Ubuntu Business Remix update

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

thanks Mark for bringing up your view on this. I must say I was quite
surprised to read it, so far I thought we all had a fairly identical
defintion of what the partner archive is.

Mark Shuttleworth [2012-01-29 15:49 +0000]:
> Some of the applications that are important to that whole ecosystem may
> not be redistributed. Partner serves as the vehicle to make those
> available on Ubuntu. Rather than going down the road of seeking to
> marginalize Canonical's role, with prejudicial language like "(secret)
> commercial agreements", please recognise that this is precisely the
> point of building a project which has both community and commercial
> teams working together.

I think that mixes together two different things. I didn't hear anyone
saying that they don't appreciate Canonical's efforts in making
popular commercial software like Skype or VMWare player easily
available for Ubuntu. I personally believe that if Ubuntu wants to be
successful, we absolutely have to make it super-easy to get this
software, because a lot of people depend on them. And our
software-center does just that.

But "for" Ubuntu, and making it easy to get it "on" Ubuntu is IMHO not
the same as "being Ubuntu". http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu itself
stresses that it is a free operating system, partner is not on
*.ubuntu.com, it is not packaged by the same set of people, has its
own, radically different, sets of policies and procedures, etc.

So I agree it could be considered as part of the "Ubuntu movement" and
the efforts of builing an OS which people want, i. e. a "selling
point". But at least for me as in my role of Ubuntu developer it's
even further apart than e. g. PPAs. (But again, distance in
maintenance policy is unrelated to its utility.)

> Our goal is to offer a platform that combines those values with
> access (easy but optional) to the full range of what's possible on
> Linux.

I fully agree to this. But that doesn't mean that everythign that runs
on Ubuntu instantly becomes part of the platform. To the contrary, I
think we need to go even further in making easier for people to run
their sofware on Ubuntu without having to get it into Ubuntu. The
success of e. g. the Android Market shows that quite nicely, I think,
as well as our inability to keep even the current archive in a really
good condition.

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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