Re: [gentoo-user] Unity on Gentoo?

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Stroller
<stroller@××××××××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>
> On 25 September 2011, at 17:05, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> …
>> But with Unity the problem is much more than being pushed before time:
>> Unity is a project sponsored by Canonical, and if you want to
>> contribute code to it, you need to sign a "Contributor License
>> Agreement" (CLA), …
>>
>> …  I can almost
>> guarantee that Unity will not be used massively by any distribution
>> that is not Ubuntu: And in the end that's what Canonical wants. They
>> want Ubuntu to be "different" to other distros, to have "an edge".
>> Hence the CLA, so they can do whatever they want with it, even change
>> license if so they want.
>> …
>>
>> Unity on the other hand will never be really used outside of Ubuntu,
>> for the reasons I listed above.
>
> Too early to say this, IMO.
>
> At the moment there are very mixed feelings about Unity. There are a good number of people who hate it, but there are some others who say "I love it, except that I hate that it doesn't let me move the menu bar". Because Unity is still young, we don't yet see a mass of people who are wanting and eager to use it for its functionality's sake. But it does address some issues with Gnome3, for some people, I believe.
>
> The end users do not give a monkey's uncle about the CLA. They just want to use the software, and our distro already provides Sun Java binaries, Unreal Tournament and stuff under all sorts of licenses. If people want to use it, and it's in the package manager, then they will. You are very much an exception, IMO, taking ethical exception to Canonical's CLA.

It's not ethical: It's practical. Canonical's CLA makes it so that
most (if not all of the) development of Unity will come from
developers payed by Canonical. The whole direction for the project
will come from Canonical. I cannot see a healty community project
derived from this development policy.

Having said that, of course I could be wrong.

> Unity is GPL. It can always be forked.

That is also true, and another reason for its possible doom. Any code
from Unity can be used in GNOME (if so the developers desire). The
other way it's not possible, because code going into Unity needs to be
CLA'd.

People can fork Unity, sure. They can also fork GNOME 2, for that
matters, and KDE 3. I just don't see it happening.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México