this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
231 points (93.9% liked)

Linux

48652 readers
1269 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A new ‘app store’ is expected to ship as part of Ubuntu 23.10 when it’s released in October — and it’ll debut with a notable change to DEB support.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If it is trivial, why is Canonical keeping it proprietary?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because it's extra work to make it open source and few outside of Canonical are interested in contributing. Open sourcing an existing component and maintaining it as such has non-trivial overhead. In that case that work is better spent on other, higher priority items. My guess is that they've gauged that the cloud end being open source won't move the needle on who uses Snap and Ubuntu so they've deemed it low priority. Personally I'm using Debian and Ubuntu and therefore Canonical has root on some of my systems. Given I can implement a cloud end for Snap, it bares very little importance to me that today the cloud end isn't open source since it's run by the folks that have root on my system anyways as well as supply all other packages on my Ubuntu systems. In fact we don't even know what the cloud end for the apt repos is. It could easily be Sonatype Nexus. For me the important bit is the client and installer side of Snap since I can't implement that in a relatively small amount of time. :)