For me, Canonical deriving revenue via MP3 sales is a non-issue. Instead, it would be unfair (unethical?!? immoral?!?) if those few upstream apps capable of generating an income decided where all the money went. If an upstream depends on revenue for sustainability then that should be explicitly communicated.

However, when it comes to criticism of GNOME perhaps more politeness and understanding wouldn’t go amiss (a point made well by Dave Neary http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/ ). If the GNOME shell took its best ideas from Unity, either back that up with good evidence or don’t mention it at all. That comment is sure to create offense where none is necessary.

You wrote:
> [...]
> But I will say that “sustainability” is most definitely something consumers can and will
> think about when making purchasing decisions. There is a growing acknowledgement in the brick
> and mortar purchasing habits about food production sustainability for example. There are most
> definitely industry practises that help lower the acquisition cost of food which work against
> sustainability of the entire industry. Some consumers don’t care..others care very much.

Well, it’s a matter on how you “define” “sustainability”. If “sustainability” is defined as: “We do have lot of SVs or HVs who are certifying their software/hardware on our OS”, and if you settle your business on this behaviour, then I think something is wrong.
To take your example of “sustainable food production”: I’m living in Germany, and I buy my food from different vendors, mostly but, from discounters where I can buy the food for my family for less then upper class “discounters” (e.g. Aldi vs. REWE). What I learned from comparing the producers of the food products of Aldi and REWE is: It’s just the name. The producers are mostly the very same.

So, what do we have in our Linux Business.
We have old, known and “sustainable” vendors of Linux OS namely RH and SuSE (today Novell) (business)
We have a old and known and “sustainable” “vendor” of Linux OS namely Debian.
And we have a “new kid on the block” namely “Canonical” and “Ubuntu”.

Most of the software comes from larger OpenSource Communities like Kernel Developers, KDE and GNOME Developers, ALSA etc.

In the past (before Canonical and Ubuntu), people were forced to eventually use the “free” Linux OS Debian (after Debian was created), or to buy “commercial” Linux OS’ RH or SuSE. Some companies who were in the “Internet” business, they settled with Debian, disregarding all the problems they stumbled upon. Other companies or government near organisations settled with RH (mostly in the non european market) or with SuSE (mostly in the european market).
But the software came from the same sources, only the integration for the different OS distributions were done inside the different distro companies or communities.
In the past, SuSE and RH did that in “private”, Debian in public. Today, RH and SuSE(Novell) do (mostly) the integration now in the public (via Fedora and OpenSuSE).

In the past, when only RH and SuSE were the real stars of Linux Based OS, many hardware and software companies (HP, IBM, EMC, Oracle, SAP etc.pp.) were certifying their software and hardware on those distros. Even today, there is no real alternative. You have to run Oracle on RHEL or SLES when you want to have support from Oracle. You need to have RHEL or SLES when you want to run EMC SAN storages on your Linux servers. Or having Adobes Flash Media Server, it’s only certified on RHEL. So you don’t have any support from Adobe when you are running Adobes FMS on other linux OS then RHEL.

Remember, the software which is used on all of our available big Linux Distros comes from the same source.

Actually, being an OPS guy, dealing with a lot of “commercial” software running on Linux, I’m able to state here, that all of the software, which is certified on RHEL or SLES, does run on Debian or Ubuntu or other not so big linux players. And sometimes much better then on the certified distros. Adobe FMS is one of the examples. Adobe FMS had(has still?) a problem with a security kernel update of RHEL. After the update FMS could only handle 512 user connections, instead of the documented 1024.
Adobe reacted with a comment: “Downgrade your kernel”
Installing and Running Adobe FMS on Ubuntu didn’t have the problem at all, and having stress tests on those machines, I came even higher then the documented 1024 user connections.

Regarding this example, many people were complaining, and they didn’t know what to do now? Downgrading the kernel, having a remote exploit not fixed, or asking RH what to do now?

So, end of story here was: RH people were saying: It’s Adobes problem, and Adobe saying: It’s a RH problem.
Who should I trust now?

I could give you other examples with EMC drivers certified for RHEL or SLES, which were running “unmodified” on Debian, having the same problems on Debian as they had on RHEL or SLES. EMC never supported any customers of EMC machines with EMC drivers running on Debian. So you had to buy a RHEL license to show EMC: It’s your problem and it’s happening on a certified distro.

“Sustainability” is a very good business goal, when you listen to your customers. If you don’t there is no such thing as a “sustainable business”. It’s just “gaining revenue” like the others do, too.

> You personally may not incorporate a view of sustainability into your purchasing habits but
> it would be wrong to suggest that others do not. And I will continue to argue that supporting
> businesses which aid in the sustainability of the entire FOSS ecosystem is in your best
> interests even if you yet think it is so. And yes, I know exactly how big of a hypocrite I am
> for arguing that without myself being a paying customer for anything. I have to save my money
> for the peanuts that I throw at people. This seat my be cheap, but the cost of the peanuts
> sort of sneaks up on you.

Of course, I need an OS which will be available for a long time. But it’s all about experience.
With Debian and/or Ubuntu I’m able to change everything to my needs. Even when Canonical will collapse (hopefully not), I’m still able to take the project and use it, change it, evolve it.
RHEL or SLES i’m able to use it but changing it, evolve it? Yes, someone can work inside the Fedora and OpenSuSE project, but the last resort is still in the managers hands. There is no direct involvement of outside users and devs inside the commercial area of RHEL or SLES. (At least not that I know of).

Ubuntu, it’s not all gold, but most of my problems I can solve directly or with discussions with the devs in question. And 90% of my problems are solved directly, or in one of the releases in between the LTS releases, without big troubles.

So the difference here is “direct involvement” and “indirect involvement”.

So, my payment to the FOSS world: Using the software the FOSS world is producing and changing bits and pieces to make a users life even more happier. Especially trying to solve the problems for the server side of the world.

And the desktop? Quoting Jono here during a keynote at LinuxTag 2008: “Who is still using xterm or the text console?” “Oh, Yes, \sh who else” (imagine the ironic smiley). Anyways, I’m testing in my sparetime most linux distros (openSuSE, Fedora, Slackware, etc.pp) and no desktop release of the mentioned products came near the experience of Ubuntu today.
Therefore, Canonical is doing the “right thing” to change the Linux Market. Hopefully others are jumping on the same bandwagon, to have real competition. Right now, for me, and I’m only speaking for myself, Ubuntu + Canonical are the leaders of the pack.

And as always, when there is someone who is really good in something, there are others who try to critisize the work. But the world is changing, and especially in our “FLOSS” world, we need new ways of competing with the real “competitors” to FLOSS.

Time will tell, who will still be the “star” on the Linux distro market and I hope that the example of Canonical and Ubuntu will be taken as the new way of doing the business. Eventually we see some developer communities being more “business alike” (when they are not already part of a business), but what we will see in the future is more competition between FLOSS projects being integrated in Linux distributions, being a first class project for Distro X and not for Distro Y.
Hopefully this will increase the quality of FLOSS in general.

Competition is a race to the bottom. In appealing to the “common” user you will always create a worse product.

It is people working together and sacrificing for a common cause that makes greatness. That is the essence of open source. That is the essence of freedom.

Imagine if all the effort that went into making Ubuntu was put to use in Debian and Gnome…

You have been divided, and so you will be conquered.

Gnome developers, I am glad you held your own, it is Canonical that is damaging open source by trying to limit software freedom by controlling so much of the desktop. But I see the creep of it in Gnome as well; making totem and evolution a dependency for gnome-core, for example.

So Gnome peeps, just make a basic desktop, with no hooks, that a user can build upon as they like. Ignore the children who walk away like spoiled children because they did not get their way.

I would like to use Ubuntu One for buying music and storage space and what ever. The only thing that bars me from doing it is that the music store only offers music in MP3 format. I am not a MP3 fan, among other things because of the bad quality (even if encoding with high bitrate). There are some better audio codecs (OGG, AAC, …). I decided that AAC is my favorit music format. It’s quality is nearly the same as OGG but it is better supported on sound/audio devices. So if I want to buy music online I would like to decide in which format to download. If the Ubuntu One Music Store offers AAC formats I will buy all my music there and spend more money for online storage space.

Perhaps You should upgrade the flexibility of the Ubuntu One Music Store (for example in offering more audio formats). This could be an advantage compared with other music stores (for example Amazon) and a reason for the users to buy music at Ubuntu. The more advantages the Ubuntu One Music Store has compaed with others the more users using it. As a result You don’t have to kick the other plugins from Banshee and You have less trouble with the community.