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.'"

Comments

Re:Professional Addition

[aichpvee]

Not if you give away the discs with free shipping.

Re:Professional Addition

[agraupe]

Professional addition? I mean, humans can be fast, but I thought calculators kinda put an end to all those professional adders.

Insightful indeed...

[menorikey]

Personally I think Ubuntu is great, probably one of the better distros of Linux that I've seen to date. The only problem I've run across is that it doesn't want to play nice with my Inspiron 9300, but that's not specific to Ubuntu; I have the same issue with SUSE as well, so mod me down if you think it's a dig (which it's not).

(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.)

Jambo Ubuntu

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Propietary Software Industry

[knightinshiningarmor]

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.

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[Xtifr]

> 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?

From available evidence, the outstanding majority. In fact, a majority (approx. 90% by some counts) of all programmers already do earn a living working directly for companies that use the software, rather than for those companies which sell software for others to use. Beyond that, of course, I'm sure companies existing and new will learn to adapt as the market changes. Once, all computer companies sold their own, incompatible, proprietary machines; now most sell open, compatible, semi-generic systems. And yet, the industry is hardly any poorer for that.

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[david.given]

From available evidence, the outstanding majority. In fact, a majority (approx. 90% by some counts) of all programmers already do earn a living working directly for companies that use the software, rather than for those companies which sell software for others to use.

Don't forget the third option: I work for a company that produces software that is licensed to hardware manufacturers who then ship actual devices. Mobile phones, in my case. The software is never sold directly to the primary users of the software.

I suspect there's a hell of lot of this going on, too.

I disagree.

[Henry V .009]

Windows has taught the world that "Home Edition" is synonymous with "Crippled Edition."

Re:I disagree.

[ettlz]

Windows has taught the world that "Home Edition" is synonymous with "Crippled Edition."

Come on now, XP Pro has, what, Active Directory/Windows Domain/whatever-else-Microsoft-tried-to-replace-LD AP-with support? A nice GUI for managing NTFS ACLs which you can manipulated in XP Home with cacls? As far as I know, Pro is only really useful if you're managing a large gaggle of Windows boxes. For instance, at home I run all my network services under Linux. I've a few boxes dual-booting with XP Home, and one with XP Pro. Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.

Re:I disagree.

[Henry V .009]

Remote Desktop is very nice in all sorts of situations. It is far more forgiving on slow connections than X over ssh. The other thing I find myself using is XP Pro's built-in file encryption.

Re:I disagree.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.

When XP came out, the logic was that anyone on 98/ME could move to XP Home, while XP Pro was for those who needed 'that weird esoteric enterprise stuff' that was only in windows 2000 professional.

So when all these users got their new laptops and desktops with xp home preinstalled it was a pretty rude awakening that MS had actually removed the webserver and disabled the ability to connect to a domain entirely.

It wasn't simply that Home was a watered down version of XP Pro (people were pretty much expecting that)...in some significant respects it was a waterned down version of 98!!! "Upgrading" from 98 to Home actually removed 2 pretty major features.

A lot of hobbyists, tele-communters, home-based web developers, power users, savvy gamers, and so forth got burnt by Home Edition. It was aggravated by the price difference, and the fact that many system builders didn't offer XP as an option in their more home-consumer targeted products... yet many "home consumers" needed XP Pro, but had no reason to pay 60% more for an 'enterprise workstation model of pc/laptop' ... forcing them to accept the bundled home edition and then buy XP Pro separately... (and at a rather ridiculous price considering how similiar the products are.)

Additionally the watered down security model, the lack of support for encryption (what?! Home users don't need privacy??) and limiting users to the "Microsoft Way" of setting up shared folders etc (hiding all the details where users literally could not meaningfully get to them -- yet all the details were there for misbehaving software to bungle up) was a real disservice to consumers.

Finally the loss of remote desktop, has saved the day for countless thousands as more clued friends family are able to solve their problems. (Sure home comes with remote assistance which is much much much clumsier and more of a pain to setup, especially when all parties are behind NAT boxes. Getting RD up and running is a few checkboxes and an easy nat/firewall tweak...)

Home solidly deserves its reputation for being crippled.

Money Talks

[mpapet]

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.

Re:Money Talks

[tvon]

So someone finally made a great distro out of Debian and it's a bad thing?

Grumpy Groundhog info

[jtatum]

Mr. Shuttleworth mentions the as yet unannounced Grumpy Groundhog project in TFA. He says it's ToBeAnnounced which I took as a hint that info is in the wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GrumpyGroundhog

It's an ubuntu distribution for developers that has the daily builds of everything:

Upstream development in the open source world moves at a tremendous pace. Many developers like to keep up to date with specific upstream products, but the work involved in building from CVS every day is substantial. With The Grumpy Groundhog Project, Ubuntu provides those developers with a ready source of packages containing the latest upstream code.

These same packages will allow cutting-edge developers to keep track of changes in the upstream codebase that might affect the distribution later down the line. For example, these packages can be auto-built with the latest compiler and toolchain packages to test compatibility with the versions that may be used for the next release of Ubuntu.

Funky Fairy!

[jonasj]

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! :-)

What a nice guy

[barkholt]

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.

The crux of the article...

[sweetnjguy29]

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.

Re:Professional Addition

[JPriest]

How about "Ubuntu Reduced Media Edition"?!

Re:Professional Addition

[Anonymous Coward]

You lose a little money with each one ... but you make it up in VOLUME!

They're CODENAMES!

[a.different.perspect]

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?

Re:Professional Addition

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

They have a foundation that helps take care of some of the administrative costs. One of the ways they make some money back is by paid tech support as an option from a third party provider (Canonical is technically that in this case). There is also free tech support, boards, etc at no cost. Their intent is that if you have no money you should not be denied anything from them - its nice to just see people being nice in the world for a change.

Pffft

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

ObIndy

[sharkey]

all those professional adders

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?