In the 2000s, a video of Nelson Mandela explaining "Ubuntu" was included in every iso[1]:
"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."
Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.
Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.
Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?
The big commercial distros hit a common failure mode for open source projects. There's a lot of money in cloud, which means there are a lot of vendors that want to extend things in ways that make the vendors' products relevant. Those vendors end up being the ones that fund future devlopment work, so they control the direction of the ecosystem for the projects they rely on (instead of users / hobbyists / hardware vendors / etc).
So, we get stuff like Ubuntu's fleet management service and flatpak/snap instead of things that actually improve the user experience.
The whole ecosystem is this way. Look at the stuff RedHat has been shovelling. The article mentions gtk3/4, wayland and pulseaudio. I'd add systemd to the list. All of those introduced multi-decade regressions into the desktop experience. The only reason they were funded was because they force churn in smaller open source projects, killing competition from lower-resource developers, and consolidating the ecosystem in the big shops.
Heck, RedHat Enterprise Linux is a giant GPL violation, but IBM throws a lot of money around, so most people just look the other way:
RedHat ships source code of GPL binaries for RHEL, but only if you pay them. The source code comes with the following restriction: If you redistribute it, they'll refuse to renew your support contract. This clearly violates the "no additional restrictions" clause of the GPL.
I think RedHat's theory is that the GPL doesn't entitle you to updates or support, so restricting them can't be considered an additional GPL restriction.
You could say that without the updates, RHEL is not fit for purpose, and therefore you should be entitled to them. Sounds like a complicated legal argument to have though.
I agree that RedHat are certainly not ethical actors in the FOSS community though.
Money talks, I guess. Two of those companies are bad actors in this space (google, with the android rug pull, and user abusing software built on open source, and aws, the repeat open source business killer):
Considering who Conservancy are, that is very unlikely. They are the main organisation doing GPL compliance work these days. Everyone else either opposes enforcement, or doesn't have the resources to do it, or does it but doesn't talk about it.
"A traveler through a country would stop at a village, and he didn't have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu, but it will have various aspects.
Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve? These are the important things in life, and if one can do that, we have done something very important which can be appreciated."
Since then, Canonical's customers have shifted with its mission; Ubuntu Desktop is mostly a promotional vehicle for paid services, and desktop changes on the whole over the past decade (post-systemd) weren't made to better represent the needs of our "travelers", but corporate customers or Canonical themselves.
Userland has always been a frontier space; as the author notes, you get out of it what you put in. But we can point to discrete events where shifts of priority and reductions of service have occurred for certain groups.
Is there a way to understand why they now have to ask for what they were once given in the spirit of ubuntu?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HED4h00xPPA