Canonical, Ubuntu, and Why I Seem so Upset About Them All the Time
I notice that there&#x27;s an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on.<p>In a way, it mirrors the difference between free markets and command economies. Free markets tend to be resilient, offer individuals the most power, and tend to favor those with skill at the expense of lots of market fragmentation and inefficiency. Command economies, by contrast, can have everything working together towards one common goal,  and allow for every individual to have some measure of equality and security. They can operate with either far more efficiency than a free market, or far less... and the fortunes can rapidly change.<p>Democracies respond by then copying the innovation of the risky dictatorial&#x2F;command experiments.<p>Ubuntu is trying to do a little of both. It tries to be like Apple, and thus doesn&#x27;t try to conform to the general FOSS community initiatives if it thinks they aren&#x27;t innovating correctly or quickly enough. That is why they created Unity, Mir, and many other in-house projects. Tightly integrating branding into the products is just par for the course.<p>By not trying to go along with the program, they annoy everyone else. But since the Debian Technical Committee, X Foundation, Linux Foundation, and W3C committees are not like the Comintern or the Apple board of directors, they have no power to enforce that program. Hence the fragmentation.