Ubuntu Celebrates Its Ninth Birthday Amid Controversy

[Luke]

Tea Party not very popular now, had more popularity two years ago.

I thoroughly doubt, that the Teabaggers represent one third of the US population - they may *sound* like they do. And I'm not sure how Tea Partiers and "liberal" open source with an African name should go together.

I remember a Washington Post poll in Fall 2011 that had Occupy Wall St(etc) outpolling the Tea Party, with favorables in the high 30's for Occupy and low 30's at that time for the Tea Party. This was before police raids on Occupy designed to drive off support from liberals who don't stand up to cops, and the Tea Party's government shutdown made enemies of people who feared for their Social Security checks.

To tie an operating system (or any other product) by name to ANY political tendency is very bad marketing, as it ties your fate to that political party. Unless you are yourself a member of the party in question or one of its foes, and your product is a secondary matter meant for your organization you should not do this. Let's put it this way: Suppose Microsoft's new CEO was a noisy Republican Party activist. Enough of that noise and he would drive some Democrats and more people left of the DP to either Apple or Linux. Were he an equally noisy Democrat he would drive some of the GOP and more of the Tea Party to Apple, possibly to Linux as well. In either case he would lose sales.

This "open-source Tea Party" remark has the potential to offend both the Tea Party and progressives like myself at the same time, an even worse mistake in branding.

[DDF420]

Eh? That's the job of GRUB2. And it does it well. For instance, openSUSE always detects Windows in my dual-boot environment.

Yes yes but he/she was talking about detection during installation so isn't that the debian partman packages in ubiquity detecting the other partitions not grub?

[dee.]

Open source ethos is more libertarian than liberal,

No it's not. The whole concept of open source depends on a governing body who enforces licenses, that is, there needs to be regulation of what corporations are allowed to do with open source software, to enforce copyleft. Libertarianism is more concerned with minimizing all regulation, which would also make the functioning of open source impossible.

even if it's comprised more by liberals. Libertarianism is the only political idealogy I know of that calls for the abolition of patents and copyright.

Copyright is something of an umbrella term. When talking about "copyright", you need to specify between the various rights that reside within the "copyright" umbrella. There's at least three distinct, very different rights that are often conflated when talking about copyright:

- The copyright proper, ie. the right to make copies of a software (and distribute them)
- The right to sales, ie. the right to use/distribute the software for commercial purposes
- The right of authorship/attribution, ie. the right to be recognized as the author of a software/piece of code

Some parts of the copyright can safely be abolished, but removing it entirely would be detrimental to open source. Of course, most libertarians aren't concerned with nuances like these, they just call for abolition of all regulation...

[Hamish Wilson]

Powdigsig, can you answer me this honestly; have you ever looked beyond Ubuntu to other mainstream distro's? This has been standard functionality on Linux (not only Ubuntu, but on Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, Mageia, etc) for years.

I seriously get the feeling that Ubuntu users simply (incorrectly) assume that all the niceties in Ubuntu are Ubuntu specific innovations and that all other distro's are like Linux From Scratch and only have a command line and a vi editor.

Broaden your horizon, most of the nice stuff in Ubuntu doesn't originate with Ubuntu.

This. Seriously.

And for the record I have never had a problem with Grub not detecting another system, although I must admit this has not come up for me much since I usually only have dedicated Linux installs on most of my machines.

[r_a_trip]

Why haven't I seen any other distros taking up on the good features of Ubuntu? Is there any other distro out there which can autodetect other OSes during the installation process that Ubuntu does with ubiquity? Nobody ever learns, that's why we have Ubuntu still steaming away...

Powdigsig, can you answer me this honestly; have you ever looked beyond Ubuntu to other mainstream distro's? This has been standard functionality on Linux (not only Ubuntu, but on Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, Mageia, etc) for years.

I seriously get the feeling that Ubuntu users simply (incorrectly) assume that all the niceties in Ubuntu are Ubuntu specific innovations and that all other distro's are like Linux From Scratch and only have a command line and a vi editor.

Broaden your horizon, most of the nice stuff in Ubuntu doesn't originate with Ubuntu.

[wizout]

---

Why haven't I seen any other distros taking up on the good features of Ubuntu? Is there any other distro out there which can autodetect other OSes during the installation process that Ubuntu does with ubiquity? Nobody ever learns, that's why we have Ubuntu still steaming away...

The same as every major distro coming with a default DE.
And it's not Ubuntu-only code doing this feature:

man grub-mkconfig

[GreatEmerald]

Why haven't I seen any other distros taking up on the good features of Ubuntu? Is there any other distro out there which can autodetect other OSes during the installation process that Ubuntu does with ubiquity? Nobody ever learns, that's why we have Ubuntu still steaming away...

Eh? That's the job of GRUB2. And it does it well. For instance, openSUSE always detects Windows in my dual-boot environment.

[Pallidus]

I have a bunch of official canonical ubuntu cd's, the first that came out.

There's an amd64 one, x86 and powerpc. One is orange the other bordeaux.

For all the hate and fuckery that gets thrown their way, they managed to deliver a solid, stable, functional (I wouldn't call it beautiful since gnome3 blargh) distro.

[Prescience500]

I thoroughly doubt, that the Teabaggers represent one third of the US population - they may *sound* like they do. And I'm not sure how Tea Partiers and "liberal" open source with an African name should go together.

I live in a liberal area so I don't see anything related to the Tea Party around me. I get the number from several sources, but the number is actually lower now. Before the recent shutdown, just over 40% said they are either part of the movement or support it. Open source ethos is more libertarian than liberal, even if it's comprised more by liberals. Libertarianism is the only political idealogy I know of that calls for the abolition of patents and copyright. Also, open source activists often resort to private solutions rather than getting governments to help them, which is a libertarian notion. Either way, in order to have a "main stream" product, one has to be accepted by the masses...liberal, conservative, libertarian, or authoritarian. If Ubuntu were as big as Apple among users in America, he'd have sparked a firestorm.

For the record, I'm not a member of the Tea Party movement.

[powdigsig]

Why haven't I seen any other distros taking up on the good features of Ubuntu? Is there any other distro out there which can autodetect other OSes during the installation process that Ubuntu does with ubiquity? Nobody ever learns, that's why we have Ubuntu still steaming away...