<story><title>If it&apos;s not practical to redistribute, it&apos;s not free software in practice</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/665175/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vezzy-fnord</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation.&lt;p&gt;The FOSS obsession with &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;integration&amp;quot; is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies.&lt;p&gt;Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: &lt;i&gt;they leave everyone else alone&lt;/i&gt;. They stay in their corner, they don&amp;#x27;t bother, they don&amp;#x27;t intervene. They don&amp;#x27;t start a massive integration effort to drag everyone else in every time they devise something new.&lt;p&gt;We should be commending Canonical for this.</text></item><item><author>pnt12</author><text>I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company&amp;#x27;s trademarks when forking their applications.&lt;p&gt;Canonical&amp;#x27;s relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the shared work, while Ubuntu most of the time paves its own way - there&amp;#x27;s a lot of Ubuntu only software, such as Unity, Mir, etc. that you just dont see in other distros.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>creshal</author><text>&amp;gt; They set their own agenda with limited cooperation.&lt;p&gt;Canonical depends on their community for everything from the very OS (Debian) to marketing to support.&lt;p&gt;Yet, they&amp;#x27;re crippling their community at the same time with their IP policy and their general refusal to integrate with software projects &lt;i&gt;they depend on for survival&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;This is, simply, unsustainable. Canonical cannot fork everything and do their own thing (not without quickly going bankrupt – unlike Apple, which has no problem with say, developing their own SMB stack if needed); and they cannot continue alienating potential (and current) users and upstream sources.</text></comment>
<story><title>If it&apos;s not practical to redistribute, it&apos;s not free software in practice</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/665175/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vezzy-fnord</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation.&lt;p&gt;The FOSS obsession with &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;integration&amp;quot; is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies.&lt;p&gt;Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: &lt;i&gt;they leave everyone else alone&lt;/i&gt;. They stay in their corner, they don&amp;#x27;t bother, they don&amp;#x27;t intervene. They don&amp;#x27;t start a massive integration effort to drag everyone else in every time they devise something new.&lt;p&gt;We should be commending Canonical for this.</text></item><item><author>pnt12</author><text>I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company&amp;#x27;s trademarks when forking their applications.&lt;p&gt;Canonical&amp;#x27;s relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the shared work, while Ubuntu most of the time paves its own way - there&amp;#x27;s a lot of Ubuntu only software, such as Unity, Mir, etc. that you just dont see in other distros.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hohenheim</author><text>Canonical&amp;#x27;s contribution is welcomed as long as people could continue it without getting blocked by their IP.&lt;p&gt;There is no obsession over &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;integration&amp;quot; as you stated. It is a valid concern that if others can not contribute freely, we are killing the essential of what made Ubuntu possible.</text></comment>