[ale] Ubuntu and the price of Unity

[James Sumners]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> AIUI, Canonical is the "owner" of Unity and they have expressly
> reserved the right to change the license as they see fit.
>
> So if the GNOME team decides Unity is the best desktop for them and
> start submitting patches to Canonical then they lose control of the
> software they are writing.

That's precisely my point. GNOME doesn't have to use Unity. The
article implies that GNOME has to choose between Shell and Unity. They
don't. So there is no reason they should fear that their code no
longer belongs to them.

> And it could be in a couple years Canonical says, thank you for all
> the work, but all future releases of Unity will be as a commercial
> product and is only distributable by Canonical!
>
> Note: I did not see what license Unity currently has.  If it is GPL,
> Gnome could fork it in event of the above, so it may not be that big
> of a deal in reality.

According to the article, and [1], Unity is GPL. In fact, [1] says
that it is "GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3".

> Greg


[1] -- https://launchpad.net/unity

-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

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