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Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

Apparently Richard Stallman in the comments saying that Canonical refused to make it a completetly free software platform...

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I think that this is a strategic error from Canonical: a lot of people would like a truly free alternative to Android phones (with open hardware), and this could have been an opportunity to get them to support Edge. Canonical missed it IMHO.

See Mark Shuttleworth AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...

> I think that this is a strategic error from Canonical: a lot of people would like a truly free alternative to Android phones (with open hardware), and this could have been an opportunity to get them to support Edge. Canonical missed it IMHO.

I think you underestimate the echo chamber effect. The number of people who care about FOSS is minuscule, and marketing the Edge to that crowd would dilute the marketing message for everyone else.

For the people who care about FOSS you wouldn't have to market that feature, just state it. Also, the people who care about FOSS are loud, and influence people who don't care about FOSS.

I think you underestimate the appealing to as many disparate influential groups as possible effect.

Yeah, that's the reason most smartphones are Android and iOS.

/sarcasm

The state of free graphics drivers for mobile is of course terrible, and Canonical are quite UX driven so there is a big difficulty. They could have made more of an effort with the non graphics parts, which would have helped.

I never got the impression they had actually decided what hardware to use - eg it might have been Intel not ARM, as 4G on ARM SoCs is hard to get.

permalink to the comment: http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/26404040

Comment quoted here for ease:

Although Ubuntu is a variant of the GNU operating system that I launched (see http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html), it has major ethical flaws: it contains software that is not free/libre (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) and it spies on the user (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html).

The Free Software Foundation challenged the developers of the Ubuntu Edge to design it so that it would run without user-restricting nonfree software, but they rejected that goal.

Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation www.fsf.org www.gnu.org

The Ubuntu spyware incident was exactly the reason why I didn't support this project.

Me, too. I decided to wait until it came out, make an assessment on how much of it would be closed, and to what extent that could be worked around. If I could have trusted Ubuntu, I'd have been in for two or three.

He seems to be a regular commenter on the Guardian website.

Personally I think the problem was that there where no free beer rewards.

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