I belive that as long as the code is open sourced and it can be FREELY forked that doesn’t represent a menace to the values of open source community. Where does the contributions go? to some project you like or to the open source community? If the cool project happens to be open sourced you are doing both!!

Why deprive the project leader of the entire capacity to decide what’s the next best thing to do? If you can always fork the project, what harm can be done to contributors? During the good terms all sides get beneficied from it!!

Maybe after years of being supported by a loyal base the leader begin looking for his own malicious interest. Suppose he sells the coyright of a VERY contribuited code base, will the new owner have unfair competitive advantage from the comunity? the code givers loose something?

This only keeps the leadership of the project CLEARLY defined. If you don’t like Gnome 3 and you want to do something more revolutionary and OSX-ky like Unity, why could community be able hold you down? Isn’t Open SuSe extremly 7-ish?

Think that if Unity dooms Ubuntu, Canonical can always sell the project. I belive thats the motivation behind Mark’s move. That’s fair, cause there still be the good old Linux Mint.

Emiliano

It all makes perfect sense, what’s these people’s problem? Mark and Ubuntu have given an incredible amount to the open source community, and now they’re saying if (and only if) you want to be a part of what they do, do it from your heart, either out of gratitude or belief in what they do. If you don’t want to be a part, go kick your can somewhere else. Coming here to whine and complain is pretty childish.

The argument that Ubuntu contributes less code than smaller distros is pretty weak; Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, and Canonical have all done great things for Linux, and you know it. Who does the size of the Ubuntu desktop platform benefit most? What is this milk they have gotten in return? I feel like I’ve milked the… whatever… out of Ubuntu, personally, but I am more than happy to give up code I write to the projects I write it for, because:

- I use them
- I believe in them
- I am grateful for what they have done for me
- I want them to continue to do it for me in the future
- I want to help others, and I believe helping such projects will help others

If the direction of such projects change later on, I would shoot myself before I started feeling regrets for code I had contributed. I’d just move on, as you are free to do. It certainly would decrease stress levels all around if you did.

Mark, thanks for your vision and insight, and most of all for Ubuntu.