[Gllug] Ubuntu and me - suggestions requested (polite ones please)

[Cillian de Roiste]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 1:47 PM, John Edwards
<john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 01:22:10PM +0000, Cillian de Roiste wrote:
> <snip>
>> From a personal (religious?) perspective I'd also like to mention
>> another reason for trying Mandriva as an alternative to Ubuntu. They
>> use open source software for their forums, issue tracking and wikis
>> etc. and they have very clearly contributed a lot of code to the
>> community too.  While I am grateful for the vast amount of new members
>> that Ubuntu has brought to the Linux community (and I really love the
>> theme), I found that their choices of software that they used didn't
>> sit well with me.
>
> Which choices are you thinking about?
>
> Launchpad? (which it not part of the Ubuntu distribution but is
> due for open source release next year)

But isn't open source yet, and if I understand correctly the reason
for not making it open source from the start is that they want to
establish Launchpad.net. This just doesn't seem to show great faith or
conviction in the open source development model to me. Another
decision that greatly concerned me was that they insist that all
translations added through Launchpad must be released under the BSD
licence regardless of the licence of the package it comes from. I
understand it is more convenient to do this (and likewise for all
code), but naturally this means that proprietary OSs will also be able
to take advantage of the work and that translators who use
Launchpad/Rosetta have no other option. If Launchpad were open source,
it would be trivial to change this decision and make the great tools
they have developed available to people who disagreed with this
decision. The other obvious one is the use of vBulletin. Why not
support phpBB or any of the other open source forums available. I did
read up on this a bit and my understanding was that they felt
vBulletin was missing some features that they needed. I could not find
a list of these or any attempt at trying to inspire the community to
add what was needed. Since Gentoo have run a massive and extremely
useful forum using phpBB for years I fail to understand why it wasn't
an option. Ubuntu are by no means the only distro to make decisions
like this, and naturally many other distros use open source web
applications (Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva are ones I know of).
Ubuntu do use MoinMoin for their wiki and as far as I know have also
dabbled in using Plone for content management (and may still be using
it?).

> Sun's Java? (which is entirely optional)

I have no objections to the packages they offer and think they can be
commended for making efforts to clarify and simplify the licensing of
packages to the end user.
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