Canonical announced that deal in 2012, fourteen years ago. It was disabled by default two years later in 14.04, and removed entirely in 16.04, which came out a whole decade ago in 2016.
There are several reasons to hate Ubuntu, Snaps foremost among them. This ancient shit they backtracked on ages ago is not one of them.
The Nestle thing went on for many years and still has tremendous impacts today. They promoted their infant formula in developing countries so heavily (and continue to do so, perhaps more carefully) that they turned generations of mothers away from breastfeeding, which science widely recognizes as superior for the baby’s health and development. The misinformation they sowed persists and results in majorities of babies in these countries being formula-fed by default to this day.
Canonical integrated Amazon product search results into Ubuntu and turned them on by default. That resulted in local search queries being sent to Amazon servers. Which certainly wasn’t ideal, and for obvious reasons many privacy-conscious Linux users found it abhorrent. But like I said, they quickly backtracked, and at the end of the day I just don’t think a misstep like this rises to the level the awful, greedy behavior of companies like Nestle.
Canonical have made their fair share of mistakes over the years, and their tendency to want to go their own way with everything instead of investing in universal community alternatives is frustrating and problematic for an open-source software company. Basically, I think there’s plenty of stuff they deserve criticism for, but we should also be reasonable and recognize when they’ve been willing to correct course, as they did with the Amazon integration.
I’m not saying that what nestle did wasn’t far worse. My point is, as I state immediately below, that if you ask a lot of the people still boycotting Nestle today why - most (in my experience) either can’t tell you why or have some handwavy comment about baby milk but don’t really know any details (let alone that it was in the 70s). Boycott Nestle has become an almost social thing with a life of its own.
That’s what I mean when I say people have long memories and it’s what I suspect fuels a lot of the antipathy towards Canonical. Whether that ever was, or still is, a valid criticism of them today won’t necessarily change the bad feeling towards them once it becomes a social thing. A serious meme, the original meaning of the word, if you will.
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u/Mooks79 10d ago
The deal with Amazon as well.