Big development as Matt Asay recently announced he is coming on board Canonical as the new COO.

Good Thing

For Mr. Asay, this is a good thing: he will greatly expand his influence, and be able to impose his philosophy on what is arguably the most popular distro.

Bad Thing

For everyone else, this is a bad thing: he will greatly expand his influence, and be able to impose his philosophy on what is arguably the most popular distro.

Ubuntu is already under too much influence from anti-Free Software, pro-Commercialization / pro-Fauxpen Source thinkers. They hire ex-Microsoft and ex-Novell employees, brook virtually no discussion on fundamentally divisive technologies like Mono and Moonlight, and put profits ahead of both user experience and ethics by making Microsoft the “opt-out” default search provider. At best, this mindset considers the Free Software foundation of GNU/Linux an inconvenience or distraction.

Mr. Asay will fit right in with this mindset.

Pro-Corporation Thing

Mr. Asay is pro-corporatism:

I have served on the OSI board for a few years now. In that time I have been frustrated by the board’s lack of corporatism, not its alleged predilection for corporate interests. Ask some of the open-source companies who have tried to get OSI to take positions favorable to them on attribution (badgeware) and other topics, and they’ll concur. The OSI is, if anything, not corporate enough.

If you understand that this pro-corporate interest dominates Mr. Asay’s thinking then you will not be surprised (or enlightened) by his commentary on any subject. Just think of how a company might best profit and nothing else, and you have it in one.

Another example:

Here’s a specific policy request: while the Open Source Initiative has expanded its board, of which I was once a terribly unproductive part, the OSI has not expanded its ideological base. The OSI can help itself and the open-source community by enlarging the experience base of its board members.  

This might include, for example, more business-minded open-source people. But it would also be helpful to include those in the open-source community that are deeply affected by open source, but may have very different views on what open source should mean, including representatives from Microsoft and Oracle, or simply developers who disagree with the current board’s opinions.

I could go on and on, but there’s no need. The underlying “embrace corporate interest” theme is present in nearly every posting Mr. Asay makes.

Polemic Thing

It’s funny in a way that – just like for Novell and Mono/Moonlight – my concern with Mr. Asay is not so much in what they do, but in how they promote it.

For example, Mr. Asay continually enployees nonsensical rhetoric:

For some, the definition of software freedom begins and ends with source code. Such people have apparently never heard of market competition.

{{weasel word}} tag please. Who exactly is out there arguing that software freedom ”begins and ends with source code”? Proponents of Free Software recognize source code visibility as necessary but not sufficient – so it’s not them. And proponents of Open Source simply don’t care about ”software freedom” - so it’s not them, either.

It’s worse than just the use of weasel words in the main thesis, though – because it’s a straw man. It’s not that a mysterious “some” think this thing; it’s that no-one thinks this! That doesn’t stop Mr. Asay from deftly beating up on that straw man, though.

Such dishonest rhetoric is my main problem with this strain of proponent. I guess that’s why some{{weasel word}} of them try so very very hard to paint RMS or the FSF as hypocritical.

Another example of poor rhetoric, misrepresenting sources:

But for me, it was Red Hat’s swipes at its competitors that are possibly more momentous. It’s not that Red Hat never criticizes competitors: in 2006, for example, Red Hat declared the imminent death (wrongly, as it turns out) of Novell.

However, the linked to article doesn’t mention “imminent”, “death” or “Novell”. (The link is broken on CNET now. Here is the original article referenced.)

Again, I could go on and on pointing on such poor argument tactics, but just browse through The Open Road CNET archives if you wish to play the Logical Fallacy Game yourself.

Prediction Thing

Past performance is no indicator of future returns? I’d like to think so. I will say that Mr. Asay does intellectually understand Free Software and Open Source, both in combination and in seperation. If motivated to do so, he could be a powerful force for exploring Free Software as a viable commerical and popular undertaking. Sadly, I don’t see this motivation in him or in Canonical.

Therefore I expect an increased acceptance of corporate interests and an increased disdain for Free Software ideology. I expect the refrain of “users don’t care about Freedom” to increase in volume and variation.

Finally, I expect any dissent from the community will be – in time-tested Ubuntu Forums tradition – heavily moderated and restricted to the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.