[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu: the Microsoft of open source?

Jacob Appelbaum jake at nblug.org
Sun Jan 13 20:10:50 PST 2008


William Tracy wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2008 7:24 PM, Jacob Appelbaum <jake at nblug.org> wrote:
>> I think most of the criticism of Ubuntu derives from it being a for
>> profit fork of Debian.
> 
> *shrug* I haven't had to pay any money to use it.
> 

No doubt. That doesn't make it free software, nor does it remove the
criticism of it being a community created for the benefit of a
commercial enterprise.

>> Furthermore, it isn't DFSG "free" and this upsets
>> many people in the Free software / Open source communities.
> 
> What specifically is in the main Ubuntu distribution that is not
> DFSG-compliant? Supposedly there are some firmware binaries included
> that are not open, but I'm not aware of anything else.
> 

I'm thinking of flash (it's not using gnash yet), drivers (nvida comes
to mind) as well as wireless chipsets that may use NDIS.

This is probably a good read on the subject:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061103-8148.html

A little google-fu shows stuff like this:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/feisty/editors/emacs21-common-non-dfsg

I suppose one could also read about a fork of ubuntu:
http://www.fsf.org/news/gnewsense
http://www.gnewsense.org/FAQ/FAQ#toc3

> The Ubuntu website and forum certainly use closed software internally,
> but that's a different can of worms.
> 

I'm not surprised if people are unhappy about their use of non free
software.

-jake

(All of that said, I think Ubuntu is good in many ways and I use it on a
regular basis. Though most of the time, I'm using vanilla Debian. I
still think it's important to discuss the above mentioned points.)



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