No, they aren’t. You can switch to their Universe patches anytime, at your own risk. If you want Canonical to mitigate that risk for you, you pay. Simple, really.
JFC, this misinformation again…
TLDR: Ubuntu Pro offers additional security patches to packages found in the universe repo. Universe is community maintained so Ubuntu is essentially stepping in to provide critical CVE patches to some popular software in this repo that the community has not addressed.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it but I don’t really see this as withholding patches. Software in this repo would otherwise be missing these patches and it’s a ton of work for Ubuntu to provide these patches themselves.
Now is they move glibc to universe and tell me to subscribe to get updates I’ll feel differently.
Frankly this isn’t terrible. I’m sure there was a valid reason.
Oh snap
Even if Ubuntu does start doing slightly sketchy things, they’ll still be a million times better than Windows or MacOS
canonical has already crossed that ‘slightly sketchy’ line.
do they also lock their sources behind a subscriber agreement that prohibits redistribution of source like ibm’s redhat has done?
RHL: We’re locking down our source because people are using it without contributing!
Also RHL: Thanks for your contribution, but we’re not interested until we have someone ready to pay us for your labor.
