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Bruce Perens on UserLinux and Ubuntu
SDenmark writes "Ever wondered what happened to UserLinux, and how it's faring now that Ubuntu has stolen the spotlight? Linux Format has an interview with Bruce Perens, founder of UserLinux, the Open Source Initiative and Linux Standard Base. Perens discusses the impact of Ubuntu, how industry bodies are helping open source and why figureheads are important for the Free Software community."
Ubuntu doesn't actually do anything different for those newbies. What they do is file off the labels from existing software so that it's not quite immediately recognisable, and then tell all the newbies that it's different. Since these people are by definition uninformed, they don't know the difference.
Ubuntu is little more than a successful marketing exercise. They sell products that already existed to people too stupid to know about them. Most of the rest of the stuff they do is just repainting the bikeshed because they didn't like the old colour ("it doesn't use XML", "it's not written in my favorite language", "I just don't like the author").
When you were trying to convert all those friends and loved ones, what you should have done was look important and lie to them.