Mark Shuttleworth reminds users that Canonical is in control of Ubuntu

Sep 25, 2012 06:38 GMT  ·  By

A couple of days ago, Mark Shuttleworth defended Canonical's decision of implementing an Amazon lens in Unity's Dash starting with Ubuntu 12.10, but he also shared an interesting view of the market.

The backlash from the Amazon lens announcement has been considerable, especially because the lens is directly integrated into the Home lens that lists all the local applications.

Users have criticized Canonical's decision, saying that they are integrating adware into the operating system and blaming the company for having some nefarious interests.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, answered most of the questions raised by the users. It's still a weird decision, but it's not as bad as people think.

Besides defending the Amazon lens, he also chose to share an interesting view regarding the Ubuntu community.

One of the problem raised by the users was the fact Amazon might be doing some data mining from queries made in Dash. Mark explained that the online search was done anonymously, through Canonical's servers, so everyone's privacy was safe.

Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err, wrote Mark Shuttleworth in the blog post.

The fact of the matter is that he's correct, but the community chooses to be oblivious to this aspect.

We do trust Canonical with all our data, but this type of controlling view emanating from Canonical's founder is rather worrisome because it looks like an “Apple” standpoint: the company knows what's best for the users and they will decide what the users need, not the other way around.