Corporate ethics is grounded on accountability to the public.

[jspaleta]

This post is about Canonical and the Banshee situation that has unfolded over the last week or so. Specifically I am going to address the point that has been raised concerning whether or not Canonical has an ethical obligation that goes beyond what is allowed by the licensing associated with Banshee as a FOSS codebase

Comments

if you climb a mountain and you turn around

[papertowlbtrfly]

Personally, I don't think Canonical ever set out to be a typical corporation embracing the dark side of capitalism. Rather, I think the original goal had been to establish a 'balance' much like crown corporations do. Recently though, there seems to be a panic to become profitable and that's been reflected in very poor choices not only impacting Canonical, but FOSS overall. If you ask me, this panic to become profitable looks an awful lot like a rushed exit strategy. Mr.Shuttleworth has to give some very considered thought as to what he wants his legacy to be. It's been my observation that it's often the most critical who are the most helpful :)

Re: if you climb a mountain and you turn around

[jspaleta]

Crown corps are structured to be accountable to the people via the government through some measure of budgetary oversight and the ability to appoint members to the corps executive board. I believe that crown corps also have a financial disclosure requirement to the government as part of that accountability.

None of these accountability checks and balances exist in the way Shuttleworth chose to structure Canonical.

Shuttleworth could have chosen to have the structure of the Canonical/Ubuntu relationship mimic the Mozilla structuring, which uses a for-profit subsidiary to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. This sort of structuring does provide some checks and balances as the Foundation's interests as the Foundation provide oversight in a very real and binding way to the subsidiary for-profit.

-jef

Re: if you climb a mountain and you turn around

[papertowlbtrfly]

Do you think it's too late for that...and would it be ideal? It would seem that those accountability checks would essentially eliminate the role of "Benevolent Dictator". While this may seem like a good thing on the surface, I look at Linux Mint and past ,uh, 'conversations' I've had with Ubuntu enthusiasts and wonder if the sagacity needed to practice restraint in installing restricted items in Ubuntu could have come from a board purely focused on proving GNU/Linux profitable on as many desktops as possible? If the board were focused towards the other end of the spectrum, well then, wouldn't you have Debian? Again, I interpret amongst the founding principles of Ubuntu to be balance. Sadly, things now appear to be askew :(

Also, I'm posting here mostly out of curiosity and because you seem to be using your livejournal as a standard blog. If this is your private livejournal and random comments are not welcome, then please excuse my intrusion :)