If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

oS is really good, I think it gets too little attention and upvotes than it should. Their YaST system is really good and completely replaces Windows control panel, they provide support for old-packages, openSUSE search panel is something what most distributions need, so far I saw it deployed only for ArchLinux successfully.

Please don't rewrite history. There was a usability hackfest in England to decide on what the desktop should look like. Canonical designers didn't agree with the GNOME designers and went off to do their own thing though didn't really communicate much (never said they'd go their own way). This was way before GNOME 3.0 was released.

I have no clue who you mean with "they scream". You mean GNOME contributors? Then again on history: Canonical committed to developing Wayland. Then changed direction, didn't communicate and came out with Mir 6 months later. This included all kinds of incorrect statements plus left out that they committed to develop some things for Wayland. The backlash has been documented many times, was pretty logical, was not limited to GNOME and mostly: it could've been avoided!

I quite appreciate Canonical, but there's a fair bit of "wtf" that went on over the years.

You seem to like speaking on GNOME's behalf; you're so terribly incorrect that I ask you to stop it. Further, mjg59 doesn't do much at GNOME. In his own words: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2014-Ma....

Now on Unity: to package Unity for many years you had to apply lots of big patches to various other components. Unity was pretty much a Ubuntu-only thing and not meant to be shared easily across distributions (I asked).

RHEL6 starts upstarts, but doesn't make use of any of the functionality. Everything is sysvinit scripts and zero (upstart) jobs. I was administrating a few RHEL6 machines and had to read elsewhere about the change to even notice it.

The person you responded to is correct though; a large factor in starting systemd was the CLA of Upstart. Above even highlights this; you cannot really say that RHEL6 used upstart in any way.

I don't necessarily agree with how mjg59 chooses to resolve his issues, but it's hard not to get the impression that he's a little right about this. The problem is precisely this:

> With Ubuntu and any other software, you get the source and it is up to you to deal with the replacement of any trademark strings.

(Emphasis mine)

That's not true of any other software!

I'm not sure how things are for RHEL, but I imagine they're basically similar to Fedora. Fedora doesn't fuzzily require you to "remove and replace all trademarks". It explicitly requires you to remove the branding -- i.e. repository information, change logs and logos. They even provide a nice list of what you have to remove. Everything that you must replace is in three packages.

Now, I'd normally just suspect mjg59 of bitterness, were it not for Canonical's PR dance around the issue.

The accusation is clear: mjg59 thinks that Canonical is intentionally keeping the wording vague so that they can have a word to say in who is developing products based on Ubuntu. Anyone who wants to use something based on Ubuntu has to ask for approval. Otherwise you might end up in court because you didn't remove "Removed spurious call to foo_frobnicate() to fix crashes on Xubuntu" from an upstream changelog.

Canonical has been handing out these approvals for free so far, but I don't think any requests came from current or future competitors. There's no reason to believe that Canonical would be as eager to approve a direct Ubuntu Phone competitor.

Yes yes, it's in their interest to not be as eager, but if this was such a big problem, they should have thought twice before basing their business around a bunch of GPLd products.

It's hard to suspect Canonical of good intentions when every single answer they handed out managed to answer another question. The dialog so far has basically been:

Q: Oh hi guys, look... I'd like to make an Ubuntu derivative, can you tell me what I have to remove?

A: All trademarks.

Q: What do you mean by all trademarks?

A: Or you can ask us for approval instead.

Q: I get it, but I'd rather just remove all trademarks... what exactly do you mean by that? Do I have to remove e.g. mentions of Ubuntu from an upstream changelog, or the @ubuntu.com e-mail address of a contributor listed in an about dialog or a CONTRIBUTORS file?

A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval.

Q: But I'm not an evil hacker!

A: Then we'll approve your request.

Q: BUT I DON'T WANT TO ASK YOU, I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT TO REMOVE!

A: Look, we get this is important, but we have to make sure Evil Hackers don't impersonate Ubuntu so we have to ask you to either remove all trademarks, or ask us for approval.

It kind of gets in an infinite loop at this point.

Canonical could clarify the wording without opening themselves up to Evil Hackers. Their unwillingness to do so is (somewhat insultingly) veiled in arguments that are about as childish as they're trying to imply mjg59's are. It's hard to suspect them of good intentions under these conditions.

I'm not sure why you think this is a bad thing. Canonical is a corollary to Apple in the Linux world. They set their own agenda with limited cooperation.

The FOSS obsession with "community" and "integration" is myopic and abhorrent. As if everyone must converge on one approach, one vanguard. There are scantly any problem domains where only one solution applies.

Now, Canonical keeping to themselves has a very crucial advantage: they leave everyone else alone. They stay in their corner, they don't bother, they don't intervene. They don't start a massive integration effort to drag everyone else in every time they devise something new.

We should be commending Canonical for this.