On 2020-02-28 15:51, Michael Stahl wrote:
On 28.02.20 15:04, Brett Cornwall wrote:
Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created
underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and
Canonical are two living examples. Sacrifices to user empowerment
are
off-topic, but: how is Canonical related to any non-profit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd doesn't mention anything.
Mark Shuttleworth began the Ubuntu project with the express intention of
keeping Ubuntu for the community while also creating Canonical as a
for-profit company in an attempt to make a consumer-grade
support/development experience. Ubuntu has a board wherein Canonical
members were allotted a maximum number of a seats to guarantee community
member additions. (Disclaimer, I haven't spent much time in the Ubuntu
ecosystem for some number of years now so things may have changed).
Over time, the boundaries between Ubuntu/Canonical dissolved as more
user-hostile measures made its way into Ubuntu - Not enough money was
being made from Ubuntu's lackluster business models (AFAICT, selling
*tshirts* was practically the only long-term revenue stream they
retained...) so the Ubuntu platform slowly degraded into a distribution
that went from "not recommended by the FSF" to outright labelled as
spyware.
I believe that Canonical is related here because, like TDC, the proposal
appears to be that a for-profit entity be given exclusive rights to a
trademark to a supposed community-owned product. Like TDC, Canonical's
founding idealized Shuttleworth's pessimism that free software could
survive without a for-profit entity as its protector.
3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the
lifeblood of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community
involvement to one of company culture (with community involvement as
a PR spin)?
what exactly do you mean? the majority of bugfixes and new features
already come from developers employed by companies such as Red Hat,
Collabora, CIB, and this has been the case for most of the existence
of the project. of course most if not all of the developers employed
by these companies consider themselves members of the LO community,
and why shouldn't they?
Like the Linux kernel, the product's ecosystem benefits greatly from
external for-profit organizations' contributions! But I would point out
that these businesses do not own the LibreOffice product itself - they
merely contribute or create their own commercial fork. There's nothing
wrong with this, of course! But imagine if Debian had granted rights to
its trademark exclusively to Canonical back in 2005. Debian would be a
very different distribution today if it were under the stewardship of an
entity expected to turn profits. And the community would likely not be
happy with the Debian project as a whole: It'd be just another consumer
distro and the tenets guiding Debian's community would have likely
withered.
Simon claims that I'm overstating TDC's influence - that will be
addressed in its relevant thread. My reply here is only to expound on
how I found Canonical relevant to my questions.
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