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

This is silly. Free software is software that complies with a free software license. Full stop.

Even RMS supports commercial use of free software, and has stated before that binaries don't need to be free of cost, or that it needs to be easy to distribute, only that the source is available for modification and 'free' redistribution.

Canonical has every right to protect its brand. Firefox does this, as do many others. This doesn't change the fact that you can use their code as you wish.

Here's a good example.

Canonical comes up with a replacement for sysvinit called Upstart. Everyone agrees sysvinit is a dumpster fire on wheels careening around at high speed, so a new init system is welcomed as a Good Thing. Some people from Red Hat wanted to contribute improvements to Upstart, but Canonical insisted on a Contributor Licensing Agreement that would allow Canonical to relicense the work however they wanted, including commercially. Shockingly, Red Hat employees couldn't get clearance to do uncompensated labor for a Canonical project like that, so rather than contribute to Upstart, we got systemd.

Eventually, systemd became so [PICK ONE OF SUCCESSFUL OR BELIGERENT] that Debian adopted it. And at that point... game over for Upstart. Ubuntu uses systemd now. Because they don't have the resources to package everything for Upstart if Debian is moving to systemd.

The thing is, Canonical isn't that well resourced. Look at who contributes to the Linux kernel.[1] Looking at the top 10 sponsors of contributors, we see some of the usual suspects -- Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung, IBM, SuSE. We see "Vision Engraving Systems," weirdly. Going out of the top 10, a lot of hardware vendors, spits Oracle, FOSS Outreach Program for Women, Pengutronix... I mean, look at the homepage for Pengutronix. [2] It's some 90s era HTML 4.01 they've got going on there. But they're able to make significant contributions to the Linux kernel. Canonical isn't on the list. Canonical has NEVER been on the list, so far as I can tell. You can look all up and down the stack, there's a handful of Canonical-only projects they contribute to, but they're a rounding error in overall Linux development.

Which is their right, of course -- the GPL doesn't insist upon contributing back. And I would agree that shaming Canonical about community isn't productive. At the same time, Apple isn't what they are, it's what they want to be but are failing at being. Apple can get away with incorporating BSD code into their OS but still writing vast swaths of it themselves because Apple doesn't need any of the BSDs to adopt launchd to make it feasible for them to keep running it. Apple has money and can pay people to write code. And on the desktop, OS X has twice the market share of every Linux distro combined, so they can get developers to write applications for their OS even though it doesn't follow the lead of the rest of the BSD-derived OSes. (And yes, I know that OS X resembles a BSD distro far, far less than Ubuntu resembles Debian.) You're right that Canonical wants to be the Apple of the Linux world. But they're not succeeding at it and they're not GOING to succeed without some way of becoming profitable that has yet eluded them. And developers don't want the burden of having to support Canonicals quixiotic insistence that they are the Apple of the Linux world.

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation... (Also, why do I have to tell the Linux Foundation who I work for in order to read this report?)

[2] http://www.pengutronix.de/index_en.html

To be fair, when it happened, Debian rebranding Firefox as Iceweasel was an unhappy decision at the end of an acrimonious discussion. It's only with the passage of time (and by comparison to Canonical's obfuscation) that it looks like a clear and appropriate resolution to a trademark issue.

I was referring to Canonical's decision to make it difficult for others to use their work, thereby excluding others from their work.

Most of your corrections to my story aren't really germane to the point, and mostly involve your constant flogging of a bunch of sysvinit replacements that never caught on, but there's one where I think you move from mere pedantry to being wrong:

> In fact, "some people from Red Hat" already had deeper architectural failings with Upstart (which I agree with, but absolutely not with how they decided to "solve" them) and its event model. The beginnings of systemd (prototyped under the name of Babykit) were lying around for several years on Lennart Poettering's machine.

Here's Kay Sievers, one of the originators of systemd[1]:

> True statement. And yeah, without the CLA, we would very likely have worked on upstart, instead of starting the systemd project. Four years ago we talked to lawyers and tried pretty hard to convince them to give it up, but there was no way to negotiate.

In the comments, from Scott James Remnant, who wrote Upstart for Canonical:

> I don't think we ever disagreed enough for me to refuse patches from them - it was very much a case of they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA

> If the CLA wasn't there, we'd've just tugged and pulled and fought about patches like normal projects, and Upstart would have turned out much like systemd - I'd've been okay with that :)

And another comment from SJR:

> you'd be surprised how little of Upstart's code is the "event system". It could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it.

> Indeed, systemd today doesn't look much like systemd back then either, it's evolved over time - the dependency system has taken a greater forefront than the socket system it was designed around, etc.

> systemd had the benefit of an active developer community, because it didn't put barriers up to contribution.

People who wrote for systemd and Upstart at the time both claim that if it weren't for the CLA, Upstart would've been contributed to by the people who eventually wrote systemd instead of systemd being its own project. I see no reason to disbelieve them.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq