Ubuntu Edge Campaign Set To Close At $12M USD

[andydread]

Depends on your view. You can download a free version. But the version upstream is not free because of the contributor agreement. If the contributor agreement was removed, Upstart would be discontinued. Why? Because it makes no sense when systemd does a much better job.

SO Let me see if I understand what you are claiming here. Does this mean that glibc and gcc is NOT FREE? What about the GNU operating system.. You know just about everything that surrounds the kernel in userland? all of which needs you to submit to a CLA. Not free? So Stallman and co. has not clue what free software is and you do? Thanks for that. I feel enlightened. I'll just add this for clarity. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

[dee.]

CLA's are irrelevant. If some software is published under GPL, that version will always be GPL forever and ever, even if the developer changes the license to whatever in the next release - even if the next release is fully proprietary and closed, the last GPL-licensed version will always stay GPL and available for forking and continued development.

If CLA of GPL'd software bothers someone that much, fork the project and don't demand CLA's from anyone. It's within your rights, as outlined by the GPL. Frankly, in all but some corner cases, CLA is irrelevant, and some jurisdictions may even take it as implied, even without an explicit CLA.

There are 6001 good and valid reasons why Mir sucks donkey dick, so let's not focus on the frivolities.

[matzipan]

GNOME does have to spend time on it. This is what was explained in the last 50 articles about Mir and what I said in my previous comment already. Saying "it does not have to" is very unrealistic. Are you actually a developer?

And this does NOT relate to what Unity 8 is based on.

Care to explain? I'm not being offensive here, I am just curious, because in my current understanding, it doesn't.

[omer666]

As for Mir and Unity? Nobody forces you to use any of them.

If only things were that simple, we would not be complaining. Ubuntu means great userbase, nobody would argue on that it I think. This includes gaming, as Steam focusing on Ubuntu confirmed recently. Then, there are nVidia and AMD and their proprietary drivers. For what display server do you think they'll develop ? The answer is not the point here, the point is that they won't do it for both. And I think everybody agrees on one thing : the ultimate goal is to do without X as quick as possible. Do you think that kind of decision would allow it ? I don't.

[matzipan]

If only things were that simple, we would not be complaining. Ubuntu means great userbase, nobody would argue on that it I think. This includes gaming, as Steam focusing on Ubuntu confirmed recently. Then, there are nVidia and AMD and their proprietary drivers. For what display server do you think they'll develop ? The answer is not the point here, the point is that they won't do it for both. And I think everybody agrees on one thing : the ultimate goal is to do without X as quick as possible. Do you think that kind of decision would allow it ? I don't.

I'm not sure it's Canonical's fault that hardware vendors will only support one, I agree it would've been nice for Canonical to play nice with everybody else, but you can't say it's their fault. Also, work on Mir seems to have began in June last year, back then Wayland+Weston were just a dream.

[bkor]

The CLA argument is a red herring arguement. The FSF demands you sumbit to a CLA for all work contributed to GNU. So I guess you don't run any GNU operating systems then? Its one thing to hate Canonical and Shuttleworth however blowing things out of proportion and spreading misinformation without any proof that CLA are non-free because of the nature of them is not helping your cause and is quite frankly ridiculous given the position of the FSF regrarding your so-called non-free CLA http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

FSF guarantees that it will stay under a free software license. Canonical does not. The entire purpose of the Canonical CLA is to ensure it can be made proprietary. I think any CLA is bad, but don't use FSF as an example, as they're different.

[r_a_trip]

The answer is not the point here, the point is that they won't do it for both.

Mir aims for an EGL interface, Wayland can render to an EGL interface. The low-level stuff isn't the problem. It's the upper levels that now have to speak both.

[erendorn]

FSF guarantees that it will stay under a free software license. Canonical does not. The entire purpose of the Canonical CLA is to ensure it can be made proprietary. I think any CLA is bad, but don't use FSF as an example, as they're different.

Original contributor keeps its copyright, so in order to make some under-CLA software proprietary, Canonical would have to convince every single contributor to revoke the GPL license of their contribution. It works both ways: if a contributor would change its mind and revoke the GPL license of their contrib, you would still have Canonical's GPL license.

Sharing copyrights with one or multiple third parties pretty much reinforces the guaranties that something stays under a free software license (but not exclusively under such a license).

[r_a_trip]

Original contributor keeps its copyright, so in order to make some under-CLA software proprietary, Canonical would have to convince every single contributor to revoke the GPL license of their contribution.

Original contributor keeps the copyright on his code, true, but Canonical has a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive license to relicense contributed code as they see fit. Previous contributions stay under the GPL, but if Canonical decided to only release version N+1 under a proprietary license, they can.

[LemonadeCellar]

Uh, back to the topic of this campaign, does anyone else find it ironic how they didn't want to do Android emulation in Ubuntu Phone for ideological (not technical, mind you) reasons, and yet this phone was supposed to dual-boot Android? No? Just me? Whatever.