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Shuttleworth on Ubuntu's Direction and Intent
cj2003 writes "Mark Shuttleworth has released a FAQ about Ubuntu's Direction and Intent. It comments on the discussions of funding, of being a Debian-fork or not, of the strange names, and many other 'hot topics' relating to Ubuntu. In his own words: 'This document exists to give the community some insight into my thinking, and to a certain extent that of the Community Council, Technical Board and other governance structures - on some of the issues and decisions that have been controversial.'"
If you don't make a commercial "Ubuntu Professional Edition", how can Ubuntu be sustainable?
I am puzzled, don't Home Editions make money?
(As an aside, Ubuntu "Live" was great for testing out that OS X x86 release that was going around, so in that regards, kudos to Ubuntu for being straight-forward to provide the means to get OSx86 up and running.)
This sig is six words long.
Ubuntu 5.04 was like Windows 2000, and before that Windows95, and MacOS7.0 before that (and Win3.1 before than, and DOS, and VMS, and CP/M...): each of those was a desktop OS that "finally arrived". Easy enough to install, reliable enough to use all day, integrated enough not to miss the predecessor it supplanted. So when each of those rolled around, I switched. This time, I quarantined my old Windows machine in a closet, just opening an Ubuntu VNC window on it when absolutely necessary. If Ubuntu could just include a Multisync that syncs my Treo 600 (including Calendar and noncorrupted Contacts) to Evolution properly, I wouldn't even have to look in the VNC rearview mirror.
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make install -not war
From the article: I have no interest in taking Ubuntu to join the proprietary software industry, it's a horrible business that is boring and difficult, and dying out rapidly anyway.
I agree that some tactics of the proprietary software industry are less than desirable, but how many of us would be able to earn a living without them?
I also agree that many businesses (Google for example) are offering a free interface while keeping their proprietary software on the back end. However, the majority of companies AREN'T going in that direction (Adobe for example). That they're "dying out rapidly" is a ridiculous statement.
Windows has taught the world that "Home Edition" is synonymous with "Crippled Edition."
And it sure does make it easy to build a better distro.
He's certainly made me believe he's sticking to Debian for the heavy lifting then Q/A and patching to make the packages perform the way he wants them.
I do wonder though if the Debian volunteers will really stick around and still take pride in working on the distro that makes Ubuntu so good.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GrumpyGroundhog
It's an ubuntu distribution for developers that has the daily builds of everything:
Now we are on the naming thing, what's with the "Funky Fairy" naming system?
:-)
Funky Fairy would be an AWESOME name for Ubuntu 6.10!
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
we won't have to hear questions of why Ubuntu isn't part of the 'DCC', From TFA:
Why is Ubuntu not part of the DCC Alliance?
I don't believe the DCC will succeed, though its aims are lofty and laudable. It would be expensive to participate, and it would slow down our ability to add the features, polish and integration that we want in new releases. I'm not prepared to devote scarce resources to an initiative that I believe will ultimately fail.
Ouch. I thought the simple fact that DCC is based on Sarge, and Ubuntu on Sid was reason enough.
Also, this FAQ should put to rest the question of leeching and other dumb shit that Ubuntu has been accused of.
vnc isn't idea. you should try windows remote desktop with the open source rdesktop client. it works better.
How wonderfull the world would be if his behaviour and attitude was the default among rich people - using his money with a vision to improve the world, instead of getting 8 sportcars and a larger penis.
- barkholt
The most important part of the wiki is towards the end, when Shuttleworth states that the real reason for funding Ubuntu is to solve the "distro collaboration problem" by collaboring with other distros on bugs, translations, technical support, revision control systems. These tools will allow Ubuntu to make its work available easily to Debian, Gentoo, and the rest of the upstream community.
If they're doing it for the reasons they claim they're doing it, it shouldn't matter. If they're all talk, well, you'll see the mass exodus. Guess it's a nice little "trial by fire".
If you want to see and hear him talk about many of the things he mentions in the FAQ, you should watch his Ubuntu talk at Debconf this year. Theora 132MB, MPEG 257MB
You know like Windows Whistler, or Longhorn? I mean, Longhorn could be the name of a porn movie. I certainly wouldn't want my child using it, especially if Bill were in it. But it doesn't matter, because the actual release is called Vista. Similarly, Ubuntu codename "Breezy Badger" is, officially, Ubuntu 5.10; "Hoary Hedgehog" was Ubuntu 5.04; "Warty Warthog" was Ubuntu 4.10. As you so astutely notice, naming as a matter of "marketing"; how much marketing do you want them to put into the names of unreleased software? When the final releases are professionally, numerically named, what, exactly, are you complaining about?
Ubuntu might be popular within its own community, but the distro won't go mainstream until its image matures past high school sophomore.
Or until some people become less anal-retentive. Did you read the part about NASA being one of their customers? And is an interacial menage a trois somehow worse than a single race one?
You'd think Mr Shuttleworth could afford to buy wiki.ubuntu.com a real SSL certificate...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
There are a quite a few major transistions all happening at the same time. Debian is adopting the GCC 4.x ABI for C++, going from XFree86 to X.Org, and there are new releases of KDE and GNOME. Because of when Sarge froze, these all started hitting Unstable at the same time. I went through this with Breezy over the summer. There just isn't a smooth way for a development distro to handle this many at once. I'm sure Gentoo's dev branch went through it to but I bet they only got them one at a time. Come to think of it, they went GCC 4.x pretty early. That is the ugliest one and has directly affects KDE and GNOME.
Once these are over, Debian Unstable will be its usual not-really-unstable self.
I was wondering if any one out there has made the move from a RedHat/Fedora Core based desktop system over to Ubuntu? Was it worth the effort? Is it better? Is it worse?
I use Fedora, with freshrpms, kderedhat, and some other public repositories. I like some of the Ubuntu concepts such as the warm fuzzy humanity thing feels really good to me. But I'm wondering if it's practically worth the effort switching? The hype is enticing, but what's it really like?
thanks
I'm glad to see that explanation. A lot of people gave Ubuntu flak for not being part of it.
.deb packages...
Honestly, I agree with him. It has marginal chance of success over the attempt that was UnitedLinux, by not having the commercial interest muddying the waters. However, the crux of the problem is that it flies somewhat in the face of the whole point of different distributions. The theory may be that distros distinguish themselves at a higher level and by forcing common underpinnings doesn't impact the ability to differentiate, but if that were truly the case, there wouldn't be such variation today.
For example, let's assume a member of the DCC is a tad more enthusiastic about GNUstep than the others. Hypothetically, GCC 4.2 releases with ObjC++ support as a significant feature. That distro may want to break with the conservative members to provid the GCC that would allow easier porting of a wider range of OSX apps. What's perceived commonly as a 'boring underpinning' becomes a potential significant factor in differentiation for a distro, but requires breaking compatibility with the rest of DCC.
Just as UnitedLinux made it impossible for the members to meaningly be different, everything ending up essentially being SuSE with different artwork and corporate propoganda, the DCC just simply can't occur and preserve meaningfully unique identies of member distributions.
Debian has always been about open source, and by not even having the illusion of binary compatibility amongst them, it perhaps encourages practices of distributing description files, tarballs, and diffs rather than binary
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings and thankfully most humans aren't humourless.
Criticising Ubuntu's 'marketing' is ludicrous given that they have had outrageous success in accruing brand recognition very quickly.
I don't think the problem you see really lies with Ubuntu. With your references to "half naked and interracial menage-a-trois" and Dapper Drake being a "gay duck" I think it is you that has maturity problems, not Ubuntu.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Maybe you should stick to XP & VISTA. Else, what would people think? And lets not even go into the fact that as a Linux variant, Ubuntu is a member of the unix family. Unixs shouldn't be able to have families anyway. Huh?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
At a guess, a customised distribution would be one with the companies logo as a background, and only the apps the company deems nessecary to run. Having run the installer a couple of times, (Both times for desktop, must have a look at the server install) you are not prompted for which applications you want. I'd say in a business environment, the games would go. So businesses are paying for *LESS* functionality than typically available.
That's what I think anyway.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
try http://ubuntuguide.org/. Kinda handy for all the addons that one needs to be happy.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
Mark wrote: "Though Linspire is not (yet) based directly on Ubuntu, it's not infeasible that the Linspire guys figure out what a good option that would be for them sooner rather than later. There are likely to be many specialised versions of Ubuntu, under other brand names, that have commercial or proprietary features. They might have proprietary fonts or software or add-ons or integration with services, etc." If I were a Debian developer and read this, this would not make me rest easy. Mark in a colourful character because he paints his life on a grand canvas and shoots for the moon (quite literally, to boot!). But, it also appears that he'd be happy if most Linux distributions were based on Ubuntu, rather than based on Debian. He talks of the important of Debian, and I think he believes what he writes. But, I'm not entirely sure he sees the roots of his own ambitions. His ambition appears to be THE core distribution, from which all others flow. And if the above quote doesn't convince you, his work on Bazaar and Launchpad should. Mark understands that to paint life on a grand canvas, you need your canvas, your brushes, your paints... you need your tools. And he is building them, in Bazaar and Launchpad. He wrote: Solving the "distro collaboration problem" would really advance the state of open source. So that's what we set out to do in Ubuntu. We work on Launchpad, which is a web service for collaboration on bugs, and translations, and technical support. We work on Bazaar, which is a revision control system that understands branching and distributions, and is integrated with Launchpad. And hopefully those tools allow us to make our work available easily to Debian, and to Gentoo, and to upstream. And also, allow us to take good work from other distros (even if they would rather we didn't ;-)).
I admire Mark for what he's doing. I believe he is genuine in his desire to "always" ensure Ubuntu is free, as in beer and liberty. But, I watch him with caution. He is an ideologue and he must be the Master of his own Universe. That combination often matures in to tyranny when a sense of loss of control sets in.
When the Ubuntu Foundation and development community matures and begins to have disagreements with him and, like an adolescent, is ready for independence, making different choices and wanting to take a different direction than the father who raised it might like, it will be interesting to see how Papa Mark responds.
Rory
Just type 'server' at the install CDs lilo prompt.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
What? Are you seriously arguing that a mildly risque advertisement is "unprofessional"? What color is the sky on your planet? More importantly, on your planet, what do "Gap" ads look like?
And please learn the English language. "Dapper" doesn't mean gay, it means stylish!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Lets just hope we don't see a Hemorrhoid Hank release anytime soon.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting someone else to do the work. --John G. Pollard
It's so refreshing to see someone in his position tell things straight and in a way we can all understand.
Even so, I suspect there's a problem here that's slowly appearing on the horizon and that's the future of Debian. It's beginning to resemble an old tramp steamer. Years of sterling, cargo-carrying service but now the crew are arguing on the bridge and some are even trying to force the captain's safe. The engineers (fewer than there were) are desperately trying to keep the ship's rather aged boilers from bursting. And a flotilla of other vessels, some flying the skull and crossbones, are circling, many darting in to nick some of the deck cargo and occasionally a few crew members to boot (although the chief purser has so far proved too weighty to carry off in a pirate lighter). If the old girl starts to founder then a whole lot of people are going to be in a serious pickle.
It may be that simply contributing patches back up to Debian isn't enough. Debian is a huge and amazing project, but for that reason is needs a lot of organization and talented manpower to keep it not merely going but a beacon of excellence. If it catches a cold, so does everyone else. With Debian being pulled in different directions, you have to wonder how long it can hold up for without beginning to suffer.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I installed Ubuntu on an old Compaq Laptop (a horrid old Presario) I have lying around and everything just worked! Even my Orinoco Wifi card just plain worked. Even Suspend just plain worked. I couldn't believe it. They're doing something right. I just hope Shuttleworth's profit model works out for him.
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