Tom's right about the nature of Canonical's business model - they are all about getting control over free software development, presumably so that they can later profit from selling that control to other companies who wish to influence free software in specific ways. That's not a new observation; I caught on to it about six months ago just by observing their public actions (admittedly, somebody pointed it out to me). The most obvious case is Launchpad: why is it deliberately not free software in any way? Canonical don't have the excuse of being ignorant of the advantages they would gain from publishing it.
[I find most of the rest of Tom's conclusions to be a bit of a stretch, but I'm not really interested in whether they're true or not, so I'm ignoring them]. I find it instructive to remember where Mark Shuttleworth got all the disposable capital that's funding this exercise. He did it by creating Thawte, a company that got rich by encouraging and exploiting the ignorance of users and companies in the dot-com era - Thawte and Verisign between them put about the myth that getting SSL server certificates signed by them accomplishes something important from a security perspective, and that failing to do this makes you vulnerable to 'hackers'. As a result, https servers and browsers have all been drawn into this hopelessly broken concept. It's nice in theory, but since the certifiers will issue valid certificates to the wrong people[0], and users will just click 'ok' even if their browser complains about a bogus certificate, the system doesn't work in practice. The current spate of phishing attacks demonstrate that quite nicely. Canonical looks to me rather like an effort at repeating this fairly successful business model. I just wonder who he's going to sell it to, after gaining control over the development of a number of significant projects. Google's plausible, they have a similar business model - imagine how much money they could make if they could integrate advertising into a large number of applications (assuming that Windows loses its dominance). Sure, it's "free software", you are free to remove the advertising yourself if you want. But none of the "official" releases will. Free software lost round 1 to Microsoft. Maybe it'll lose round 2 to Canonical. Hard to predict. Sourceforge already tried to do it once, but failed, so there's at least a chance Canonical will also fail. Just don't confuse Shuttleworth with a philanthropist. He's a businessman. Canonical's investing, not donating. [0] http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html _______________________________________________ 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/
