Yes they did: they started showing effectively spam in people's /etc/motd, also using a domain that was owned personally by an employee, to talk about HBO TV shows. The entire effort was driven by one single person at Canonical, Dustin Kirkland, who is a "Product Manager", previously "VP of Product". Here are the details, you can read them if you so wish. You will find that this developer "screwed around" in the process as well, making very bad decisions (engineering-wise) early on when trying to push this out, and end-users had to call him out on his bad choices (here's the ticket). Here are the details:rainwarrior wrote:I don't follow internal Linux politics, but I remember this having such terrible immediate backlash, and obviously this decision was undone. Is it something you actually think they'd ever try again?
(And FWIW, don't Windows 8 and Mac OSX finder already do something equivalent anyway?)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1701068
https://lwn.net/Articles/726902/
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/07/0 ... otd-claims
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088
https://twitter.com/koitsu2009/status/8 ... 5686799360
I have a generally negative opinion about Canonical for this reason, but the reality is, Ubuntu is one of those incredibly well-supported OSes in the server environment and by cloud providers, so it tends to be "easy to use". The OS itself does do a **ton** of "phoning home", however, and disabling all of that is always something you have to do post-installation (i.e. it's already phoned home by the time you have the chance to remove it). This has been a common "WTF" point for a very long time now. And no, the installer DOES NOT ask you if you want to opt-out (unlike Debian's installer; FreeBSD also asks you this, but *defaults* to opt-out). I could talk more about this, but here's a gist that shows it: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/fdc1c ... 1-txt-L245