Greg, thank you for your sincere and gracious apology.

When one cares deeply about something, criticism hurts so much more. And the free software world is loaded with caring, which is why our differences can so easily become vitriolic.

All of us that work on free software share the belief that our work has meaning far beyond the actual technology we produce. We are working to achieve goals that transcend the merits of the specific products we build: putting software freedom on a firm economic footing means that it can realistically become the de facto standard way that the software world works, carried forward by powerful forces of investment and return and less dependent on what feels like the heroic efforts of relatively few software outsiders swimming against the tide.

Red Hat’s success in proving a viable business model around a distribution was a very significant milestone in that quest, for all of us. I don’t mean to diminish that achievement when I point out that it’s come at the cost of dividing the world into those that buy RHEL, and those that can’t or won’t. Red Hat’s success is well deserved, and our work at Canonical is not in any sense motivated by desire to take that away. Red Hat is here to stay, there will always be a market for the product, and as a result, we all have the reassurance that our contributions can find a sustainable path into the hands of at least part of the world’s population.

Canonical’s mission is to expand the options, to find out if it’s possible to have a sustainable platform without that dividing line. We know that our quest would not be possible without your pioneering, but we don’t feel that’s riding on anybody’s coat-tails. We feel we have to break new ground, do new things, add new ingredients, and all of that is a substantial contribution in turn. But we don’t do it because we think Red Hat is “wrong”, and we don’t expect it to take anything away from Red Hat at all. We do it to add to the options, not to replace them.

We should start every discussion in free software with a mutual reminder of the fact that we have far more in common than we have differences, that individual successes enrich all of us far more in our open commons-based economy than they would in a traditional proprietary one, that it’s better for us to find a way to encourage others to continue to participate even if they aren’t necessarily chasing exactly the same bugs that we are, than to chastise them for thinking differently.

On that note, let’s shake hands.

Mark

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