Ubuntu Business Remix update

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 08:58:19PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> On 29/01/12 18:38, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> > Mark, you were surprised that a significant number of developers don't
> > consider the partner repository part of Ubuntu. In addition to what
> > Laney has pointed out, /etc/apt/sources.list has for years said: ##
> > Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ##
> > 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is
> > offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to
> > Ubuntu users.
[...]
> Well, that's a poor choice of words.

Those were probably my words, albeit mostly copied-and-pasted from
elsewhere (ultimately, the ancestry of this phrasing probably goes back
to "non-free is not part of Debian" ...).  They do seem unnecessarily
negative, so I'm happy to adjust them somehow.

However, like others responding to this thread, I find it very difficult
to consider partner to be "part of Ubuntu" in a way that has much
meaning to me.  Part of the Ubuntu ecosystem, yes; affiliated with
Ubuntu, yes; built for use with Ubuntu, yes; presented to Ubuntu users,
yes; important to the success of Ubuntu, yes; but actually part of
Ubuntu, I just find that tough to fit into my mental model of things.
For example, I'd been given to understand (albeit from a while back)
that partner was due to migrate to a PPA at some point; PPAs are all
those things as well, but I didn't think we considered them to be part
of Ubuntu in general.  Partner feels like a privileged kind of PPA to me
more than anything else.

You've made it very clear in this thread that you understand it
differently, and presumably that you always did; but, without wanting to
put words in anyone's mouth, my impression is that there's been a common
understanding at variance to this among all the Ubuntu developers I've
spoken to on the subject for some years, both within Canonical and
without.  I can't remember any public guidance to the contrary before
this thread, and given that it's on archive.canonical.com, we often
refer to it as the "Canonical partner archive" or similar, and that it
behaves pretty much like a Canonical PPA in all but name, I don't think
it's surprising that this shared understanding has come to be.

We don't need to invoke any fundamental conflict between Canonical and
the Ubuntu community to explain this, especially when Iain went out of
his way to stress that he does consider it a valuable service.  This is
more about a sense of the mental model of "Ubuntu" that's perfectly
natural for developers to acquire, particularly when e.g. we reinforce
it by telling Ubuntu core developers that they are "collectively
responsible for the maintenance of all packages in Ubuntu"
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers#CoreDev).  That makes it quite
natural for those developers to feel a sense of co-ownership of the
idea, which seems like a healthy thing to encourage (indeed: "feel a
sense of personal responsibility for the quality of Ubuntu releases and
for the satisfaction of Ubuntu users" - I'd be worried if developers
*didn't* have strong feelings about what Ubuntu meant and their ability
to improve it!).


In the cause of reducing conflict, I wonder if this is a distinction we
simply don't need to make.  As Allison points out, a name like "Ubuntu"
means different things in different contexts, and it's cumbersome to
have to keep spelling out which one we mean, not to mention that the
discussion about whether something is part of Ubuntu or not is by its
very nature divisive.

The remix guidelines say "In general, a Remix can have applications from
the Ubuntu archives added"; the plural "archives" is in the original
text.  The point of the remix guidelines, as I remember it, was (a) to
ensure a certain basic level of quality, associated with our ability to
remove packages from the archive that didn't meet our quality standards,
and (b) to ensure that the degree of difference between stock Ubuntu and
any given remix would always be small enough that the difficulty of
dealing with bug reports and the like about remixes wouldn't get out of
control.  In short, to preserve our good name, to keep the whole system
more or less comprehensible, and to encourage important infrastructural
changes to happen as part of Ubuntu itself.

Now, partner is small; the TB-approved rules for it
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ExtensionRepositoryPolicy - Scott R, from what
you said I think you perhaps weren't aware of this) are intended to
ensure a certain basic level of quality and gatekeeping; and we already
present them to Ubuntu users, so the general idea that a remix is more
or less something you could get by starting up Ubuntu and fiddling about
in Software Center a bit hasn't been broken.

Aside from the issue of establishing suitable distribution agreements,
I'm not sure it would be unreasonable to simply say that this is
something remixes can include, provided that they make it clear to their
users that the result is not entirely free software (or similar wording)
and that redistribution might involve special effort.  (It isn't even
terribly clear to me from the current guidelines that this would be
prohibited, but obviously reasonable people currently disagree; and I do
think it's important to require redistribution terms to be made crystal
clear when they differ from those of the standard editions of Ubuntu,
both for all the usual reasons and to avoid confusing the public into
believing that restrictive terms might apply to Ubuntu as well.)

Similarly, I don't see why remixes couldn't include packages from extras
more or less at will.  Extras didn't exist when the remix guidelines
were formulated, but it has a clear technical policy attached to it, and
it's already presented to Ubuntu users; by the same argument as above,
it seems a perfectly reasonable thing for remixes to include packages
from that extension repository.

The guidelines already say straight out that remixes are "not in fact
Ubuntu as distributed by the Ubuntu project", so there's no issue of
something that is Ubuntu including something that isn't, or any weird
semantics like that.

I think an approach like this could resolve the situation for this
particular remix without having to go down a particular line of argument
that obviously makes some Ubuntu contributors feel uncomfortable.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]