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Summary: Corporations that are somewhat like leeches (leveraging the work of GNU hackers while deleting them from historical timelines) are becoming more of a liability because of their community-shaming, exploitation, and mass bans (usually the Codes of Conduct help them justify that); we need to steer things back in the direction of communities, wherein the needs of users -- not just greedy businesses -- are put first, ensuring users' freedom or true control by computer users (Android is a cautionary tale)

THE VIDEO above (unscripted and unedited, as usual) covers several aspects not mentioned in the text below, so we suggest watching it too (or listening to it; our videos are blind people-friendly). The text below is for reading and it does cover some of the more important points.

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Hours ago we published an article by Marcia Wilbur. She wrote some thoughts about contributions by companies, real threats (paraphrasing an insult from Red Hat), and Edubuntu being "fully supported" by Canonical, according to Canonical. Who is freeloading? Who's the parasite? Who cashes in on all the work and who is being exploited as uncompensated staff or de facto slave labour? As a reminder, Techrights is a non-profit operation that never had sources of income. Is that fair? This year I discovered that Sirius 'Open Source' had plundered my colleagues and I for years. We still have months' worth of material to publish about it as an ombudsman is likely the next step. We've meanwhile also discovered the role of Matthew J Garrett, the Coke Fly doing bios, in disrupting the company by doxing. That's a story for another day though. We've got plenty of time to cover that.

There's a story behind Marcia's article. Earlier this month she expressed concerns about Ubuntu contributions. "While researching the Edubuntu packages to use as an example as to [freeriding]," she said, she found "they’re not contributing to the community [and] I have uncovered something very interesting!"

"Well, I thought it was interesting. The control file description stated that Ubuntu fully supported the packages but when I joined the development list and asked this was not true at all, and I was told this was just left in the control file from previously [done work]."

I told her that Canonical was quite parasitic from the start, taking the work of Debian volunteers and hiring away some critical developers. Ubuntu was selling itself using sex.

Marcia, being from the Debian camp, agreed about Canonical's role. "Yeah," she said, "this being said, the author did point out that most Ubuntu distros do not contribute any development. Can’t argue with that!"

Last month I did a lengthy video about that.

Marcia decided to look a little deeper and ask around to affirm her initial findings.

"I was able to get a hold of a project Scribus," she said, "in IRC."

"Also, I was told by the Edubuntu dev team that the description in the control file saying they fully support… is a mistake!"

"From what they’re telling me, they pretty much just customize the distro and don’t have anything original in development. Do you know how successful education apps can be? Not one single original education app from Ubuntu devs is available in Edubuntu pkgs."

"But my favorite part was when the point of contact in the Edubuntu conversation tried to tell me how distros “are”, that distros don’t usually have anything new in development unless it’s maybe an administrative tool."

"When it actually, the exciting part about a new distro -- or respin -- is when the distro not only focuses on the audience needs for software specifically selected to that focus, but also to some new tool, utility or application available in the distro. And I have seen distros [which had] spun around an exciting new tool."

Fedora created several additional tools, but the large majority of the software wasn't Red Hat's.

Marcia saw the same in Debian and Ubuntu.

"With Debian base, not always the case. But to justify not contributing to development of packages, when Edubuntu is only repackaging basically… saying well no one else is developing for their distro… well, it’s just disappointing."

"GNU/Linux is widespread and Free software is highly ubiquitous. But are some companies engaging in exploitative tactics by misattribution and -- adding insult to injury -- community-shaming?""Hey, I get it but they’re just re-packaging packages and calling it their own without contributing anything back to the projects. And then to see in the control file the description states it’s fully supported by canonical!"

"I mean sure, I have dependencies on other projects always but I’m not a corporation or company charging half $1 million dollars for 2 OS licenses for 2 hardware products…"

"Add to that, the entire fully supported thing… I was told the description in the control file was a mistake. Really?"

So we have companies like Canonical raking in millions (or in IBM's case, billions) without doing much of the critical work. Or, in some cases, any of the work. Is that fair?

GNU/Linux is widespread and Free software is highly ubiquitous. But are some companies engaging in exploitative tactics by misattribution and -- adding insult to injury -- community-shaming?

"And apropos real community-based distros," a person has pointed out to us, "Devuan just released version 5 (Daedalus)." ⬆