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The Business Model of Ubuntu
Andareed writes "Open-source software companies, such as Ubuntu (an open-source Linux distribution), are better able to respond to user request and bugs than traditional software companies, such as Microsoft. Simon Law, head of the Quality Assurance department at Ubuntu in a talk given to the UW Computer Science Club, explains why this is, and how Ubuntu is leveraging the open-source model. Simon explains how the QA department at Ubuntu differs from traditional QA departments, through its use of the open-source community at large. Most interesting is Simon's views on what motivates open-source developers to develop software, and how open-source oriented businesses (specifically Ubuntu) are making money."
If it is so good and responsive to user input, then maybe the next release will actually make wireless compatibility better instead of worse than the previous release?
Ubunutu? Can we get an editor here?
There's also more talks at http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/
Ubuntu is not a company, it is a community-driven distribution. Canonical Ltd. is a major financial sponsor of Ubuntu, but (AFAIK) provides very little guidance of the project.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
It seems to me that the reason Ubuntu (and other OS projects) can respond to user feedback and bug reports more quickly than larger (non-FOSS) companies is the relative sizes of the user communities. Compare the size of the Ubuntu install base to that of Windows (or Mac OS X, or...) and it becomes a no-brainer that you can respond more quickly. Don't get me wrong, I applaud the work the Ubuntu group does, but the ability to respond quickly will lesson as they grow. Compare with RedHat and its enterprise offerings.
Just my US$0.02 worth.
I thought Ubuntu's business model was "be funded by an generous and independently wealthy geek". You mean to tell me it actually makes money?
1. Change name from Ubuntu to Ubunutu
2. ?????
3. Profit!
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Is it just me or did Dapper increase the problems related to X when updating kernels. I had to recently upgrade to 2.6.15-26amd64-k8 because of a serious security flaw (otherwise I wouldn't have bothered just yet), but inevitably I had to recompile my NVidia drivers. Is this the sort of QA Mr Law is overlooking perhaps?
I have to say though, the Ubuntu forums is an awesome resource for fixing Ubuntu related problems. If it is any sort of testiment to the level of paid support then Canonical Ltd. (the commercial organisation behind Ubuntu Linux) are certainly on the right tracks.
Kudos to them.
ilovegeorgebush
Yepp, I've run into some problems wint the new kubuntu and wireless. For some reason it won't let me do "chanel switching" (the parameter that messes it up is "channel 6"), and since that is the GUI driven wlassistant tries to do the whole configuration fails. My solution is to "strip" that part of the command and run it like this:
/sbin/iwconfig eth1 mode managed rate 11M key open 1234567890 essid firewall nickname mycomp
:)
:P .. and yes, I'm running against an old router which can't do better than that.. :P
dhclient eth1
I've got those rows in a file called wireless.sh that I run as root with sudo.
The problem has something to do with insufficient rights on the device. I know it's a bummer and ubuntu should not have to be fixed with haxx0r scripts considering one of their goals is to be simple at a Joe SixPack level... but I've run into this problem on just one comp and all the others are working excelelently..
Cheers...
P.S. No, that's not my passphrase or my essid or computers nick..
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Seeing it's slashdotted (apparantly).
1) 30s of video held at 15 degree angle (obviously setting up).
2) Nope, launch right into the talk. 20 minutes or so of ubunutu Q+A guy. (camera still at 15 degree angle)
3) Mildly interesting (and entertaining) Question & Answer session. Check out the guy's voice at circa 28 minutes! (camera still at 15 degree angle)
4) The interesting bit - ubunutu guy leaves & audience exits...hahaha - check out the nerds - especially the guy in shorts!
What is going to make Ubanto more than a Linux flavor of the week? The only distribution that seems to have real staying power is Red Hat. Every other distribution comes and goes in popularity like SUSE, Mandrake (Mandriva), Linspire, etc, etc...
IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.
I find the Ubuntu forums to be totally inadequate. There were at least 15 different threads on how to get wireless working for my dell b130, with none of them working for me.
I still don't understand why the latest stable ndiswrapper isn't included on whatever Ubuntu CD is offered on the website. That alone would probably solve most people's wireless issues. Everything needed to get wireless networking working should be on the CD. Not everyone has wired access, certainly not with city's and towns rolling out municipal wireless.
Unfortunately, the build of ffmpeg we were using didn't allow theora encoding. We tried :(
Either that, or it's just that the Linux desktop isn't that great to begin with. I realize that's an arguable point, but it seems to me that, for example, Firefox running on Linux is significantly slower than Firefox running on Windows on the same hardware. I have to say the Windows desktop looks a lot more polished, too. And the fact that GNOME (at least on the systems that I've used) opens a new folder for every directory instead of replacing the contents of the current window is just really annoying. So I use Windows for my desktop stuff and Linux for development and other real work. YMMV.
i've been running gentoo for a few years, but when i bought an x60 recently, the livecd wouldn't boot. so i tried ubuntu, at first thinking that i'd just use it to bootstrap gentoo, but this quickly faded into i'll try ubuntu, and then "i've spent all this time getting it to work, i guess i'm committed". so ubuntu for the last few months on my primary personal machine. and yes, a lot of stuff works.
1 5&page=17
but some things don't, and there doesn't seem to be any response at all from ubuntu. the biggest issue is a minute long hang during boot with the message "mounting root filesystem".
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1861
this thread is 18 pages long and started june 1st, and there are many other threads, bugreports, etc that are dealing with the same issue. there are a hundred "me toos", and one has to assume many people like me who haven't put their two cents in for every one who has. so i'm pretty sure it's not an isolated problem. and yet there is very little response from ubuntu. a few pages with sloppily put together work-arounds. but i haven't seen any sort of official statement on the problem or a commitment to fix it or a disclaimer in any of their pr that the problem exists, or even a statement of the scope of the problem (eg. which cpus are effected).
in some ways i'm very impressed with ubuntu, but responsiveness isn't one of them. in the gentoo world, there would have been a 10 page official document describing the problem, summarizing scope, offering work-arounds, and naming a team assigned to solving the problem.
seth
My blog
Watch natural selection at work. It's a good thing. The problem with Windows is that its users do not abandon it if they find something better. Hence, no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows (see: Vista).
Distros most certainly can have staying power, if they keep working on themselves and improving their distros. If they don't, good riddance.
IMHO, the problem with Linux for the desktop is users have no loyalty. Once something better comes along they drop thier old distro like a bad habbit. This ultimately makes it impossible for a distro company to be profitable more than a few years.
That may be very true for the home desktop, but probably not the business desktop. Ubuntu is targeting the business desktop with it's feature list, paid support options and now longer support guarantee. A business is much less likely to start switching distros based on the flavor-of-the-week mentality.
Redhat recognized this by targeting the server market first. Then they made in-roads on the business desktop. Ubuntu, likewise has server offerings and business desktops.
It's not that either one of them can't be used for home or hobby use, it's just that their default setup is not that. What is the biggest complaint for new users to either Ubuntu or Redhat? They can't play mp3s or watch videos. Those aren't normally high priorities in a business setting, but are for home use. Both distros have pretty simple instructions to add that capability, too, but neither include it out of the box (or ISO, so to speak). Why not? Because, ultimately, it's not their target audience.
So, unless Ubuntu does something really dumb, it's going to be a major player. Will it always be number one on distrowatch? Probably not, but it's here to stay.
But... I was trying to be funny. :(
Just for the record, ever since Bill Gates quit his day job at Microsoft he has been running one of the largest privately funded health and education initiatives to allieviate misery worldwide. His project has been so successful that he has been able to convince Warren Buffet to donate the bulk of his wealth to the fund, too. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
Traditionnally, most of the big players in GNU/Linux distributions have had a bottom-up approach. They get the kernel, a few hundred of common software (GNU utils, desktop environment) they package, they try to get everything to work together and once it's good enough they ship. It's up to the user to set it up regarding his needs (e.g: some users spend some time on seting up the desktop appearance while many others won't care, but will spend some time on installing some scalable fonts and setting X up for dual display and get all their peripherals to work). Major GNU/Linux distributions have required tweaking for years. Now that wasn't really a problem, since most users went to GNU/Linux to discover the OS's internals and learn more about compiling, OS architecture and on. Most LXers/Slashdotters (me included) didn't care, and on the contrary were in fact quite happy with the state of GNU/Linux (using the shell before friends/girls looks like some kind of voodoo, I've always found it fun to mount an USB key with dmesg | tail then mount -t vfat -o uid=1000 /dev/sdaX /mnt/usb before friends ;)). However, we couldn't expect massive GNU/Linux adoption with this approach. The user should NOT care about the OS.
.deb packages that I couldn't install on my Debian (they even broke some dependancies). Before, about all .deb packages used to work on Debian Sarge (which was at the time still in development). They broke the ABI too, but that I didn't really cared. But my main problem was with the community and all the hype. But well, I can't blame a distribution for its community (not talking about developers but all the forums full of newbies, it feels like Digg or MySpace for Linux ;)). And anyway, it was just Debian, no?
The great paradigm shift with Ubuntu (and a few others, but I don't know them really) is that they took a top-down approach. Instead of taking the existing software as a starting point, they take the final result: if they want the desktop to behave some way (e.g: have hints for new users, give more visual feedback, make some apps easier to use), they'll modify GNOME appropriately. Mark Shuttleworth has a lot of money so the bounty system works just right. They also have integrated Ubuntu with Launchpad, their bugs/features request/apps discussion database/website (which code is unfortunately proprietary), so that it supports their mantra better (anyone who knows how to fill an HTML form can request a feature). But under the hood, it's still Debian. In fact, it's 90% Debian, 10% Ubuntu (Debian has done 90% of the road up, and the Ubuntu people 10% down). They couldn't do Debian's work better, but most Debian people wouldn't want to do Ubuntu's work (but some of them are both Ubuntu and Debian developers, quite a lot in fact). The accomplishment with Ubuntu is that it was the last piece of the puzzle needed for a community-made distribution (even if it's financed) to go mainstream. It has all the technical greatness of Debian (including the wonderful APT framework) with a great ease of use.
As a Debianist, I used to be quite against the Ubuntu hype. First, with their high dependancies and their oh-too-recent toolchain, they make
Well no, it's Debian plus a bit more. And the bit more is that it can go mainstream for the desktop use (and it has already started). My mom has been using Debian for almost 2 years now (of course I installed it, but she's using it) with no problem. However, she's totally insensitive to computer aesthetics and she doesn't care as long as she can use Thunderbird and Firefox. Some times ago, a friend of mine couldn't upgrade his pirated copy of Windows because of the WGA (maybe he could, but he's not tech-savvy at all, and I told him I wouldn't help him with Windows anyway). So I proposed him to test GNU/Linux, say in a dual-boot. He was like "no, I don't want no fuckin' dual-boot, I just want Linux". I was quite surprised, he doesn't know anything about c
You have to actually restart GNOME, not just logout. I am under the impression, with the "login" screen on, GNOME is running.
/etc was where preferences are stored, so I just cd/ls-ed. As for the sudo thing, I am used to being able to authenticate when I save.
I searched for my question and found "edit the xorg config file, and some syntax tips. I googled the location of the config file, but didn't find anything. I knew that
I shouldn't have to do anything but pick a resolution from a list. Things like this should just work. A good OS doesn't require reading a manual for every little thing.
If I was using Gentoo, or making my own distro, I wouldn't really have a problem. But Ubuntu is supposed to be easy to use. Not something that people should have to hire someone to set up.
And thanks to all the moderators who modded me troll for pointing out a legitimate problem.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I don't know about you, but screw the "OS community", quite frankly, I'd think global health, education, and global development to be much more worthwhile causes. But then again, who cares about the helping people in need, who cares about starvation desiese and illiteracy, as long as your OS is free and open, and spiffy, right?
It is commendable that Gates is making all of those charitable donations to alleviate hunger and poverty and disease. Nobody can fault him and his foundation on that. However, it will never solve the real problem keeping those people and countries in poverty.
What the third-world really needs is investment in infrastructure, industry, educational institutions, etc., so that they can become self-sufficient. As long as they are dependent on subsidies from the U.N. or other countries or the Gates foundation, they will always be in poverty. What's the old adage? Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
Unless there is real investment, whether through Gate's foundation or other sources in business that can provide jobs, and a market for their output, there will always be poverty and disease in those countries. If you want to alleviate world suffering, ultimately, you are going to have to give people in the rest of the world the means to support themself, not just a handout.
Hm. I always thought this was the real business model of Ubuntu.
Rediculous is ridiculous!
Looks like Ubuntu expected that since they registered Ubunutu.org and simply redirected it to Ubuntu.org. Perhaps they should have a little message informing people that they are mis-spelling Ubuntu, rather than directing them to the correct location even though an incorrect location was typed. (Don't want to do any negative reinforcement, you know.)
Better yet, they should make a new organization for Ubunutu and call it "UNU" for "Ubunutu's Not Ubuntu".