It’s not recent that I’ve read people positioning themselves, sometimes aggressively, about Canonical’s decisions and the direction they are going in relation to, for instance, funding the company or the snap thing.
I have an analogy:
Think of yourself inviting some friends over to your house; you show them the rooms and tell them that they can use the house for free and indefinitely. Some friends appreciate your gesture and decide to help with the dishes, others to pay an energy bill. But there’s a friend who doesn’t like the blue color of your couch and says you should change it to a red. You politely appreciate the advice, but prefer to stick with the color blue, which makes your friend complain, not just about the couch, but the house as a whole, and even leave your house.
This story is a bit wacky, but it kind of describes the impression I have about what happens with Ubuntu - and maybe some open source software I know of.
Many times we don’t support the companies or devs behind the softwares we love and use daily, but some people want to feel entitled to denigrate themselves and badmouth the project for not being exactly the way they want it. The same usually does not happen when it comes to a paid software or those that are mostly developed for MacOS or Windows.
I remember that my first contact with a Linux distribution was in 2006. It was a Live CD that I was gifted containing the version 6.06 (Dapper Drake) of Ubuntu. That was definitely a game changer for me.
Today, one of the OS I use is Arch Linux. This is for several reasons, but mainly because I love his almost minimalist approach. I’ve hopped through many distros (many of which are Ubuntu-based) trying to find one that I was better suited to, but the fact is, I’ve used Ubuntu for a long time. I’m not going to lie that I’ve switched from Ubuntu due to certain decisions Canonical has made changes that I didn’t like.
And that’s just the whole point of my early story. Companies and developers have their own values and goals. They have every right and duty to make any changes to the product they develop, and I have no right to rant about something that was offered to me at zero cost because it doesn’t operate the way I like.
It’s pretty simple: if you’re not satisfied, switch to something you like, or even create something and share it with the community.