Lack of Connection Between Canonical and the Community

[Benjamin Kerensa]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>
wrote:

> On Monday, December 08, 2014 01:56:00 PM Michael Hall wrote:
> > > The most important thing that Canonical can do to encourage more
> > > contribution  from the broader community is act like they are part of a
> > > broader community. Canonical has made a lot of decisions which put them
> > > in a poor light in the community.  Maybe they were good business
> > > decisions and it was worth it (I don't know), but it's had an
> > > impact.  There are different ways to go about these things [3].
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Admittedly have have made decisions that have hurt our relationship with
> > the community. I think we have recognized that fact, and in the past
> > couple of years we have been much better at both considering the impact
> > of our decisions on the community as well as involving the community in
> > the decision making process. If there are instances where you feel we
> > are still making these mistakes, please let me know about them.
>
> The biggest current issue I'm aware of is the question of license
> requirements
> for binary distribution [1].  This has been discussed with the CC a few
> times,
> but without a lot of progress (not the CC's fault).
>
> One of the roles I have in Ubuntu [the Linux distribution] is of an archive
> administrator.  Part of that role is to review the licensing of new
> packages
> uploaded to the Ubuntu [the Linux distribution] archive.  If I were to
> review
> a package for inclusion in the archive and it had the same license as
> Canonical claims for Ubuntu as a whole, I would have to limit it to the
> non-
> free Multiverse section of the archive.
>
> The claim that all binaries are owned by Canonical, even ones to which
> Canonical made no contribution to the code, simply because they were
> compiled
> and distributed (I think that's the claim, the exact claim and the
> rationale
> behind it isn't clear and that's part of the problem) reinforces the idea
> that
> contributing to Ubuntu is working for Canonical and not for a broader
> community.
>
> You can see in the IRC logs of the last meeting where Riddell tried to
> bring
> this up again and was told to get over it (in my opinion).  So as recently
> as
> the last CC meeting, this is still an issue and there are people in the
> community that feel like Canonical is not treating them well.
>
> Scott K
>
>
> [1]
> http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy
>
>
>
Scott,

FWIW the person who responded to Ridell no longer works for Canonical.

One contributor above said:
"There's a sense of a hapless and powerless community who dare not speak
ill of Canonical or "bad things will happen"."

The truth is it does happen and was one of the reasons I stopped
contributing because simply put you could not have an opinion or be vocal
about disagreeing with Canonical without getting dog piled.

I am not going to name names here but let me tell you folks before I
stopped contributing someone on the Canonical Community Team on not one
occasion but two occasions pretty heavily verbally assaulted me with
profanity and ridicule. This kind of stuff does not happen in other
projects and shows the very toxic results that can happen when people speak
up.
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