It doesn’t seem to me that Canonical is very serious about trying to get Ubuntu accepted for business use generally. If I were in charge of corporate IT anywhere, I’d make a policy that Ubuntu users must entirely remove, not merely disable, unity-lens-shopping with “sudo apt-get purge unity-lens-shopping”, and I would also black-hole DNS and routing for the names and IP addresses associated with unity-lens-shopping.

It’s not that Fedora doesn’t have problems.  As +Ingo Molnar pointed out yesterday, what he expected to be a desktop search went out to Google. This is clearly a privacy problem, and in my day leading Fedora (Fedora Core 1…) I would have been up in arms about how disastrous a violation of trust it was. But Fedora is explicitly not trying to be accepted by business; it’s trying to be near the bleeding edge, trying out new ideas. And they aren’t monetizing it, so it’s easier to accept as an honest mistake, especially since +Mantas Mikulėnas reported in response that this behavior was reverted in Gnome Shell 3.6.

I’m in favor of making money from Linux distributions. I’m in favor of exploring new business models for doing so. I’m even in favor of targeted advertising; if I’m going to see advertising, I’d really rather it be relevant to what I might want to learn about, and as far as I can tell, the only ads I have intentionally clicked on were targeted and thus relevant. But I do draw a line at intentionally disclosing private information by default, on purpose.

Ubuntu has a bigger problem than its Amazon blunder

Eugene Crosser October 01, 2012 10:30

I may be wrong, but in my perception this goes along the same lines as the current madness with Gnome3/Unity. Namely, that the people who are making decisions in the field of Unix desktop are “foreign” to “us” in the way they think.

Alan Cox October 01, 2012 12:06

Tell that to +Google, given all the crap they preload and how much they tie their stuff to their backend. Makes Ubuntu seem like angels 8)

Eugene Crosser October 01, 2012 16:01

+Alan Cox I was going to mention that Google is moving in the same direction, but as a purely commercial enterprise they kind of may be easier excused for that.

David Megginson October 01, 2012 18:58

I love Open Source.  When Debian started to suck and fall years behind, because they were too scared to put out an actual release, Canonical forked it and made Ubuntu, with a predictable 6-month release schedule.  If Ubuntu starts to suck, watch for a new fork, taking advantage of all the Ubuntu work but removing the suckage.

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