14. You can leave your hat on

Believe it or not, some Linux actors can't always be totally in good faith. For a fistful of money...

When Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was released in June 2006, Canonical has immediately issued a press release where, amongst the praised features (a 15-minute away LAMP solution with Ubuntu Server Edition, support for up to 5 years), they said: «The Ubuntu server platform has been certified for IBM's DB2 and MySQL.»

At that time, the IBM Recommended and Validated Environments for DB2 9 did not mention any Ubuntu release, and the only relevant certification was with Recommended and Validated Environments for DB2 V8.2. That is, DB2 v8.2 was "Validated" on Ubuntu 5.04 ("Recommended" means IBM actually builds, tests and deploys on them; "Validated" means IBM certifies the full compatibility and gives official support).

And here comes the truth: "Ubuntu server" first appeared with version 5.10, so the claims about "the Ubuntu server platform being certified for IBM's DB2" can't refer to the 5.04 certification. Furthermore, there was no official record of IBM supporting DB2 on any newer Ubuntu release, so basically Canonical was lying and neither Ubuntu Server 6.06 LTS, nor Ubuntu Server 5.10 were certified for DB2!

In the meantime, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS was validated for DB2 9, but this happened several months later. The lie was standing unnoticed by anybody (or nobody cared about the deceiving advertisement). Mr. Shuttleworth simply ignored my questions on the matter. What would happen with all the mainstream Linux distro would simply lie to increase their market share?

It's only a coincidence that while I am writing this, Canonical announced a tighter integration with DB2: the latest IBM database will now download and deploy easily from the Ubuntu desktop. This time in full truth, we hope.

Also blamable from Canonical is the use of the (partially) closed-source Launchpad for managing the bugs in Ubuntu. As if Bugzilla, Trac the other open-source bug tracking systems were not good enough, or as if open-source can't be trusted enough. All this, coming from the distro ranked #1 on Distrowatch! Far from being the right message to pass to the community...

Another unexpected surprise is coming from Novell, the open source company. While the EU Europass site features downloads as both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice 1.1 documents, the Novell Buying Programs page has all the price lists as XLS files! None of them is duplicated as either ODT or SXW. This tells volumes on their "integration" with Microsoft. In times of NLD9, they had that objective of having all Novell employees on Linux and OpenOffice by Q1 2005. Or maybe not.

A last glitch is coming from the real #1, Red Hat itself. Part of their Patent Policy, there is a Patent Promise. It's not difficult to notice that the BSD and MIT licenses are missing from the list of the Approved Licenses: «GNU General Public License v2.0; IBM Public License v1.0; Common Public License v0.5; Q Public License v1.0; Open Software License v1.1.»

Once again, a wrong message.