I had that reaction as well. At the end of the article, though, they explain where Ubuntu Core makes sense and why their use case doesn't (it seems that the main reason is they don't have a subscription model, so they can't budget ongoing costs, or something like that).

In my mind, I'm here wondering -- if you really need the features, spending your own dev time for self-maintenance has to cost more than $30k/year... what are they thinking?

> Accordingly, the risk for NextBox users would be that at some point in the future, Canonical would revoke this privilege from us, making NextBox un-updatable from one day to the next, or at worst, unusable.

> In addition, it became apparent that we had not selected sufficiently strict according to open source criteria. Assuming Canonical would eventually cease to exist or discontinue Ubuntu Core, it would be nearly impossible with Ubuntu Core for the open-source community to ensure that NextBox would continue to be usable in a meaningful way.

It's about more than the monetary costs over the coming couple of years. Canonical pulling a RedHat here would be much worse for Ubuntu Core users than it is/was for CentOS users.

That's exactly it. I work at Canonical and was part of the internal conversation around this subject. We constantly walk that fine line where we want to encourage open source work and communities around it to flourish, while at the same time we need to pay for bandwidth and people's salaries to be working on that exact technology. The irony is that for the particular case at hand, they would probably get it for free because despite being a commercial project it's a small one at that, and we love to see such initiatives taking place. At the same time, we work with major industry players that are supposed to pay the bill, for their own benefit and for everybody else's too, otherwise we just go out of business and that's no good. It took time mainly because we need to set the exact terms without arbitrary discrimination.

We'll have a more clear form for that kind of application soon, so that we can streamline such requests, community or otherwise.

That used to be what an open source distro was, and there used to be several options for such, no?

No, there always was an explicit warranty disclaimer and few, if any, distros offered continuous 10-year security updates constrained to a base version. Usually, you had to keep upgrading to keep getting security updates.

Source: spending my teenage years on installing various distros on my dad's computer, simultaneously pissing him off and ensuring I'd never have a girlfriend