[Hamara-devel] If it's not practical to redistribute free software, it's not free software in practice

[shirish]

Hi all,

Just read Mathew Garett's blog-post and the comments therein.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html

Also went through Redhat's Trademark Guidelines - 
http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/corp/RH-3573_284204_TM_Gd.pdf

The Guidelines are more clear than what Canonical has done so far and 
this was written way back in 2k5. (Around 10 years back).

Some interesting responses and comments from the discussion -

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1479235#cmt1479235 - 
marahmarie

"Is it what it's intended to state?"

If it is then it will completely screw everything up. In the context of 
what you wrote in the OP: "If an @Ubuntu.com email address is present in 
a changelog, you'd have to change it."

To what, exactly? @redacted? I mean, seriously, this would screw up 
knowing who did what in the changelog which breaks the ability to trace 
changes back and contact the correct author(s) should any events arise 
where you would kind of have to know who did what or who to contact when 
things go wrong.

You might have snuck that in there as a half-baked joke or worst case 
scenario but seriously, that's a ridiculous thing to have to do. I don't 
clearly see how it would infringe trademark or copyright, either - I 
mean, my mind is bending trying to figure it out. Talk about repressive...

Why not just declare Canonical our next totalitarian state and get it 
over with. "I will just edit you out of existence"...yeah, right, right, 
right.

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38467.html?thread=1483075#cmt1483075 -

"Who determines whether I'm causing harm to the Ubuntu project? And how 
come Red Hat can provide a list of the terms I have to remove while 
Canonical can't? " - mjg59


It seems that Canonical's Snappy Installer would also be used for 
desktop and server offering which wasn't supposed to happen -

See 
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/829303-new-debian-project-leader-talks-open-source-careers-ppas-and-more

which I had reported some months back.

All in all, it doesn't seem a good road for Ubuntu-derivatives.

In the discussion it emerges that the permission which was given to 
Matthew was till he gets revenue of 10k and he can't pass the rights to 
others, if I didn't know better than would have thought it is a sort of 
Mafia protection.

All in all doesn't sound good :(

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org