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____/ Homer on Thursday 27 May 2010 20:00 : \____
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>> Canonical Pushes Skype Into Ubuntu Repository
>
> Of course.
>
> What next, Internet Explorer?
>
> Forgive my cynicism, but isn't the whole point of distro repositories to
> consolidate and coordinate the /build/ process, such that all packages
> are built and maintained against the correct dependencies, then
> published together as a working set, with bug reporting that can
> actually be addressed by those maintainers and other volunteers, because
> (and /only/ because) they have access to the sources?
>
> So how exactly do Canonical's package maintainers propose to address bug
> reports and maintain sane builds of a proprietary package?
>
> What is the advantage of this versus just downloading the blob directly
> from the proprietary software vendor's website? I mean it's not like
> anyone at Canonical can actually /do/ anything with this blob, beyond
> just /hosting/ it.
>
> I've asked this before in other cases, including various other
> infractions by Canonical, but what exactly do they hope to achieve by
> promoting proprietary software in the Free Software community? If
> they're so committed to the proprietary paradigm, then why waste their
> time on something that's only a fringe player in the proprietary world,
> like GNU/Linux? Surely it would be better for them, according to their
> apparent aspirations, to simply join the "90%" in Windows land, and
> promote their proprietary goals to a more receptive audience.
>
> What Canonical is doing is contradictory and nonsensical. It has the
> appearance of sabotage. They're poisoning Free Software, rather than
> supporting and promoting it.
>
> Even if you have more technical and less political motives for using
> GNU/Linux, it's the Windows platform's proprietary nature which is
> largely responsible for its technical failings. Most notoriously its
> tendencies to become infected by viruses, become unmanageable from both
> a developer's and user's perspective, become abandoned leaving users
> stranded, enforcing Draconian restrictions on its users, and operating
> in a clandestine and Machiavellian fashion (i.e. phoning home,
> collecting personally identifiable information without consent, spamming
> users with adware, enforcing censorship, and being abused as a tool to
> spy on and report users to corporate henchmen). And the real irony is,
> Skype is one of the worst offenders of this type of behaviour. So even
> in purely technical terms, it simply doesn't make any sense to promote
> proprietary software in a Free Software community, particularly not
> software this sinister.
>
> Canonical's behaviour is rather more than just misguided. I sincerely
> hope they're consciously in league with the enemies of Free Software,
> because the only alternative must be they're monumentally stupid. The
> result is the same regardless.
Yesterday I posted a followup post to say that the article from Phoronix
is erroneous. Ubuntu told me this after I had written about it.
AFAIK, the Ubuntu repo not even contains Opera. Canonical put that type of
software in the "partner repository".
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz | "Software sucks. Open Source sucks less."
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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