Linux Deepin, Ubuntu systemd and Licensing, and Red Flag Scuttled

March Shuttleworth posted this morning that Ubuntu will be supporting systemd rather than its own Upstart initiation system. This comes a day after The Fridge ran a post explaining why derivative distributions must obtain a license from Ubuntu to use their packages. In other Linux news, Chinese distribution Red Flag has been discontinued. And finally today, Jack Wallen has published a review of Linux Deepin saying it just might steal your heart.

Yesterday the "Community Council Statement on Canonical Package Licensing" appeared on The Fridge of Ubuntu.com. Last fall news surfaced that Linux Mint was required to sign a license agreement if they wanted to continue including Ubuntu packages in their distro. Basically, the Community Council said it was to protect Canonical and its reputation.

In other Ubuntu news, Mark Shuttleworth today posted that he knew when he was licked. In a post titled "Losing Graciously," Shuttleworth said Canonical has decided to follow Debian and support systemd after all. He said that it was because Ubuntu was part of the Debian family. It sounds like he was saying they would try to be switched over for the release following the 14.04 LTS. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a nice recap of the whole topic at ZDNet.

The South China Morning Post is reporting that Red Flag Linux has bitten the dust and has ended all commitments and contracts as of last Monday. They quoted Eric Peng saying, "A lack of brand awareness and sustained investments, coupled with the rise of rivals including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, led to its downfall." Its 150 employees haven't been paid since last April!

Jack Wallen said that Linux Deepin "achieves its goals with impressive results" in his latest review at ZDNet.com.  He said of its desktop:

With a new desktop (DDE – Deepin Desktop Environment), Linux Deepin takes nods from nearly every desktop environment available and rolls it into one, elegant solution. Part Windows 7, part Ubuntu Unity, part KDE, part GNOME 3 (which DDE gets its base), this desktop brings to mind exactly what Microsoft should have done for Windows 8.

Wallen gives the distribution quite the once over and concludes, "Give Deepin a try. I’m certain you’ll be very happy you did."