Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/01/14/ubuntu-debian.html

By the end of 2004, I’d been running Debian ‘testing’ on my
laptop since around early 2003. For almost two years, I’d lived with
periodic instability — including a week in the spring of 2003 when
I couldn’t even get X11 started — for the sake of using a
distribution that maximally respected software freedom.

I’d had no trouble with ‘potato’ for its two year lifespan,
but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I
couldn’t spare the time for upkeep. Running ‘testing’ was
the next best option, as I could pin myself for 3-6 months at a time on
a particularly stable day and have a de-facto “release”.
But, I slowly was unable to spare the time for even that work, and I was
ready to throw up my hands in surrender.

At just about that time,
a thing called
‘warty’ was released. I’d already heard about this
company, Canonical, as they’d tried earlier that year to buy a domain
name I technically own (canonical.org), but had long since given over to
a group of old friends. (They of course had no interest in selling such
a “hot property”). This new distribution, Ubuntu, was
Debian-based, and when installed, it “felt” like Debian.
Canonical was committed to a six-month release schedule, so I said to
myself: well, if I have to ‘go corporate’ again, I might
as well go to something that works like the distribution I prefer.
And so, my five year stint as an Ubuntu user began.

Of course, I hadn’t always been a Debian user. I started in 1992 with
SLS
and quickly moved to Slackware. When the pain of that got too great, I
went “corporate” for a while back then, too. I
used Red Hat
Linux from early 1996 until 1998. I ultimately gave up Red Hat
because the distribution eventually became focused around the
advancement of the company. They were happy to include lots of
proprietary software — indeed, in the later 1990s, Red Hat CDs
typically came with as many as two extra CDs filled with proprietary
software. Red Hat (the company) had earlier made some efforts to
appease us harder-core software-freedom folks. But, by the late 1990s,
their briefly-lived RMS (aka Red Hat Means Source) distribution had
withered completely. By then, I truly regretted my 1996 decision to go
corporate, and fell in love quickly with Debian and its community-led,
software-freedom-driven community. I remained a Debian user from 1998
until 2004.

But, by the end of 2004, the pain of waiting for ‘sarge’
was great. So, for technical reasons only, “going
corporate” again seemed like a reasonable trade-off. Ubuntu
initially looked basically like Debian: ‘main’ and
‘universe’ were FaiF, ‘restricted’ was like
‘non-free’.

Sadly, though, a for-profit, corporate-controlled distribution can
never remain community-oriented. A for-profit company is eventually
always going to put the acquisition of wealth above any community
principle. So it has become with Ubuntu, in my view. The time has come
(for me, at least) to go back to a truly community-oriented,
software-freedom-respecting distribution. (Hopefully, I’ll also never
be tempted to leave again.)

I didn’t take this decision lightly, and didn’t take it for only one
reason. I’ve gone back to Debian for three
(now) seven specific reasons:

• UbuntuOne’s
  server side system is proprietary software with no prospects of
  liberation. This has been exacerbated since Canonical now
  heavily focuses on strong integration of UbuntuOne into the desktop for
  the Lucid release. It seems clear that one of Canonical’s top goals is
  to convince every Ubuntu user to rely regularly on new proprietary
  software and services.⁰
• Canonical has become too aggressive with community-unfriendly
  copyright assignment policies. Copyright assignment on Free
  Software can be put to good uses. However, most for-profit
  corporations design their copyright assignment process primarily to
  circumvent the company’s potential copyleft
  obligations; Canonical’s
  copyright assignment is sadly typical in that regard. Even worse,
  Canonical’s management has become increasingly more aggressive in
  pressuring the community into accepting such copyright assignment
  policies as a fait accompli. (I’ll likely write more on this
  issue this year, but in the
  meantime, my
  “Open Core” Is the New Shareware,
  Michael
  Meeks’ Thoughts on Copyright Assignment, Dave
  Neary’s Copyright assignment and other barriers to
  entry,
  and this LWN article are
  all good “further reading” resources.)
• The line between ‘restricted’ and
  ‘main’ has become far too blurry. I was very glad
  when I first saw Ubuntu’s “you’re about to install restricted
  drivers” warning window, and I find that a good way to
  deal with the issue. However, there are many times (particularly during
  initial install) when Ubuntu doesn’t even inform the user that
  proprietary software has been installed. I realize that there’s a
  reasonable trade-off between (a) making someone’s hardware work (so they
  don’t think Microsoft is better merely because “it works”)
  and (b) having a fully FaiF
  system. However, this trade-off is only
  reasonable when the users are told clearly that they own hardware made
  by vendors opposed to software freedom. If the users never know, how
  will they know what hardware to avoid in the future?
• Updated on 2010-01-19: This one is less of an issue to me than the
  others, but it shows the same pattern of Let’s do more proprietary
  software on our platform that Red Hat went through in the 1990s.
  Namely, Canonical
  is now directly encouraging customers to run proprietary software on
  Ubuntu. (Updated on 2010-02-03: it turns out Canonical
  was already doing this a
  long time ago but I didn’t know about it until 2010-01-19. (Thanks
  to J.B. Nicholson-Owens
  for the info on this.))
• Updated on
  2010-01-25: osamak
  kindly pointed out
  that Canonical also has
  plans to offer a facility for installing third-party proprietary
  software, called the “Software Center”. This appears to
  be similar to services that help install proprietary software on
  GNU/Linux systems such as Linspire’s system and Click-and-Run.
• Updated on
  2010-02-06: Canonical
  has named Matt Asay its COO. Matt has an often stated
  that sometimes
  proprietary software is a better option for customers and believes
  that software freedom, as a political and moral cause, should be given
  up, in favor of pragmatically providing proprietary solutions whenever
  it is convenient. Specifically, in Matt’s own words:

  Sometimes, after all, an open-source project is absolutely the wrong
  choice for a customer … The path forward is open source, not free
  software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order
  to meet a customer’s needs.

  I would not want to run a distribution led by someone who believes
  proprietary software and FLOSS are equally legitimate. As a side note, I
  also find it quite bizarre that Canonical would hire someone to run its
  operations whose past statements clearly disagree with
  closing Ubuntu Bug
  1. (Also, Matt
  Asay said
  in an interview that Canonical has a goal of deploying more
  proprietary application software.)

• Updated on 2010-02-17, 2010-04-21:
  After the (very
  good) news 13 months ago that Canonical would release LaunchPad under
  AGPLv3,
  Canonical abandoned the
  authentication and login system for LaunchPad (and many other
  Ubuntu/Canonical online systems), and replaced it with proprietary
  software, but
  then released it
  in April 2010.

(Updated on 2010-02-17: As can be seen above, my mere list of three
reasons posted just one month ago has now more than doubled! It’s as if
Canonical made a 2010 plan to “do less software freedom”,
and is executing it with amazing corporate efficiency.
As Queen
Gertrude says in Hamlet, One woe doth tread upon
another’s heel, so fast they follow.)

When considering all this and taking a step back and look at the status
of major distributions, my honest assessment is this: among the two
primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation
distributions (aka Fedora and Ubuntu), Fedora is clearly much more
software-freedom-friendly. Nevertheless, since I’ve twice gone
corporate and ultimately regretted it, I decided it was time to go back
home — back to Debian.

So, during the last week of 2009, I took nearly two full days off to
reinstall and configure my laptop from scratch with lenny. I’ve thus
been back on Debian since 2010-01-01. Twelve days in, I am very
impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now
available upstream as well. This isn’t the distribution I left in 2004;
it’s much better, all while being truly community-oriented and
software-freedom-respecting. It’s good to be home. Thank you, Debian
developers.

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⁰ For more information on the
danger that proprietary network services pose to software freedom, please
see
the Franklin
Street Statement.