Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

[Quackdoc]

Not hard? There are quirks, there are bugs, software needs to be compatible with KDE and gnome apps.
There are things that are taken for granted nowadays. You copy text in Firefox and you expect that you can paste it in chrome. When you can't, you get instantly annoyed. Big bang rewrites usually don't work great in IT industry. Let's wait and see.

Copy and paste works fine. Drag and drop not yet. but to be fair, cosmic-files is super basic, but wayland already allows applications to handle drag and drop. iced supports drag and drop too, not sure if libcosmic does yet

[grung]

Copy and paste works fine. Drag and drop not yet. but to be fair, cosmic-files is super basic, but wayland already allows applications to handle drag and drop. iced supports drag and drop too, not sure if libcosmic does yet

Agreed it seems that I was not clear - it was an example, I have no idea what works and what not as I haven't tried the Cosmic desktop yet.

[sophisticles]

They can.
But they won't.

more spins using their codebase is a good thing for system76, it costs them nothing and it makes it more likely for fedora users to make a system76 their next machine.

e.g. Mac VMs converted me to MacOS.

How does it make it more likely that Fedora users will buy a System76 product?

System76 has built up a business around a Ubuntu based OS and from what i have seen over the years, Fedora users do not suddenly switch to Ubuntu.

Let's assume Fedora COSMIC is great and becomes the most popular spin, what makes you think a Fedora COSMIC user is suddenly going to go buy a System76 product that is based on Ubuntu?

There's a business concept known as brand dilution; what happens if Fedora COSMIC is buggy as hell, people are not going to differentiate between the Fedora spin and System76 they will think that COMSIC is at fault and rag on the developers.

Look at all the complaints on these forums about Mate, KDE, Gnome, XFCE, et al, because the version that ships with their distro has issues and they associate that with the upstream product.

You never want control of your product in someone else's hands.

There's a reason why companies spend millions of dollars getting and enforcing patents, it's because you don't give away your competitive advantage.

[mSparks]

How does it make it more likely that Fedora users will buy a System76 product?

Because, if they use the COSMIC desktop, and they are happy with it, they will be very happy to buy a machine with it preinstalled rather than have to mess around building their own.

Same reason I bought into MacOS after listening to two decades+ of FUD.
I ran MacOS in a VM (using the required bios password pleasedonotsteal).
I discovered it is almost 100% identical to linux gnome I was already using for my main machine.
All my following prebuilt buys have been Apple.

user is suddenly going to

Nobody "suddenly does" anything, changing opinions and behaviours takes years/decades.

You never want control of your product in someone else's hands.

Giving users 100% control of the systems people buy from them is pretty much System76s ENTIRE business model. Hence they dont sell windows laptops, only Linux ones.

That's the sell, what exactly do you think the downside is? This isn't windows hardware/software where sales is desperate people don't find out how shit it is before they buy it.

[mmstick]

Incorrect, they can re-license it at any point they choose.

If you want precedent look at x264 and x265, both started as GPL's open source projects, both eventually spun off x264llc and x265llc under different licenses.

If I write something and release it as GPL, i can say the next version is closed source any time i want.

No, that's not possible. If something is licensed as GPL, it cannot be relicensed after the fact. You can add additional licenses, but the code must always honor the licenses that came before it. So the only way to make the code proprietary would be if it was dual licensed from the beginning, such as how Slint and Qt are licensed.

[mmstick]

How does it make it more likely that Fedora users will buy a System76 product?

System76 has built up a business around a Ubuntu based OS and from what i have seen over the years, Fedora users do not suddenly switch to Ubuntu.

Let's assume Fedora COSMIC is great and becomes the most popular spin, what makes you think a Fedora COSMIC user is suddenly going to go buy a System76 product that is based on Ubuntu?

System76 is a Linux hardware company. The business is built around ease of Linux hardware support, regardless of what Linux distribution you are using. Pop!_OS is the optimal baseline that we officially support. It is there to give the best out of the box experience possible. Where hardware is guaranteed to be running optimally in an environment that's regularly validated on that hardware. But there's nothing to gain from locking people into a single Linux distribution. If you want to install something else, you are free to do so.

Also, how many times do we have to teach you that there is nothing to gain from making Pop!_OS proprietary, and that this is entirely against the philosophy of the company? All of our software is either MPL-2.0 or GPLv3. This is a huge value add for our customers, most of which care about open source software availability. The people who want proprietary software can go buy a Mac or Windows PC.

[sophisticles]

No, that's not possible. If something is licensed as GPL, it cannot be relicensed after the fact. You can add additional licenses, but the code must always honor the licenses that came before it. So the only way to make the code proprietary would be if it was dual licensed from the beginning, such as how Slint and Qt are licensed.

If I write some code and release it as GPL, I am the copyright holder, I have every right to change the licensing terms.

Who is going to stop me?

The EFF?

Can you imagine them trying to sue the author of the code for violating the licensing terms he released the code under?

LOL.

[sophisticles]

System76 is a Linux hardware company. The business is built around ease of Linux hardware support, regardless of what Linux distribution you are using. Pop!_OS is the optimal baseline that we officially support. It is there to give the best out of the box experience possible. Where hardware is guaranteed to be running optimally in an environment that's regularly validated on that hardware. But there's nothing to gain from locking people into a single Linux distribution. If you want to install something else, you are free to do so.

Also, how many times do we have to teach you that there is nothing to gain from making Pop!_OS proprietary, and that this is entirely against the philosophy of the company? All of our software is either MPL-2.0 or GPLv3. This is a huge value add for our customers, most of which care about open source software availability. The people who want proprietary software can go buy a Mac or Windows PC.

Forget about proprietary, you want to release the software as GPL, fine.

Why do you also have to release the distribution in binary format?

Why not release PoP_OS and COSMIC as source only and keep the binary version for your paying customers?

While your at it can you answer another question for me?

What happens if someone buys one of your systems, an expensive system, say a top of the line, fully configured system that costs over 30 grand.

They get it after you have released COSMIC and so they receive the system, with PoP_OS installed running COSMIC.

After using the system for a couple of weeks, they download Fedora COSMIC and decide they like that better and so install it.

During the install either something goes wrong or they screw up the system after the install, so they reach out to your company demanding that you fix it, what do you do?

Lastly, what is your plan if the Fedora COSMIC spin turns out buggy as hell and so it reflects badly on your company?

You have been around these forums long enough, you see people complaining about Gnome, KDE, Mate, XFCE, because of their experiences with the DE on a given distro, how are you going to deal with the negative associations when the desktop your company spent 2 years developing is getting raked over the coals because some distro put together a buggy release?

At the very least, consider protecting your trademark, release the code as GPL but make it clear that anyone that wants to offer a COSMIC based spin is not allowed to call it XYZ COSMIC where XYZ is the name of the based distro.

Example, do not allow them to call it Fedora COSMIC or Ubuntu COSMIC or Whatever COSMIC, they can call their spin Rusty Fedora or Ubuntu Rust or something like that.

That's what i would do.

But then again what do i know, it's not like I ever accomplished anything worthwhile.

[Quackdoc]

You have been around these forums long enough, you see people complaining about Gnome, KDE, Mate, XFCE, because of their experiences with the DE on a given distro, how are you going to deal with the negative associations when the desktop your company spent 2 years developing is getting raked over the coals because some distro put together a buggy release?

As someone who sold and maintained linux computers in the past, you just deal with it, the vast majority of people who buy your product aren't braindead idiots and if support tells them that it's unsupported and for support you need to reflash --INSERT OS HERE-- they typically understand that. This is looking for issues where none exist.

[mSparks]

No, that's not possible. If something is licensed as GPL, it cannot be relicensed after the fact. You can add additional licenses, but the code must always honor the licenses that came before it. So the only way to make the code proprietary would be if it was dual licensed from the beginning, such as how Slint and Qt are licensed.

sophisticals other crazy aside, original authors/copyright holders can licence their work however and whenever they want. absolutely does not need to be a particular licence from the beginning and there are countless examples of projects doing exactly that. mongodb springs to mind, they started GPL then switched to triple licencing including AGPL and closed source several years down the road.

You can't take GPL licences away from people, but that isnt what you said.