Bradley M. Kuhn

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Back Home, with Debian!

Thursday 14 January 2010 by Bradley M. Kuhn

By the end of 2004, I'd been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I'd lived with periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when I couldn't even get X11 started — for the sake of using a distribution that maximally respected software freedom.

I'd had no trouble with ‘potato’ for its two year lifespan, but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I couldn't spare the time for upkeep. Running ‘testing’ was the next best option, as I could pin myself for 3-6 months at a time on a particularly stable day and have a de-facto “release”. But, I slowly was unable to spare the time for even that work, and I was ready to throw up my hands in surrender.

At just about that time, a thing called ‘warty’ was released. I'd already heard about this company, Canonical, as they'd tried earlier that year to buy a domain name I technically own (canonical.org), but had long since given over to a group of old friends. (They of course had no interest in selling such a “hot property”). This new distribution, Ubuntu, was Debian-based, and when installed, it “felt” like Debian. Canonical was committed to a six-month release schedule, so I said to myself: well, if I have to ‘go corporate’ again, I might as well go to something that works like the distribution I prefer. And so, my five year stint as an Ubuntu user began.

Of course, I hadn't always been a Debian user. I started in 1992 with SLS and quickly moved to Slackware. When the pain of that got too great, I went “corporate” for a while back then, too. I used Red Hat Linux from early 1996 until 1998. I ultimately gave up Red Hat because the distribution eventually became focused around the advancement of the company. They were happy to include lots of proprietary software — indeed, in the later 1990s, Red Hat CDs typically came with as many as two extra CDs filled with proprietary software. Red Hat (the company) had earlier made some efforts to appease us harder-core software-freedom folks. But, by the late 1990s, their briefly-lived RMS (aka Red Hat Means Source) distribution had withered completely. By then, I truly regretted my 1996 decision to go corporate, and fell in love quickly with Debian and its community-led, software-freedom-driven community. I remained a Debian user from 1998 until 2004.

But, by the end of 2004, the pain of waiting for ‘sarge’ was great. So, for technical reasons only, “going corporate” again seemed like a reasonable trade-off. Ubuntu initially looked basically like Debian: ‘main’ and ‘universe’ were FaiF, ‘restricted’ was like ‘non-free’.

Sadly, though, a for-profit, corporate-controlled distribution can never remain community-oriented. A for-profit company is eventually always going to put the acquisition of wealth above any community principle. So it has become with Ubuntu, in my view. The time has come (for me, at least) to go back to a truly community-oriented, software-freedom-respecting distribution. (Hopefully, I'll also never be tempted to leave again.)

I didn't take this decision lightly, and didn't take it for only one reason. I've gone back to Debian for three (now) seven specific reasons:

• UbuntuOne's server side system is proprietary software with no prospects of liberation. This has been exacerbated since Canonical now heavily focuses on strong integration of UbuntuOne into the desktop for the Lucid release. It seems clear that one of Canonical's top goals is to convince every Ubuntu user to rely regularly on new proprietary software and services.⁰
• Canonical has become too aggressive with community-unfriendly copyright assignment policies. Copyright assignment on Free Software can be put to good uses. However, most for-profit corporations design their copyright assignment process primarily to circumvent the company's potential copyleft obligations; Canonical's copyright assignment is sadly typical in that regard. Even worse, Canonical's management has become increasingly more aggressive in pressuring the community into accepting such copyright assignment policies as a fait accompli. (I'll likely write more on this issue this year, but in the meantime, my “Open Core” Is the New Shareware, Michael Meeks' Thoughts on Copyright Assignment, Dave Neary's Copyright assignment and other barriers to entry, and this LWN article are all good “further reading” resources.)
• The line between ‘restricted’ and ‘main’ has become far too blurry. I was very glad when I first saw Ubuntu's “you're about to install restricted drivers” warning window, and I find that a good way to deal with the issue. However, there are many times (particularly during initial install) when Ubuntu doesn't even inform the user that proprietary software has been installed. I realize that there's a reasonable trade-off between (a) making someone's hardware work (so they don't think Microsoft is better merely because “it works”) and (b) having a fully FaiF system. However, this trade-off is only reasonable when the users are told clearly that they own hardware made by vendors opposed to software freedom. If the users never know, how will they know what hardware to avoid in the future?
• Updated on 2010-01-19: This one is less of an issue to me than the others, but it shows the same pattern of Let's do more proprietary software on our platform that Red Hat went through in the 1990s. Namely, Canonical is now directly encouraging customers to run proprietary software on Ubuntu. (Updated on 2010-02-03: it turns out Canonical was already doing this a long time ago but I didn't know about it until 2010-01-19. (Thanks to J.B. Nicholson-Owens for the info on this.))
• Updated on 2010-01-25: osamak kindly pointed out that Canonical also has plans to offer a facility for installing third-party proprietary software, called the “Software Center”. This appears to be similar to services that help install proprietary software on GNU/Linux systems such as Linspire's system and Click-and-Run.
• Updated on 2010-02-06: Canonical has named Matt Asay its COO. Matt has an often stated that sometimes proprietary software is a better option for customers and believes that software freedom, as a political and moral cause, should be given up, in favor of pragmatically providing proprietary solutions whenever it is convenient. Specifically, in Matt's own words:

  Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong choice for a customer … The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs.

  I would not want to run a distribution led by someone who believes proprietary software and FLOSS are equally legitimate. As a side note, I also find it quite bizarre that Canonical would hire someone to run its operations whose past statements clearly disagree with closing Ubuntu Bug 1. (Also, Matt Asay said in an interview that Canonical has a goal of deploying more proprietary application software.)
• Updated on 2010-02-17, 2010-04-21: After the (very good) news 13 months ago that Canonical would release LaunchPad under AGPLv3, Canonical abandoned the authentication and login system for LaunchPad (and many other Ubuntu/Canonical online systems), and replaced it with proprietary software, but then released it in April 2010.

(Updated on 2010-02-17: As can be seen above, my mere list of three reasons posted just one month ago has now more than doubled! It's as if Canonical made a 2010 plan to “do less software freedom”, and is executing it with amazing corporate efficiency. As Queen Gertrude says in Hamlet, One woe doth tread upon another's heel, so fast they follow.)

When considering all this and taking a step back and look at the status of major distributions, my honest assessment is this: among the two primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation distributions (aka Fedora and Ubuntu), Fedora is clearly much more software-freedom-friendly. Nevertheless, since I've twice gone corporate and ultimately regretted it, I decided it was time to go back home — back to Debian.

So, during the last week of 2009, I took nearly two full days off to reinstall and configure my laptop from scratch with lenny. I've thus been back on Debian since 2010-01-01. Twelve days in, I am very impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now available upstream as well. This isn't the distribution I left in 2004; it's much better, all while being truly community-oriented and software-freedom-respecting. It's good to be home. Thank you, Debian developers.

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⁰ For more information on the danger that proprietary network services pose to software freedom, please see the Franklin Street Statement.

Posted on Thursday 14 January 2010 at 12:04 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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