On 11 December 2012 22:23, Tim Brocklehurst <timb@???>wrote:
> Thanks for the repost Andy.
>
> I read about this last month, and I must admit that I felt glad that I'm
> not a
> Ubuntu user.
>
> I'm not so worried about Canonical collecting data, as I am about whether I
> trust that Canonical has my best interests at heart. And that's why I don't
> use Ubuntu.
>
> There is an implicit trust that the distribution maintainers will take
> decisions that are at least in the spirit of those that you would make
> yourself. I realise that sometimes upstream makes big changes (generally
> with
> good reason), but it's up to the distributions to decide if, when and how
> to
> adapt to it. Personally, I'm a Debian guy, and with the slight exception of
> early versions of KDE4 and Amarok (notably); the debian maintainers have
> done
> a damn good job of giving me the system I need for both work and home.
>
> However, once you remove that trust between user and maintainer, you stand
> to
> lose users; quickly. I realise that Canonical has to pay the bills, and I
> know
> they want to be new and flag-waving; but the flag you need to wave is "we
> have
> happy users", not "we keep doing things and accidentally irritate you".
> Canonical's influence has been massive, and beneficial; don't underestimate
> that; particularly raising the expectations for the quality of the desktop.
>
> Unfortunately, with this following hot on the heels of Unity, I think many
> users might migrate to other distro's and not recommend Ubuntu at all.
> After
> all, would you use a system out of choice if you didn't think you could
> trust
> the developers? Isn't that WHY we use Linux at all?
>
>
Canonical is a company and has a right to turn a profit. It also pays
developers, so needs to fund that somehow.
Unless you are prepared to start donating to Canonical, this seems like a
reasonable way to make some money. They anonymise all input data so that
amazon etc can't tell who it is from and do not store it. There are still
some privacy issues but I am told these are being worked on, and even the
EFF has raised the points so it isn't like it is a secret.
If you want a really open, properly free (libre) operating system then you
should be looking at Debian as it is the only linux I know of that has a
goal of free software and is serious about it -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines
I really admire Debian for it's goals of completely free software, and if I
were to donate to any linux it would be Debian, despite most of my machines
now being Ubuntu.
Anton
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