Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical’s vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.
Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical’s vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation.
This is a pretty frustrating interview to me. He doesn’t really seem to engage at all with the fact that building a core system component in a way that isn’t fully open completely looses all of the resiliency to enshittification or conflict of interest between corporation and users that makes linux a good thing in the first place.
I don’t personally really like that fedora chooses to repackage and serve their own versions of flatpaks. But that its possible is mandatory, because otherwise if flatpaks are successful and they end up making choices that are user hostile, there is no escape hatch.
Its a completely unnecessary choice, and is to me, entirely disqualifying. If snaps were to become successful it would be a bad thing for this ecosystem that I care about.
I also find it frankly bewildering that he talks about everything being their own software stack as a flex, when this whole space is built on collaboration building together, and then goes on to describe it as vertical integration, a form of anticompetitive behavior that countries make laws aimed at preventing. Vertical integration is not a good thing.
Its fine if your stack is all yours, but thinking vertical integration is a flex feels really slimy and out of touch to me
I thought that snaps were open. The only thing Ubuntu didnt open source was the storefront and people can build there own storefront.
Is that wrong?
It is my understanding that the back-end marketplace for snap is not open, and that snap as a packaging ecosystem is permanently tied to Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) exclusively.
No one else can build a snap repository or source (not sure what the best language would be but I’m trying not to word things ambiguously).
From Wikipedia:
Which is why people are unhappy with snap. And why I say that although I wish fedora didn’t set up their own flatpak repo and provide then alongside flathub, to me its a requirement that it be possible to do that. Because then if the people leading the project start making user hostile choices, you have recourse. Same as with any free license, open source project- you can just take what was already built and the community can rally around moving efforts over to the version that isn’t being user hostile.
Snap doesn’t have that. If they became successful, canonical would have enormous power over the linux ecosystem and if they chose not to treat users with respect, they would already have market capture. The more successful they were to become, the more likely things depend on them. Like important packages only being published as snaps. And the more likely that things have been built around snaps specifically, the bigger of a liability it is for linux as a whole. A liability controlled by a for-profit company, with for-profit motives.
People have similar frustrations with systemd as more projects build hard dependencies on it, but at least those are still totally open projects
Sorry to the long wall of text but I hope its at least helpful 😅
Edited to add the section from Wikipedia