| > This is idealism. In reality, building and maintaining software takes incredible amounts of organization and labor. All of the work is already being done. Debian is a community distribution and is one of the most popular. > As Ubuntu gets more mainstream, the percentage of users who agree with your opinion will shrink and those who disagree will grow, and Canonical will proportionally depend more on the latter. Yet Debian will still exist. > I use Ubuntu LTS myself, but mainstream Windows users almost universally couldn’t care less about desktop spying on Windows. Nobody wants the spying. If your choices are get spied on or pay the full cost of a platform transition away from one that has been spending billions of dollars for decades to keep you locked into it, some people are still moving away from it over this! If you gave them the choice without the transition cost, basically nobody would choose the spying. Which is the thing you get when forks are possible, because somebody just forks it and removes the malware. This is a characteristic of the license. > Open source is not a magic solution and FLOSS is simply unsustainable under capitalism. This is a weird position to take when it clearly already exists. Would having more users make community development less sustainable? There would be more members of the community so the average one would have to do less work to produce the same software. Even if 99% of the new users are non-developers, the 1% who are makes it easier rather than harder to sustain. |