Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

Sounds like a regression on Canonical's issue #1. The resolution case was "A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.". This article does indeed appear to showcase active work toward a regression on bug #1

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

Mark Shuttleworth marked that bug as resolved a couple of years ago, which I think was a mistake. I recently reproduced this bug in that I went to a local PC store and attempted to buy a machine without any proprietary software. They said that they didn't have any such machines available (never mind a majority of their machines, as suggested by the original bug text).

Money talks. Canonical attempted to make bank from their partnership with Amazon, yet people over the web went insane and fought tooth and nail to shift the weight to derivatives, like Xubuntu and Mint.

Naturally, this is one of their alternative methods.

He also uses the popularity of Android as part of his reason for closing it. Sure, Android itself is open source, but you still have to go out of your way to find Android devices that are purely FOSS.

In general I certainly agree, but there are also advantages for free software of this.

For example, this will probably help expose and fix lots of bugs in Microsoft's implementation of Linux interfaces, which will be a benefit to free software developers and vendors.

Also, general users will get more exposure to free software programs, and may be more open to buying a legit Ubuntu or other Linux computer in the future. For example, I was able to switch my wife over to using Linux Mint without any issue, which was undoubtedly made easier by the fact that she was already using LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and Firefox on her Windows PC.

It seems like people are able to pretty easily run free software programs on Mac OS X, and all things being equal I think that has been a great benefit to free software, and a lot of web developers et al seem to be willing to make their program free software friendly and release them under free software licenses. I would love to see a similar trend with Windows, even if I personally think that proprietary operating systems are extremely harmful and need to go the way of the horse and buggy.

> but you still have to go out of your way to find Android devices that are purely FOSS.

Can you elaborate?

I'm not aware of any physical Android devices which are able to boot and function as an Android device (e.g. with a hardware accelerated GUI, can make phone calls over GSM/CDMA) that don't require proprietary vendor blobs.

I am excluding the Android emulator because I don't think it qualifies as a "device"

> but you still have to go out of your way to find Android devices that are purely FOSS

This is pedantry, and certainly there's a sliding scale of openness for devices. But unless I'm very mistaken, there are no devices available that even approach 'purely FOSS'. What would such an 'Android' phone even be? No google play services, no google play store, crippled and buggy open GPU drivers, and still a proprietary baseband. Not that I'm happy with this situation it just seems impractical.