Recently there has been a flurry of concerns relating to the IP policy at Canonical. I have not wanted to throw my hat into the ring, but I figured I would share a few simple thoughts.

Firstly, the caveat. I am not a lawyer. Far from it. So, take all of this with a pinch of salt.

The core issue here seems to be whether the act of compiling binaries provides copyright over those binaries. Some believe it does, some believe it doesn’t. My opinion: I just *don’t know*.

The issue here though is with *intent*.

In Canonical’s defense, and specifically Mark Shuttleworth’s defense, they set out with a promise at the inception of the Ubuntu project that Ubuntu will *always be free*. The promise was that there would not be a hampered community edition and full-flavor enterprise edition. There will be one Ubuntu, available freely to all.

Canonical, and Mark Shuttleworth as a primary investor, have stuck to their word. They have not gone down the road of the community and enterprise editions, of per-seat licensing, or some other compromise in software freedom. Canonical has entered multiple markets where having separate enterprise and community editions could have made life easier from a business perspective, but they haven’t. I think we sometimes forget this.

Now, from a revenue side, this has caused challenges. Canonical has invested a lot of money in engineering/design/marketing and some companies have used Ubuntu without contributing even nominally to it’s development. Thus, Canonical has at times struggled to find the right balance between a free product for the Open Source community and revenue. We have seen efforts such as training services, Ubuntu One etc, some of which have failed, some have succeeded.

Again though, Canonical has made their own life more complex with this commitment to freedom. When I was at Canonical I saw Mark very specifically reject notions of compromising on these ethics.

Now, I *get* the notional concept of this IP issue from Canonical’s perspective. Canonical invests in staff and infrastructure to build binaries that are part of a free platform and that other free platforms can use. If someone else takes those binaries and builds a commercial product from them, I can understand Canonical being a bit miffed about that and asking the company to pay it forward and cover some of the costs.

But here is the rub. While I understand this, it goes against the grain of the Free Software movement and the culture of Open Source collaboration.

Putting the legal question of copyrightable binaries aside for one second, the current Canonical IP policy is just culturally *awkward*. I think most of us expect that Free Software code will result in Free Software binaries and to make claim that those binaries are limited or restricted in some way seems unusual and the antithesis of the wider movement. It feels frankly like an attempt to find a loophole in a collaborative culture where the connective tissue is freedom.

Thus, I see this whole thing from both angles. Firstly, Canonical is trying to find the right balance of revenue and software freedom, but I also sympathize with the critics that this IP approach feels like a pretty weak way to accomplish that balance.

So, I ask my humble readers this question: if Canonical reverts this IP policy and binaries are free to all, what do you feel is the best way for Canonical to derive revenue from their products and services while also committing to software freedom? Thoughts and ideas welcome!

**NOTE:** *Before you read this, I want to clear up some confusion. This post shares an idea that is designed purely for some intellectual fun and discussion. I am not proposing we actually do this, nor advocating for this. So, don’t read too much into these words…*

The Ubuntu phone is evolving step by step. The team has worked their socks off to build a convergent user interface, toolkit, and full SDK. The phone exposes an exciting new concept, scopes, that while intriguing in their current form, after some refinement (which the team are already working on) could redefine how we use devices and access content. It is all the play for.

There is one major stumbling block though: *apps*.

While scopes offer a way of getting access to content quickly, they don’t completely replace apps. There will always be certain apps that people are going to want. The common examples are Skype, WhatsApp, Uber, Google Maps, Fruit Ninja, and Temple Run.

Now this is a bit of a problem. The way new platforms usually solve this is by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay those companies to create and support a port. This isn’t really an option for the Ubuntu phone (there is much more than just the phone being funded by Canonical).

So, it seems to me that the opportunity of the Ubuntu phone is a sleek and sexy user interface that converges and puts content first, but the stumbling block is the lack of apps, and the lack of apps may well have a dramatic impact on adoption.

So, i have an idea to share based on a discussion last night with a friend.

Why don’t we rebase the phone off Android?

OK, bear with me…

In other words, the Ubuntu phone would be an Android phone but instead of the normal user interface it would be a UI that looks and feels like the Ubuntu phone. It would have the messaging menu, scopes, and other pieces, and select Android API calls could be mapped to the different parts of the Unity UI such as the messaging menu and online account support.

The project could even operate like how we build Ubuntu today. Every six months upstream Android would be synced into Launchpad where a patchset would live on `patches.ubuntu.com` and applied to the codebase (in much the same way we do with Debian today).

This would mean that Ubuntu would continue to be an Open Source project, based on a codebase easily supported by hardware manufacturers (thus easier to ship), it would run all Android apps without requiring a cludgy porting/translation layer running on Ubuntu, it would look and feel like an Ubuntu phone, it would still expose scopes as a first-class user interface, the Ubuntu SDK would still be the main ecosystem play, Ubuntu apps would still stand out as more elegant and engaging apps, and it would reduce the amount of engineering required (I assume).

Now, the question is how this would impact a single convergent Operating System across desktop, phone, tablet, and TV. If Unity is essentially a UI that runs on top of Android and exposes a set of services, the convergence story should work well too, after all…it is all Linux. It may need different desktop, phone, tablet, and TV kernels, but I think we would need different kernels anyway.

So where does this put Debian and Ubuntu packages? Well, good question. I don’t know. The other unknown of course would be the impact of such a move on our flavors and derivatives, but then again I suspect the march towards snappy is going to put us in a similar situation if flavors/derivatives choose to stick with the Debian packaging system.

Of course, I am saying all this as who really only understands a small part of the picture, but this just strikes me as a logical step forward. I know there has been a reluctance to support Android apps on Ubuntu as it devalues the Ubuntu app ecosystem and people would just use Android apps, but I honestly think some kind of middle-ground is needed to get into the game, otherwise I worry we won’t even make it to the subs bench no matter how awesome our technology is.

Just a thought, would love to hear what everyone thinks, including if what I am suggesting is total nonsense. 🙂

Again, remember, this is just an idea I am throwing out for the fun of the discussion; I am not suggesting we actually do this.

So the Ubuntu Community Council has asked Jonathan Riddell to step down as a leader in the Kubuntu community. The reasoning for this can be broadly summarized as “poor conduct”.

Some members of the community have concluded that this is something of a hatchet job from the Community Council, that Jonathan’s insistence to get answers to tough questions (e.g. licensing, donations) has resulted in the Community Council booting him out.

I don’t believe this is true.

Just because the Community Council has not provided an extensive docket of evidence behind their decision does not equate to wrong-doing. It does not equate to corruption or malpractice.

I do sympathize with the critics though. I spent nearly eight years pretty close to the politics of Ubuntu and when I read the Community Council’s decision I understood and agreed with it. For all of Jonathan’s tremendously positive contributions to Kubuntu, I do believe his conduct and approach has sadly had a negative impact on parts of our community too.

This has nothing to do with the questions he raised, it was the way he raised them, and the inference and accusations he made in raising such questions. We can’t have our leaders behaving like that: it sets a bad example.

As such, I understood the Community Council’s decision because I have seen these politics both up front and behind the scenes due to my close affiliation with Ubuntu and Canonical. For those people for who haven’t been so close to the coalface though, this decision from the CC feels heavy handed, without due evidence, and emotive in response.

Thus, in conclusion, I don’t believe the CC have acted inappropriately in making this decision, but I do believe that their decision needs to be illustrated further. The decision needs to feel complete and authoritative, but until we see further material, we are not going to improve the situation if everyone assumes the Community Council is some shadowy cabal against Jonathan and Kubuntu.

We are a community. We have more in common than what differs between us. Let’s put the hyperbole to one side and have a *conversation* about how we resolve this. There is an opportunity for a great outcome here: for better understanding and further improvement, but the first step is everyone understanding the perspectives of the people with opposing viewpoints.

As such `#ISupportCommunity`; our wider Ubuntu and Kubuntu family. Let’s work together, not against each other.