of their fork. They were misled about Canonical's technical competence. Somewhat obscenely, as far as I can tell, Canonical was "outspending" my funding to work on the project month to month by amounts well beyond 10x, prbly under 100x. They were able to create the illusion of a flurry of useful activity and promote a false theory of why that activity was useful. They were able to "out market" me. Between two competing companies, those kinds of tactics may be just part of the game. As a way to compete against the public project that created the very opportunity your company is exploiting, I find it to be exploitative. It exploited my labor. It exploited community participation in a public project. At the end of the day, Canonical left behind a public project in ruins. Now some might counter that it is a corporation's *duty* to spend its own resources as efficiently as possible to generate a return for shareholders (even a not-yet-fully-formed or net-yet-public corporation). That, therefore, Canonical's spoiling of the public project was entirely justified -- it's a dog-eat-dog world, no? I agree with the the part about "*duty*". I disagree that, in this case, the spoiling of the project was justified -- simply because there were plenty of same-cost alternatives that would almost certainly have led to a better outcome *for both sides*. They split, they did not win the developer and user communities. They left me in a state of discredit based on highly misleading rumours about why I had made certain decisions. They left me without even the fraction of their resources I had been working on. They left their own fork in such a state that even they had to abandon it. And why? Because the Canonical hackers couldn't be bothered to format code correctly? Choose algorithms a little more carefully? And make interface enhancements in any other way than the first little idea that popped into their collective heads? Because it was just too much bother to help set up a more efficient patch flow to upstream (the project that was underway when Canonical so rudely interrupted)? In my family, when you borrow something, you do your best to return it in as good or better shape as when you got it. When you enter a room full of strangers, you don't bust in like a bull in a china shop. When you see a man trapped under a burning car, you stop to try and help effect a rescue. When you come across an expert in some topic that interests you, you act with respect towards that expert. Canonical seems to know nothing of those ethical values and the outcome of their participation in the public project is a direct reflection of that. Given that there is no reasonable theory showing a necessity for such bad behavior, yes, I lay a lot of the destruction that resulted at their doorstep. So that's ethics. What about economics? The punch-line of Canonical's fork seems to be that, from the perspective of just a few years, they wasted a lot of their own money. They reduced their options (by holding GNU Arch back). They did, indeed, drive their own fork up a tree to be abandoned there. You know, if they respected my technical judgement well enough to want to use my work in the first place, they might have had the foresight to at least hedge their bets by assuming my judgement might continue to be useful going forward. They might have tried to help, rather than brush aside. -t _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
