[Hamara-devel] kubuntu and ubuntu at odds

[shirish]

Hi all,
See https://lwn.net/Articles/646233/ -

It's a bit of a long read

TL;DR basically Jonathan bought two issues to the community for which he 
was summarily sacked.

a. Canonical has an intellectual property rights policy which basically 
says that if you are redistributing Ubuntu packages, you can't 
redistribute them in Toto. What you have to do is recompile the source 
package and have your own branding. While people do not have issue with 
the branding part, the intellectual property that Canonical is claiming 
is at odds both with the open-source nature that that both Open Source 
Consortium as well as FSF had been advocating.

See 
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-community-team/2015-May/000422.html 
for Jonathan Ridell's bringing to notice on the issue.

That again is a bit of a long thread where Jono Bacon (long time 
Community Manager of Ubuntu and they go back to back but in friendly 
manner) but it makes Ubuntu look quite bad from FOSS perspective. What 
is not been shared that this has been an issue right from Day 1 when 
Ubuntu came in and more so when Canonical Contributor License Agreement 
or Harmony Agreements as they are known came in 2011 (almost 4 years now).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Harmony_%28FOSS_group%29

I had some private chats with some of the SFLC lawyers way back in 2007 
(on some different topics) and even then Canonical had issues with 
sharing binaries with others unlike other players in the field. So the 
issue is not a new one but rather quite an old one and from an 
third-party observer POV seems that Canonical is just biding the time.

b. Funds which were raised on behalf of Kubuntu but never passed on to 
Kubuntu and were distributed internally within Ubuntu. That again is a 
bit of long thread but as shared on the article itself as well they were 
able to get some numbers as to how much donations had come in over the 
last couple of years. Details as to where the money went would never be 
known.

Apart from the issues raised by Jonathan, people have reacted quite 
negatively as the governance procedures were by-passed it seems by both 
parties but more blame is being given to UCC (Ubuntu Community Council). 
 From my limited understanding of Ubuntu/Canonical governance, most of 
the sub-projects such as Kubuntu have their own Councils (called as 
subproject Community Council) so in this e.g. it is KBC for Kubuntu 
Community Council.

What would have been much better and this is agreed to by almost 
everybody in the FOSS community is that UCC should not have summarily 
sacked Jonathan and others but used the KBC as a process to air its 
issues with Jonathan before sacking him as Jonathan wasn't speaking for 
his own self but on behalf of issues that KBC were facing for quite 
sometime.

The end result it seems that most developers (including long-time 
developer Scott Kitterman) is leaving Kubuntu and other Canonical 
initiatives. From the tone on the mailing list it seems other devs. are 
considering similar options.  It is very much possible that the fall-out 
there would work to advantage of Debian as the Debian-KDE team is short 
on resources. I do remember that there were couple of calls of action 
before jessie was released as they didn't have enough hands on-board to 
get all of Plasma, KDE, Frameworks out.

How it will affect Canonical will be known in short to medium-term.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org