> I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and now I'm free! Well, no, you just switched from one corporate controlled Operating System to another.
You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking. Because there is an obvious difference between the two that you're eliding: Ubuntu is forkable, and OS X is not.
In other words, Canonical only "controls" Ubuntu in the sense that a community of users and developers trust their stewardship of it. If they squander that trust, that community can pick up Ubuntu and take it wherever they prefer it to go.
This is not a theoretical freedom; people exercise it all the time. Look at the diaspora from MySQL to products like MariaDB, for example, or the split from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. These are both cases where the communities around the products decided that the company stewarding those products (Oracle, in both cases, as it happens) was failing in that role. So new stewards stepped forward, and the communities followed them.
If you feel that Canonical's decision to include online search results in the Unity dash is a deal-breaker for you, you are free to vote with your feet in the same way. You could use Linux Mint, for example, which is basically Ubuntu without Unity.
Here is how "corporate controlled" Ubuntu is -- so much so that a third party is free to pick it up, strip out some features, and re-distribute it to users who don't want those features! And those users are free to switch over to it, if they wish; Canonical won't stop you. They couldn't stop you, even if they wanted to. Which is kind of the point.
Now imagine what would happen to someone who decided that OS X would be better if (say) Chrome were the default browser, and released their own re-spin of it where that is the case. The flaws in your comparison become evident.
> If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.
So either you are 100% Pure, or you are 100% Impure. This would come as news to (among others) the makers of Ivory soap, who famously advertised it for decades as "99 44/100% Pure." I could understand an argument that this degree of purity doesn't make it better or worse than other soap products. What I could not understand would be an argument that unless it is 100% pure, it is not soap.
False premise: something being forkable does not make it free. Perhaps the derivative is free, but this article wasn't about running the derivative, was it?
Also, your last paragraph pretty much backs up my original point: if you're going to stand on your high horse of software-freedom and write about how great it is, you better go all in. That Dell is running proprietary software; at the firmware level in the least, but probably with binary blob drivers. Oh, and the article doesn't mention (nor you) about how you have to opt-out of third party sharing of your desktop search results with Amazon! That's not freedom respecting, so please don't try to divert attention away from these very valid points with arguments about how something is forkable.
Ubuntu is (almost all parts anyway) free in exactly the way the Free Software Foundation defines the word. Ubuntu is created by a community and overseen by a corporation, but you can take the Ubuntu source and do what you want with it within the terms of Free Software. You cannot do this with OS X.
You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking. Because there is an obvious difference between the two that you're eliding: Ubuntu is forkable, and OS X is not.
In other words, Canonical only "controls" Ubuntu in the sense that a community of users and developers trust their stewardship of it. If they squander that trust, that community can pick up Ubuntu and take it wherever they prefer it to go.
This is not a theoretical freedom; people exercise it all the time. Look at the diaspora from MySQL to products like MariaDB, for example, or the split from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. These are both cases where the communities around the products decided that the company stewarding those products (Oracle, in both cases, as it happens) was failing in that role. So new stewards stepped forward, and the communities followed them.
If you feel that Canonical's decision to include online search results in the Unity dash is a deal-breaker for you, you are free to vote with your feet in the same way. You could use Linux Mint, for example, which is basically Ubuntu without Unity.
Here is how "corporate controlled" Ubuntu is -- so much so that a third party is free to pick it up, strip out some features, and re-distribute it to users who don't want those features! And those users are free to switch over to it, if they wish; Canonical won't stop you. They couldn't stop you, even if they wanted to. Which is kind of the point.
Now imagine what would happen to someone who decided that OS X would be better if (say) Chrome were the default browser, and released their own re-spin of it where that is the case. The flaws in your comparison become evident.
> If people are going to write about their holier-than-thou articles about how they switched to free software, they better be running something like Trisequel Linux on a Gluglug Laptop or perhaps they should think about something else to write about.
So either you are 100% Pure, or you are 100% Impure. This would come as news to (among others) the makers of Ivory soap, who famously advertised it for decades as "99 44/100% Pure." I could understand an argument that this degree of purity doesn't make it better or worse than other soap products. What I could not understand would be an argument that unless it is 100% pure, it is not soap.