Canonical must change copyright policy

Sam Varghese
Saturday, 12 March 2011 11:37

Opinion and Analysis

The next chapter in the three-cornered public stoush between the GNOME Desktop Project, the KDE Project and Canonical, the maker of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has just been kicked off by GNOME Foundation board member Dave Neary.

Former GNOME media adviser Jeff Waugh has also decided to get involved with a post that, he says, is the first in a series. Waugh, it may be recalled, left the project in 2008, a year after he had been accused of being part of it for just one reason - self-publicity. He did not deny the accusation.

Thus far, in Waugh's contribution to the stoush on Neary's blog, he has been accused of trying to
sidetrack arguments and he has been critical of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth who was once his employer.

While Neary's addition to the argument is sober by comparison to that of KDE developer Aaron Seigo, it serves only one purpose - to keep the festering row going. Old conflicts and disputes are raised and people who have grievances come out of the woodwork to get their own back.

Bad feeling between GNOME and Canonical has been festering recently after the latter decided to use its own interface, Unity, for the next version of Ubuntu, instead of the forthcoming GNOME 3 shell.

A second spat took place more recently between Canonical and the developers of the Mono-dependent music player Banshee - which is to be the default in Natty Narwhal, the next version of Ubuntu - over the splitting of royalties from music sales.

The revenue was going to GNOME in toto before Banshee was included in Ubuntu, but Canonical wanted to take a big slice of the money once it became the default player for Narwhal. The issue has now been settled.