[OT] Worrying quote of the month.

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:
> Shuttleworth: 'Don't trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with
> your data already.'
>
> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20121008#feature

Mark's just keeping it real, as we say in the States.

If the fact that every OS vendor effectively has root on your system is 
troubling, it's time to leave computing.


I went to the Ubuntu Developer Summit this last May, since it was 
finally held in California for the first time in many years.  UDS 
happens twice every year right after a release, a week-long series of 
work sessions to plan the scope and sequence for the next release six 
months later.  While I paid my own travel and lodging, most of the 
attendees are either employees of Canonical or steady contributors to 
the project, so most were fully sponsored by Canonical.  In addition to 
covering travel and lodging, Canonical also provides two meals each day, 
with outside sponsors covering dinner most nights (Google uses a 
customized Ubuntu across a wide range of ops, and to show their support 
they not only catered dinner one night but threw one helluva party along 
with it).

And all those UDS expenses are just two of the 52 weeks that make up 
what it takes to deliver Ubuntu twice each year.  All year long 
Canonical has hundreds of employees to pay salaries to, in addition to 
making upstream contributions to the kernel, Gnome, Libre Office, and 
others, along with the other overhead that comes with running an 
organization of that scope.

While Canonical does have revenue in the tens of millions annually it's 
not yet profitable, so the difference is coming out of Mark 
Shuttleworth's pocket.

Personally, I have no problem with someone who's been giving away 
literally tens of millions of dollars (well, technically that would be 
"pounds") every year to build up a great OS using opportunities to try 
to make it profitable.

There's more to open source than just "gimme gimme gimme".

In fact, Ubuntu.com now has an optional donation page where you can not 
only contribute to the project, but decide how much of your donation 
goes to each of about a dozen categories, from hardware compatibility to 
UI design and more.

If my shopping at Amazon can kick a few cents toward Ubuntu, I'm happy 
to do so.

Anyone concerned about the built-in Amazon search can simply turn it off 
in Settings.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys