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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

So I upvoted expecting the worst, but this isn't that bad. The only thing I'd be worried about is canonical selling ads to third parties in terminal, then yes, fuck that.

EDIT: stuff like this isn't that new. GNU Parallel has that infamous "cite me in your work" long ramble every time you invoked it until you used a flag claiming you'd cite them. This is an ad which makes it commercial may be, potentially raising a different level of ickyness at least in some people's minds, but it definitely is of the same kind of behavior.

At the very least, if you're paying canonical, that shouldn't be there.

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Regarding GNU Parallel, the nag screen got patched out on Debian due to not being GPL compliant, for now. There's some back and forth "because the citation notice is not part of the license, but part of academic tradition"

https://sources.debian.org/src/parallel/20220722+ds-1/debian...

Exactly. Hell, even VIM has an "ad" every time you start the editor up for donating to Uganda. The donate to uganda may be more altruistic and not-profit-seeking, but it takes up more real estate than this canonical ad, and is "Unwanted". Why is one acceptable and not the other?

That's the foot at the door. Third parties is some steps down that road.

Ubuntu/Canonical has been erratic for quite some time now. Time to get back to a non-company backed up distro.

So everything free should be filled with ads? Even FOSS?

Who said ‘should’? If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?

> If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?

Of course - users must want exactly what creators want and products are created by creators for creators.

People create what they want to create. If it’s not what you wanted that’s your problem not theirs.

Users aren't required to use it either

Nobody said they were.

"If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?"

If your goal with a program is to have users beyond yourself, then it becomes a dialogue. The question above implies that creators should always do whatever they want regardless of what users think about it.

Of course creators can always say no/ignore users, and users can always go somewhere else. This has a greater effect when there's something financial on the line (e.g. people leaving a subscription for a better competitor)

They should do what they want worrying about the customers that matter to them. They don’t have to worry what you as an individual care about. How much were you paying them? Submit a ticket to your paid support agent if you want them to listen to you. Otherwise… stop complaining about how this free thing isn’t how you want it.

Well, because it's OSS my business would be to fork and patch it.

Yeah you can already do that. So what’s the problem?

FOSS can always be forked, which puts some pressure on developers/maintainers to not be too egregious.

This is hardly new BTW. I remember switching from LimeWire to FrostWire to avoid ads a couple of decades ago.

I don't remember limewire being FOSS.

It's GPL, and as far as I remember always was. For example https://lwn.net/Articles/143220

  LimeWire: Open source brings commercial success (NewsForge)
  [Posted July 11, 2005 by corbet]

  NewsForge looks at the business behind LimeWire, an open source Gnutella client. ""On the development side, LimeWire LLC engages open source developers by paying bounties for features. Small bounties, listed as being 'good for beginners,' pay $50; medium bounties, 'good for learning the intricacies of the code,' pay $200; and large bounties, for projects that are 'difficult, but very useful,' pay $500.""

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