Why I Don’t Like Canonical

“What Mr. Shuttleworth did with Canonical and Ubuntu was
divebomb the distribution pool. I can’t claim to know anything
about his personal motivations: I’ve never met him and
we’ve never interacted. He’s on public record
as saying his motivation is to promote the usage of Linux in
particular and free software in general, and
that’s a laudable goal and one I can’t with
good conscience say is not his true aim. However, if I accept that
that’s his aim, I still question his
methods.

“Ubuntu is fundamentally in a position of deeply unfair
competition within the Linux distribution market. I know Mr.
Shuttleworth frequently says its true competition is Microsoft, but
that’s exactly it — he tends to act as if other distributions were
irrelevant at best and a hindrance at worst. Ubuntu is a commercial
distribution, with a large staff of paid developers — like
Mandriva, Red Hat (and, to an extent, Fedora), or SUSE. However, it
is not remotely self-supporting and does not plan to be
self-supporting in any reasonable timeframe.”

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