Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed

Historically, the "spirit" of Open Source (or the motivation to part from the FSF, which was the birth of the movement) was to present whatever was happening in the Free Software world to businesses precisely with the goal of attracting money. Loads of it.

Open Source is a method of work. It says, my value is not in my source code, I'm not afraid of sharing it with the world (as a matter of facts, I get more value by doing so). But it is furthermost a methodology aimed at helping businesses make more money. (Or else all this commotion would've never happened in the late 90s and we'd all be still calling it Free Software).

Canonical is a business. It needs money and if you've ever owned a business, or worked in a financial position in one, you know there's no such thing as "getting enough". If they don't make money, they'll die and the project might terminate. Take it or leave it.

That being said, I chose to leave it a while back, for very similar reasons (I moved to Debian which was familiar and more ... free). But I cannot say I'm surprised they do similar deals, and cannot stand by when people accuse them of ... not following some convenient definition that was never there to begin with.

I demonstrated that dpkg will not remove packages with dependencies. Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out.

How does that not change your point?

http://benjaminkerensa.com/2012/09/22/lots-of-hype-over-shop...

Canonical sure needs money. Before this, the deal was that Ubuntu is free in both ways and Canoncial tries to earn money with support-contracts for corporations. That wasn't succesful enough (which maybe isn't too surprising with established forces like Redhat already in the market), so Ubuntu One marked a new approach, to monetize the wide distribution of Ubuntu by offering paid services (but also a free offer). The try to participate on the in-app-purchases goes in the same direction.

So far, there was a balance. Unity in itself can be seen as a tipping point, where Canoncial tried to steer Ubuntu in one direction without even trying to align that with the community. That alone made Unity a hard sell for established ubuntu-users, its bad state in the beginning didn't help.

And now ads. Ads are seldom in the best interest of the user. Sometimes they are, when they offer exactly the product the customer searched for (i once got a cheaper dsl-connection because i arrived via a google-ad when i searched for dsl connections, for that i was thankful). In the Unity dash, the user is trying to start a program or to open a file of his, so it is almost guaranteed that the ad will never be what the user searches for.

So all this default does is enabling a probably very small revenue-stream to canonical, while cluttering the dash and irritating users by givem them the feeling that this ubuntu-desktop is doing strange things not in their control (even though they can disable it, a new user won't know how and even if he did, the system did something unexpected, which will bother him).

I hope there are better ways to monetize (maybe donations, paid features like the already existing ones, integrating google music, an ubuntu-tablet, facebook-integration paid for by facebook, certified hardware - but sure not simple ads -.-).