Comment 9 for bug 375272

I agree with mattl's point. Having been around the Free Software world since 1992, I've slowly watched every for-profit company that originally had Free Software principles slowly but surely lose them. Indeed, I started to write off Canonical on this point when I saw that Launchpad was proprietary. I was reinvigorated when I saw the work of many folks that made a change there and they are on course to Free it under the AGPLv3.

However, as someone else in this bug mentioned, apparently no lessons were learned there. The goal of UbuntuOne as a service is a great one, because there are many proprietary services that do this already and having a FaiF replacement would help make our community better.

I was just saying to Amanda Brock a few months ago that much of the party line of Canonical sounds like Bob Young did about Red Hat in the 1990s. I told her that I had a hard time believing it because I've heard many for-profit companies in the past espouse a commitment to Free Software before only to let our community down.

She assured me that Canonical was different because of Mark Shuttleworth's leadership and commitment to Free Software. I tried to believe her, but was still skeptical. Seeing the launch of UbuntuOne shows that my skepticism was well founded. Please, Mark, I'd be quite happy to made to look like a fool for being so pessimistic. Please make a commitment and a plan today to release the server side of UbuntuOne under the AGPLv3.