[GUFSC] Canonical

[Gustavo De Nardin]

Pra quem acha que o Ubuntu é a melhor coisa desde o pão sem casca.

Link: <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2006-04/msg00004.html>

Respondendo à: <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2006-04/msg00003.html>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Suffield <asuffield@>
Date: 03-Apr-2006 17:04
Subject: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] top posting and flame
To: gnu-arch-users em gnu.org


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


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