The Myth

Now, most of you know by now that I really don’t like Unity. At all. I think that it’s very buggy, and really kludged in.

My views, however, are not what this is about.

Unity has been called “lock-in”, and that it’s just a trap by Canonical and Ubuntu to force out other Desktop distros of GNU/Linux. Unity, therefore is just a trick to force users into a Microsoft-esque closed platform.

The Verdict

The development page on Launchpad shows that the code is GPLv3 and LGPLv3. If we check out the branches, you can see that there are a ton of active forks. 47 at the time of this writing.

So, let’s try it out, see if we can fork Unity.

$ bzr branch lp:unity
Branched 658 revision(s).                               

Sweet. Looks good.

So, Unity is (L)?GPLv3, source is publicly available, and there are no qualifications on the source, other then that.

So, it would seem that Unity is F/OSS, in every sense of the word. Since F/OSS always grants the right to fork, the Unity platform is able to be modified as you see fit. Vendor lock-in is defined ( via the source of all human knowledge, wikipedia ) as:

In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. Lock-in costs which create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly.

Not only can you fork and push the deb to your system, but you can push it to a PPA, and distribute your fork that way. If the Fork continues to do well, you can even push it to Debian, and get the software into Ubuntu. All of this is not only painless, but easy, and the tools to do it are freely available.

This is not even to mention how easy it is to install variants such as kubuntu, xubuntu or lubuntu.

As much as I dislike Unity, this myth is totally false. Count it.