Let me rephrase -
I can't actually say what triggered at least one of these complaints, since it would violate my ethical obligations.
Suffice to say, as the press release says, it turns out that
was not even the only complaint they received, and it turned out the FSF had received other complaints as well.
The GPL has held back open source and left the door wide open for Apple and Microsoft to push a locked-down cloud future in which general purpose computing has been or is in the process of being destroyed for 99% of the population.
It's a stupid license that grew out of naive politics, and has done nothing more than made the world suck more; quibbles over pointless GPL licensing minutia are a waste of resources and fail to inspire in me a dramatic response.
I wonder if attitudes such as yours actually hold "open source" back. In my mind it can't be good to gin up infighting for no good reason, especially on a forum thread like this one that is not at all related to the topic of permissive vs. copyleft licensing.
I'm not sure what your age is... but I suspect you might not remember the world of personal computing before the GPL and free software were everywhere. If you do remember those times... it is very difficult for me to put myself in your shoes and understand how you come to the conclusion that the GPL has made the world suck more.
I suspect that if the Linux kernel was published under a BSD-style license, Canonical would provide binaries without source, and their patches would be proprietary. My suspicions are based on the fact that Canonical are trying to make it difficult to redistribute their work, so much so that they were violating the GPL before introducing the trump clause mentioned in the article.
I'd be interested in how the GPL has held back open source and what license would be better. Haven't the licenses like BSD/MIT just made it easier to take open source code and lock it down?
I should probably make an absolute accusation, then:
Canonical's IP policy was in direct conflict with the GPL. Canonical were distributing GPLed works that I hold copyright on. Canonical refused to discuss the issue with me. Eventually I talked to the FSF and discovered that I was not the first person to raise concerns about this. It's difficult to square the idea that Canonical is an open-source friendly company with its behaviour towards the people who wrote the software they depend upon.
Well here's an explicit accusation of misbehavior to sate your hunger: Canonical has deliberately gone out of its way to stomp on its users, taking advantage of Ubuntu's once-upon-a-time reputation as being "community-driven" to prey upon and exploit that community for failed commercial gain. The Amazon Shopping Lens is but one example of this.
You're delusional if you honestly believe Canonical has any semblance of morality. I'm pretty sure cosmic rays zapped the neurons in Shuttleworth's brain, causing him to take on all the downsides of a Jobs-sized ego without any of the benefits, and now Ubuntu has gone from an excellent modernization of Debian to the second-worst distro (behind only Fedora, though this is increasingly marginal).
Hyperbole does not help anyone, even if it's hyperbole for the purpose of reinforcing some more reasonable point (which I have no way of knowing is the case here). Saying Canonical has no "semblance of morality" is over the top to say the least. I'll take dry boring truth over exciting made-up drama any day.
> to prey upon and exploit that community for failed commercial gain.
AFAICT, Ubuntu doesn't really make money: it's basically Mark Shuttleworth funneling some of his fortune into a Linux distribution. That's a pretty good deal for us end users in many ways, and I don't really blame them for trying to at least break even.
I'm well aware of this, which is why I indicate that it's for failed commercial gain. IIRC, they're making some modest money in a support and administration role (with things like Landscape and what not), but I've yet to see a big Ubuntu-based project actually be successful by any measure.
I'm not complaining about anything but the claim that you made no accusation. A statement that there was misbehavior is an accusation. I'm open to the notion that it was explicit rather than implicit...
I think sfconservancy sums it up pretty well with "full permission to redistribute Ubuntu as a whole remains in question."
While I'm happy that there is full GPL compliance, there are other parts of the stack such as X11 which are not GPL and don't mention anything about not adding additional restrictions ontop of the binaries.
