No biggie, actually

Mr. Asay’s departure isn’t really a big deal for Canonical or Ubuntu.

For one thing, Mr. Asay was a poor choice for Canonical – assuming Canonical wanted to take a pro-Free Software position and not another sure to fail Novell-like stance. I’m not the only one who thinks Mr. Asay’s hostility towards Free Software was a concern; Canonical and Ubuntu need more people – especially at the higher levels - who both understand and are respected by the larger Free Software community.

For another thing, whether it be time in position or philosophical difference (or whatever combination of those and perhaps other factors), Mr. Asay has had precious little impact on Canonical/Ubuntu. Even upon his leaving, neither he nor his boss points to even a single concrete achievement.

When Mr. Asay announced he was joining Canonical, I feared that he might influence Ubuntu. We are all better off that he did not.

In his clarification post, this bit caught my attention:

The reason I don’t complain much about Microsoft or Apple or Google is that I pretty much consider them lost causes. They exist to make a buck, and they have cultures that are more or less fundamentally at odds with proper collaborative F/OSS development. Even with Google, Android is pretty much a manual on how not to run a proper F/OSS project, and their ultimate goal appears to be to own every piece of information about everyone in the world, which frankly creeps me the hell out. I don’t expect anything more than minimal legal compliance with open source licenses from Google and Apple and Microsoft, and most other software companies. Whenever we see anything else I get pleasantly surprised. I get passionate about Canonical precisely *because* they’re not as bad as those companies – they’re definitely not a lost cause, they do a lot of good stuff, and they have a great opportunity to do even more really good and constructive work.

Grouping groups

Although I think I agree with much of what Mr. Williamson has to say, I question if Google should be grouped in with Microsoft and Apple as “lost causes”.

On Google

Serious question here: what exactly has Google done that is detrimental to Free Software or Open Source? Google wasn’t even founded as an “Open Source company”, yet it makes a lot of contributions to FLOSS (albeit more so on the Open Source side than the Free Software side).

I’ll confess freely I don’t follow news about Google very closely – one reason being I don’t have Google classified mentally as a “threat”. I don’t really have them classified at the same level as Red Hat, but they are nowhere near Microsoft or Apple (or Novell, for that matter) in terms of offensiveness and harm wreaked on the FLOSS ecosystem.

In the context of corporations “friendly” to FLOSS, I would put Google somewhere between Canonical and IBM, with a slight edge to Google because of GSOC and Google’s clean approach to patents.

I’m not aware of Google trying to subvert the meaning of “Open Source” or waging a war of FUD, ala Microsoft. I’m not aware of Google trying to absolutely control users and developers, ala Apple. And I’m not aware of Google playing cat’s-paw to such companies, ala Novell.

My Rankings

Again, in the context of corporations, I would rank some commonly mentioned entities as follows:

1. Red Hat
2. Mandriva
3. Canonical
4. Google
5. IBM
6. Oracle
7. Apple  (Below here is active harm)
8. Novell
9. Microsoft

Apple barely escapes being “actively harmful” because they have an “enemy of my enemy” thing going on that incidentally helps open standards a bit, and Open Source a (very) little. I don’t think Apple is intentionally trying to promote any real sort of Open-ness or Freedom, and I wouldn’t argue too hard if someone wanted to move the “active harm” cutoff a little higher.

Your rankings?

I’d be interested in hearing other thoughts on how you view and mentally rank some of these companies (or ones I left out) – and I’d be especially interested in any references to anti-Free Software activity by Google.

Have I really been overlooking a major threat from Google? Or perhaps, is the “Google is the next Microsoft”-meme being messaged by Microsoft apologists?

UT: Richard M. Stallman had criticized Miguel de Icaza for his participation to Open Source Lab which has been founded by Microsoft. What do you think about that? And in the context of this subject how do you evaluate Mono Project.

MZ: Miguel and I have met, but I don’t know him well enough to comment on his motivation for doing this work. I don’t know that Richard does either. I will say that I think it’s shameful when members of our community are publicly attacked in this way, rather than opening a dialog to discuss the problem and its resolution.

With regard to Mono, I think it is a valuable piece of free software for us to have. However, there are risks involved in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software, because it is under the ultimate control of Microsoft. Microsoft could take advantage of this to attack free software in various ways. This would be a logical act of self-preservation, and consistent with their previous actions and statements of intent.

Paragraph the First

I’ll overlook the first paragraph, mainly because I don’t feel like opening that can of wormy bullshit again.

Paragraph the Second

I am quite surprised to see that - excepting the first sentence - Mr. Zimmerman and I are in perfect agreement here.

There are risks in choosing the .NET platform to develop free software. And I am pleased that Mr. Zimmerman realizes that is exactly what Mono is: the .NET platform (albeit a gimped and tail-lights chasing stepchild implementation).

I also greatly appreciate Mr. Zimmerman’s points :

• Microsoft is in “ultimate control” (despite Team Apologista’s desperate protestations)
• Microsoft has multiple ways to wield .NET offensively
• It would be logical for them to do so
• they have acted similarly in the past
• they have said they would act similarly the future.

Raising questions

All of which raises some interesting questions … which only a preternaturally insightful commentator such as myself could dare answer:

Q: Will Team Apologista now attack Mr. Zimmerman for being a “zealot”?

A: No. They may say more context is needed, though.

Q: Will Team Apologista acknowledge any of Mr. Zimmerman’s points as being valid?

A. No. Again, more context is a good go-to here.

Q: Will Team Apologista call the exact same points made by someone else “hate-filled”, “paranoid”, “zealotry”, or “poo-poo-doo-doo head-y”?

A: Yes, yes they will. Surprisingly, there will be no requests for more context at this juncture.

And of course there’s one major question:

Q: If Microsoft is in ultimate control of a platform that presents risks and is recognized as a logical vector for them to attack as they have in the past and said they will in the future, why the hell are you promoting it ?

A: …

Sorry, folks, even Your Trusted Author can’t come up with a good answer for that last one.

You don’t innovate if you spend all your time talking and working with people that agree with you. You learn by confronting hard questions and answering them. Canonical has a culture of tackling hard problems, and that starts with serious, critical introspection. I’m just one piece of that, but I’m hardly alone in believing we can do better.

-Matt Asay, Canonical COO

Well, knock me down with a feather.

Things are all blurry – Ryan Paul actually wrote something insightful rather than parroting Mono press releases! Matt Asay used to talk junk about Linux and didn’t use it … now he loves it! I agree with 3 consecutive sentences that Mr. Asay wrote!

NOOO! I like my worldview in stark black and white! Get back into your pigeonholes!

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’.

The Register has the story: At the recent OpenSource World conference, Dell Senior Product Marketing Manager Todd Finch said the number of returns for Linux machines and Windows machines were approximately the same.
Finch went on to say that Microsoft was “making something of nothing” out of a “non-issue”.

Canonical already called Microsoft out on FUD over netbook returns back in April. There’s an interesting footnote at the end of the Canonical blog:

P.S Continually repeating that we ‘confirmed’ a 4x return over XP when we did nothing of the sort is really not worthy of a great company like Microsoft. If we are going to compete, let’s do it on real facts and actual statements. You’re better than that, Redmond

Uh, no they aren’t.
We may wish they were “better than that”, and they should be “better than that”; but they aren’t – in fact, this further reveals exactly what they are. Microsoft has a long and shameful history of dishonesty and gleeful use of what is called FUD tactics, and that seems to continue to this very day. (Trivially shown in this case: the Microsoft blog has never bothered to issue a correction.)

While I realize Canonical is trying to be polite and stay to the moral high road, the issue here is a huge disinformation campaign on the perception that Microsoft is “a changed company” or “finally gets Open Source”.
Playing into that by …. generously …. stating Microsoft is “a great company” or “better than that”, is:
1. Just not true.
2. Supporting the myth that Microsoft has changed in some material manner.

So, while it comes at no surprise to see Microsoft continue to opt for the same old lies and distortion, it is nice to hear from a major player like Dell putting the smack down on the netbook FUD.