Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered

[mmstick]

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.

That would require that every contributor sign a CLA in order to change the license. There's more than one person involved with development. You need permission from all copyright holders to change the license. That is not feasible in the real world for anything other than a personal hobby project.

[mSparks]

That would require that every contributor sign a CLA in order to change the license. There's more than one person involved with development. You need permission from all copyright holders to change the license.

or just not include/use 3rd party contributions.

git makes it very easy to strip out individual contributions.

[Quackdoc]

or just not include/use 3rd party contributions.

git makes it very easy to strip out individual contributions.

it's actually not *that* simple, since you need to replace the code, which can actually be pretty hard to do in a legal way since you need one person to remove the code, and another people to add new code, or make the implementation completely different enough to make sure no court is going to bend you over a table

[mmstick]

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?

There is no benefit in that at all. You do not understand the customers who are buying this hardware. They are not interested in running a proprietary OS on their system. That would be highly offensive and diminish any chance of anyone wanting to use Pop!_OS. Pop!_OS exists to provide a good experience for everyone using desktop Linux. Such that if they get value out of Pop!_OS, they may then choose to support Pop!_OS by buying System76 hardware.

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.

No one here cares what OS you install on your system. Your hardware. Your choice.

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?

If you break it, you get to keep the pieces. Support can send instructions to reinstall the system.

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

It doesn't reflect on the company at all. We would direct them to file issues with Fedora. The state of Fedora COSMIC is entirely unto Fedora alone. Support can provide assistance where possible, and if all else fails there's always a recommendation to try a Pop!_OS ISO to see if the issue still persists.

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?

That would have no affect on our reputation. If a distribution is buggy and we are able to confirm that it is so, then we would notify the customer about known issues with that distribution, and direct them to any open issues on their issue tracker. Support can provide instructions for trying their setup on Pop!_OS where our support and QA team can give the most assistance.

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 would be pointless. COSMIC is a desktop environment. It would be bizarre to release a COSMIC distribution that's not called COSMIC.

[guglovich]

Fedora, get your hands off me! The rose is not blooming for you!

[ssokolow]

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

But does it work with all applications? For one of my projects, the first thing I wound up doing was writing a wrapper around Qt's handling code for pasted/dropped files/paths, complete with a big test suite, because it felt like half the apps I used violated the spec in some way or other which other applications learned to work around long ago. (eg. Mixing up whether the spec calls for LF or CRLF for lists of paths, getting paths and file:// URLs confused, offering up a shell-quoted path where no shell quoting was called for, using file://localhost/... in the presence of applications that made no provision for that being a technically valid expression of how file:// was originally envisioned as functioning half-way between a URL and a URI, where you specify a hostname and it's implementation defined what it does with it, etc. etc. etc.)

[mrg666]

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.

Assuming all contributors of the code agrees. However, the open source code stays with the previously attached open source license.

For you though, I agree, you can change the license any time. Nobody will notice.

[mSparks]

since you need one person to remove the code,

git can do that for you automatically "simply" by rolling back the commits made by a username.

more common usecase is deleting contributions made by someone found to be making malicious contributions or pirating other peoples code.

won't necessarily leave it in a functional state, and how hard it is to get it functional after that depends on how much they contributed, but deleting people and changes is pretty straight forward. Outside of a few core developers most commits tend to be only a few lines with negligable impact.

[Vistaus]

you do realise this is how opensource works? Without it System76 could only ever have been a Windows laptop reseller.

They still have first mover and integrator advantage. They know the code, they have the developers, they also have the laptops and desktops they primarily target it towards so they can make sure it works exceedingly well there and then anyone else gets best of the rest. Its like the Apple advantage - their OS only runs on a handful of systems so they can focus and integrate better instead of designing for a multitude of hardware and situations that they may not even be aware of exists.

But won't it turn into another Deepin then? I mean support-wise. Because Deepin runs fantastic on Deepin, but less so on other distros, particularly faster-moving distros like Fedora.

[sophisticles]

...

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me.

I think i have a clear understanding of how you view your company's positioning in the overall market and within the Linux ecosystem.

You have my word that I will offer no more unsolicited advice regarding how your company does things.

In a related note, when can we expect a Pop!_OS ISO, doesn't matter if it's Alpha or Beta quality, that features COSMIC?

Once again, thank you for taking the time to converse with me and good luck on your COSMIC launch.