Originally posted by kravemir
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But let's dive into specific things Canonical did to annoy or harm their users and community:
* They released Unity with the Amazon search shopping 'lens' installed and enabled by default, a big privacy violation and a decision not discussed with the community in any way first.
* Unity was tremendously unstable in the first few years. I liked the way it worked, I genuinely did, so I would install it at least once a year. It was a crash-happy mess for me on three different pieces of hardware (two desktops and a laptop) every time I tried it until 15.10. They pushed it out a full five years before it was stable enough to be production-ready. GNOME 2, MATE, and Xfce might have the aesthetic appeal of a McDonald's restaurant, but they have always been rock solid stable for me.
* Canonical started the development of Mir in secret, and members of Canonical's own Ubuntu community spent over six months working on bringing Unity to Wayland before Canonical told them their Unity-to-Wayland work was being abandoned. There was a big flame war over whether Mir really does anything that Wayland doesn't do, but even if it does that kind of secret project change is hurtful in a project partly developed by community contributions.
* Last, work on Mir required a Contributor License Agreement. So GPLv3 forks of the GPLv3 public Mir code could happen at any time, but at any point Canonical could make their own proprietary fork of the project. Canonical representatives insisted that a proprietary fork was not planned - but if you don't plan on a proprietary fork, then you don't need a CLA. Most other GPL open source / free software projects don't have one.
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