[justinclift]

Hmmm. "freely available to the whole world". Is that really the wording they use?

Asking because their recent advertising added to the apt cli is promoting some kind of security packages. Seems like people need to pay for those?

[mattl]

I believe that was for Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro provides some extra support (five more years) for packages in Ubuntu's existing (gratis) Long Term Support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu.

[justinclift]

Hmmm, not sure about that.

The wording was along the lines of "There are security updates for package XYZ. If you join <something> (maybe its Ubuntu Pro like you mention?) you'd have access to them."

That's not really a message that should be showing up on a box running 20.04 LTS, which is years before its EOL date.

[mattl]

Yeah, I saw it too.. we used a precursor to Ubuntu Pro so I'm sure my message was less obnoxious.

I think they're also offering patches for some commonly installed third-party stuff like nodejs via Ubuntu Pro.

I actually quite like Ubuntu Pro for the fact I can send a developer a laptop and know that there's 24/7 support from Canonical. I was a little dubious at how good they'd be, but they were able to diagnose the problem and provide a fix.

[justinclift]

> I think they're also offering patches for some commonly installed third-party stuff like nodejs via Ubuntu Pro.

Yeah. That rubs me the wrong way. Like, they're clearly entitled to pay developers money for whatever they want.

However, they're paying developers to develop patches they're not sharing back with their upstream in a timely fashion:

1. Without those patches going through the upstream channel(s), there's no real mechanism to push back on patches and aren't good enough (for whatever reason)

2. It feels like they're taking advantage of the rest of the OSS ecosystem that is writing software / developing fixes and providing them in a timely fashion

:/

[bmacho]

Is there a free Ubuntu Pro clone, like Alma and Rocky for Red Hat?

[justinclift]

No idea personally.