New Ubuntu Foundation Announced

AccUser writes "Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. From the article: 'The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time, and continue to produce new releases of the distribution. As a first step, the Foundation announces that Ubuntu version 6.04, due for release in April 2006, will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.'"

Comments

This is exactly what is needed

[Manan Shah]

I am very impressed by Ubuntu ease of use, and even more, by their commitment. When you have such an active community and big money behind such a project, it has a very good chance to succeed. It is amazing how much the folks at Ubuntu pay attention to minor usability issues.

If Linux ever becomes mainstream, it will be because of distributions like Ubuntu.

Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's

[rylin]

Not sure why yours weren't sent out, but mine definitely were.
I ordered 20 x86 versions and 15 x86_64 versions, and they arrived in a semi-timely manner.

Oh crikey, not another one!

[Willeh]

Ok, so now we have Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, Red hat, Mandriva, colinux, Yellow dog, Caldera and god knows who else vying for a slice of an ever so slowly growing pie, not even counting Brazilian, Chinese, Japanese or german national efforts.

Isn't it time that some of those efforts were combined to get some kind of weight behind Linux as a whole, or are companies like IBM and Novell already moving into their respective trenches when linux on the {Desk, lap, floor}top takes off? While i can understand these companies having their own distro as has been traditionally the case, but do we REALLY need another non-profit foundation that thinks it can topple the 800 pound Red Gorilla on it's own while trying to reinvent the wheel and juggling a mix of community support and paid support? I'm not trying to be an anti-linux jerk, i'm just wondering what Ubuntu has to offer that isn't in another distro already.

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[justforaday]

Yes, if we could just get them all working together on some sort of United Linux, all of our problems would be solved...

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[AccUser]

But isn't this a symptom of open source software, in that everybody is able to do it their way? With M$ and Apple, we get an operating system that works the way they want it to. With GNU/Linux, you get to choose a distribution which works the way you want it to. And if you can't find one that does that exactly, you have the opportunity to do it yourself.

Obviously in the real-world (!) we all just want something that works the way we want it to, without having to scratch around every distribution. Personally, I think that Ubuntu does it for me.

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[Otter]

On the contrary, what you're talking about was the situation in 2002.

Today, things have basically contracted to Ubuntu, Gentoo, Novell/SuSe, Debian and Mandrake on the desktop and the Red Hat family and Debian on the server. The other desktop distros (Turbo, Caldera, Lycoris, Xandros, Lindows/Linwhatever, and the rest) have mostly faded. In the next few years Ubuntu will cannibalize the remaining Debian desktop share, and Mandrake has been spinning its wheels since version 7. The consolidation you're looking for has already happened -- remaining niche players like Yellow Dog don't affect the overall picture.

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[The Warlock]

You forgot Fedora, which has a very large desktop share, and Slackware, which is still popular. And SuSe sees some popularity on servers. It's still pretty complicated. Not that this is nessessarily a bad thing, as others have said.

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[Mad_Rain]

Isn't it time that some of those efforts were combined to get some kind of weight behind Linux as a whole

Mandriva was doing pretty good about your request, merging Mandrake, Connectiva, and Lycoris... It seems to be more aimed at the desktop than the server, although Mandrake has good server products too.

However, after being a Mandrake user for 3 years, I switched to Ubuntu for its easy install and upgrade path, in addition to maintaining more recent software. I hope that Ubuntu abosorbs some Debian distrobutions (Knoppix, knoppmyth, etc.), while maintaining their simplicity.

Re:Oh crikey, not another one!

[bman08]

Furthermore, the whole analogy is wrong. Running a successful steakhouse in a city or large town is going to net you, the owner, more dough than being a McDonalds franchisee, though obviously Ronald is pocketing more than anyone. The thing that's great about the restaurant analogy is that it really highlights the fundamental flaw in the whole 'what linux has to do to win' argument. Microsoft has us all thinking that it's a win-or-lose game. It's not. When I go out in my little town, I can choose three different pizza joints, 2 italian, 4 chinese, McD's and Burger King. The real winner in that situation is me. It's the same thing when I walk into my office... Win, Mac, Lin, BSD... Sometimes I want a quarter pounder with cheese and sometimes I want hand fed kobe beef. Whatever the situation, I'll have it my way thanks.

Great News

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO Ubuntu is the distro most likely to break out into the main stream. I recently switched from Gentoo and can personally attest to the simplicity and ease of use of Ubuntu. The typical non-nerd doesn't want a command line; doesn't want to compile a custom kernel; doesn't know what "compiling" means. Ubuntu is perfect for the mainstream, and a guarantee that the project will continue is great news.

Long live Ubuntu! (And Kubuntu too)

Happy to hear it

[bad_outlook]

I'm very happy that Ubuntu has come out of the gate, and done everything right. Since I've been using linux (1998) I've never seen any company so behind Linux as Cannonical have been, and I have a good feeling about this. Funny thing is, yesterday I just recieved my free Ubuntu cds; I 'ordered' 15 x86 versions, and 6 powerpc versions. I'm giving them to friends to try the 'live' option, and dropping them off at coffee cafe's, music stores and colleges. It's a good time to be using free software, and I think it can only HELP the world in coming together.

I wonder if ...

[Laz10]

$10m will make sound work out of the box :p

Start of Something Special

[Amadaeus]

3 Years of desktop support and 5 years of server? The fact that Ubuntu is looking at long-term development for their OS instead of the usual 6-month fire-and-forget releases of many other Linux Distros subscribe to is an encouraging sign that Linux is coming of age.

Longer lifespans for Linux provides a level of security that will allow many users wary of switching over from Windows to start looking at a Linux distro as a serious replacement for their current OS. Just think: there IS an alternative to warning users that they have to buy a new OS for new features and security updates.

I'm only worried that theyll spend all $10m on pretzels and beer.

Re:How does Debian fit in?

[rpsoucy]

They started out friendly, but now Ubuntu is distancing itself more and more from Debian, they're making no effort to even stay compatible for package installation, which I think is hurting Debian in the long run. I really wish people would just try and help Debian if they have a problem with it instead of starting up yet another dist to make GNU/Linux "OS of a thousand distributions."

Really impressed with Ubuntu

[jd142]

I just got a really cheap laptop and Mandriva(running on my desktop) didn't like it. Ubuntu just worked. And installing ndiswrapper for the wireless card was a piece of cake.

I've used Ubuntu as a rescue cd at work very reliably.

Can't wait until October for the next release.

What more could a company want?

[kebes]

This type of (financial) commitment to linux will do great things to silence (corporate) critics of FLOSS who say that there is no "structure and support" for linux. That's alot of money, and a solid commitment behind Ubuntu now. I'm glad that there are linux distros out there that are putting such an emphasis on having a product that is long-term, stable, and that will be patched/supported for a long time.

From my experience with Ubuntu (installed it with a friend on a brand-new powerbook), it is easy to use and works well. I really hope that the momentum Ubuntu is generating will continue... it is quickly becoming the best option for converting new users over to linux.

Perhaps they could merge

[sczimme]

Ok, so now we have Ubuntu, Gentoo, Suse, Red hat, Mandriva, colinux, Yellow dog, Caldera

If they merged we could have UbunTuseYellowCoDrivaDeraDogHat.

If nothing else the domains should be readily available.

Ubuntu review

[Henry V .009]

I've been playing with Ubuntu lately, and I like it. There are some problems though:

Sound. I have to kill -9 the ESD process to get some applications to work. A lot of applications had to be tweaked individually after install.

Synaptic. Synaptic does its job, I can say that. But the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I upgraded to Hoary yesterday. Why did that have to involve editing sources.list by hand?

Applications. Why the hell do newly installed applications need to be added to the menus manually? This is Ubuntu's biggest flaw. When you install a new program, you'd better know how to invoke it from the command line -- and good luck finding that out from Synaptic's description, which disappears after install anyway.

Firefox. Ubuntu's web browser of choice, Firefox, is unresponsive after opening new tabs. Firefox is much nicer in Windows. And IE for Windows is far more responsive than either.

Menus. I like the start menu organization. The "Places" menu is great. I was beginning to think that Linux was congenitally incapable of setting up the most important bit of UI on the system. The menu is even better in Hoary.

Folder Navigation. I don't like the fact that there is no back or up arrow when exploring file folders. This is massively stupid UI design.

All in all, it's a nice system. It's a million years behind Windows in usability; there is clunkiness present everywhere. But there are lots of free applications. As usual with Linux, it is so impossible to install or change anything without expert knowledge that you can safely recommend the system to your grandmother without the slightest fear that she will be able to mess anything up.

Re:How does Debian fit in?

[SassyDave]

I was going to mod you up so we could see a healthy discussion on this topic, but I'll reply instead.

They started out friendly, but now Ubuntu is distancing itself more and more from Debian

I have to respectfully disagree. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and I have switched the /etc/apt/sources.list to use the Debian unstable sources. The two distros are binary compatible (meaning I can use Debian .deb files on Ubuntu), and it works great. I get the eye-candy of Ubuntu (a pretty good default setup) with the new packages of Debian unstable. I for one like the setup.

Re:How does Debian fit in?

[wasabii]

That's impossible simply because of the organization of Debian. It is not designed to be a supported commercial quality distro. Each maintainer has pure authority over their own packages.

Ubuntu strives to put together a cohesive distro without the infighting that happens so frequently. You must remember, time is money for these people. All the improvements on software that Ubuntu makes are available for Debian to pick up. Usually even submitted into Debian's bug system.