[sf-lug] Ubuntu 11.04

[Rick Moen]

Quoting jim (jim at systemateka.com):

>     nice writeup! thanks. 
>     some people are talking about "going back to 
> debian." that seems a reasonable alternative. 

I'm really fond of Aptosid (formerly Sidux) as a means of doing painless 
installation of cutting-edge Debian.  The Aptosid developers release
live-CD images (defaulting to your choice of KDE Plasma, XFCE, or
Fluxbox) for x86 and x86_64 each quarter.

http://aptosid.com/


Getting back to Ubuntu / Canonical for a moment, I find it unsettling
that Canonical, Ltd. require a copyright ownership assignment before
they're willing to accept contributions for _any_ of the projects they 
operate, including Upstart, Bazaar, Update-manager, etc.  See:
http://www.canonical.com/contributors 

Long experience suggests this is a red flag.  There's really only one 
reason to require copyright assignment on code contributed to an open
source project:  preserving the ability to go proprietary.  Jon Corbet
turns out to have written a thoughtful piece on the problem in 2009:
http://lwn.net/Articles/359013/

Brad Kuhn's comments:
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/02/01/copyright-not-all-equal.html

Canonical's response?  None whatsoever except for the rather sleazy
'But everybody does it' excuse from Shuttleworth that Kuhn comments on.  
In other words, the suspicion of proprietary intent is correct.

The worst part of that, as Corbet points out, is that Canonical keep
trying to encourage other Linux distros to adopt Upstart as the core of
their architectures.  Fortunately, they aren't doing that -- and now
systemd appears to be emerging as a superior alternative without that
drawback.

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html