[ale] Ubuntu and the price of Unity

[Greg Freemyer]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:16 AM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:49 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Let me sum that article up simply: the GNOME project doesn't like
>>> Canonical's Unity project because it might be more popular than their
>>> in-development "Shell" project.
>>
>> That's not what I read. GNOME is wary because Cannonical  requires/uses a
>> copyright/license scheme that signs away copyright to Cannonical and allows
>> for closed-source proprietary code. That is very bad from a GNOME
>> perspective as they got started because of QT license issues with the
>> framework for KDE.
>
>
> So? GNOME isn't writing software for Cannonical. What Cannonical does
> has no bearing on what GNOME does. If Cannonical is violating the
> GNOME license(s) (with GNOME code included in their Ubuntu
> distribution) then GNOME can take legal action against them.
>
> In regard to my "summary" of the article, look at the last three
> paragraphs (the actual summary) of the article. In particular, let's
> look a the third to last:
>
> "The troubling possibility for GNOME developers is that the bake-off
> is happening outside the big tent of the GNOME project, and if Unity
> fulfils its promise and the GNOME Shell fails to pick up users, the
> GNOME community may have no choice but to adopt Unity as a default
> shell for GNOME."
>
> Why in the world would GNOME care if Ubuntu users like Unity more than
> Shell? Why would that force GNOME to adopt Unity over Shell in their
> own project? That makes no sense at all. That's like the Enlightenment
> project saying "Well, people seem to really like the GTK+ toolkit so
> we're going to stop what we're doing and use it for the base of our
> DE."

AIUI, Canonical is the "owner" of Unity and they have expressly
reserved the right to change the license as they see fit.

So if the GNOME team decides Unity is the best desktop for them and
start submitting patches to Canonical then they lose control of the
software they are writing.

And it could be in a couple years Canonical says, thank you for all
the work, but all future releases of Unity will be as a commercial
product and is only distributable by Canonical!

Note: I did not see what license Unity currently has.  If it is GPL,
Gnome could fork it in event of the above, so it may not be that big
of a deal in reality.

Greg