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Interview With Mark Shuttleworth
suka writes "The founder of the Ubuntu project argues in a recent interview with derStandard.at that the time for mass consumer sales of Linux on the desktop has not yet come. He goes on to talk about the integration of proprietary drivers, the One Laptop per Child project, and 'great applications' from Microsoft."
http://derstandard.at/Text/?id=2845484
All he says about Microsoft is that they make some "great applications". I can only assume he's talking about Office, or Visio or something.
All he says about OLPC is that he's afraid they'll be criticized for not getting the machine down to $100 yet, and that he'd be happy to help any governments run Ubuntu on the thing if that's what they want.
And all he says about integration of proprietary drivers is that they're willing to do it to make software work. So there's no news on ANY of those fronts.
Much more interesting is what he says about the new truly Free distro that's coming out. It will contain no media, no documentation, and no firmware for which source is not provided. There won't be a video clip unless you can get the materials used to make it. No PDFs without the source documents needed to produce them. Now THAT is a wonderful thing to contemplate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Shuttlesworth is independently wealthy.
First of all, while he may be repackaging a lot of what Debian has done, he was a Debian developer through the 90s. (source) Second, he made his money in internet security certificates, so I highly doubt wide-spread desktop linux would hurt him financially. And third, you have to realize that there are tons of people out there who find that Windows works just fine for them, and you don't fix something unless its broke. This is why Dell has been hesitating, they don't feel that the investment is worth the risk.
Well, system integration is where is the added value. Factoring out the work of millions of system administrators and users who would have to do the exact some thing. A very boring, but very necessary job. When the number of components grows as N, the work to make them work grows as N^2. That's also why the delay between Debian stable releases is only slightly smaller than the time to release Duke Nukem forever.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Yes, that would be great.
I don't think those concerns are valid, nor do they reflect much knowledge of the situation.
Seconded. I think it's also important to consider just how much Shuttleworth and Canonical have given, not only for Ubuntu but for Debian as well.
To characterise what they've done as 'ripping off someone else's work' does no justice whatsoever to the immense number of hours they've invested in:
Rest assured, this is not the work of a rip-off artist. If it is, then I wish someone would 'rip-off' my work early and often! 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Nonsense. Just because an OS is GPLed, it doesn't mean everything running on it has to be. Just because a compiler is GPLed, it doesn't mean that the things you compile with it must be. Just because tools are GPLed, it doesn't mean the things you use them for must be. The GPL is only as viral as copyright normally is.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Actually, if you read Communist Manifesto,
Have you read Das Kapital? The Communist Manifesto was more of an ideological essay, his real economic work can be found in there.
You know, to put misconceptions aside... You'll learn that the core of Marxism is that capitalistic profit is an abuse of the proletariat, and that it should be banned; but he also realized that profit (and this is where my previous post came from) is the main driving force behind technological development, so in order for a society to move forward, you would need a central government that dispatched resources so that you can both abolish capitalism and maintain a developing society.
Even Marx realized that communism could not work without a central authority.
I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 and setting up Samba was a breeze: Just right-click a folder, and select "share this folder", then select "windows share" (or something similar) and a dialog pops up requesting that you install the samba service. Press OK and the install is performed for you. Then, after the install is finished it just works.
There are still some kinks to this process: I could access my shared folder right away with a pocket pc, but a windows machine kept asking for a username and password. In the end I had to create a samba login to be able to access the folder, but I might be missing something...
Also, when you move or delete a folder, the share is not removed automatically.
Finally, I had problems sharing a folder with spaces on the name.
Anyway, it seems that the issues I had are all related to simple bug fixes or default configuration changes. The process itself seemed pretty smooth and straightforward from a end-user's perspective.