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."

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[choongiri]

http://derstandard.at/Text/?id=2845484

Bleah

[drinkypoo]

He goes on to talk about the integration of proprietary drivers, the One Laptop per Child project, and 'great applications' from Microsoft."

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.

Re:It's full of source!

[Braino420]

I would hope that Ubuntu will be going DVD one of these days soon

It is available on dvd. It doesn't have all the different "flavors" of ubuntu, but those are just an apt-get away (or you can download the dvd for that flavor).

Re:Not to be rude, but...

[grcumb]

Insightful? Shuttleworth is independently wealthy from a previous internet business, and his mission from day one has been a mass Linux desktop. Don't believe me? Look at Bug #1 in Ubuntu "Microsoft has a majority market share". Ubuntu isn't market-driven. Shuttleworth has said that he'll support the distribution himself out-of-pocket if need be.

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:

• Integrating a compositing window manager that out-blings Aero by a country mile;
• Creating an entirely new system start-up service to replace the aging init.d
• Investing huge amounts of effort in improving the package management GUI to a point where anyone can use it;
• Creating themes that - like them or not - are better organised, cleaner and simpler to use than anything that's come before;
• Providing top-flight technical support services, both free and paid;
• Creating one of the most dynamic and energetic user communities in FOSS today;
• Spending millions preparing an educational version of the OS, and paying to roll it out into African schools;
• And dozens of other things that I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

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^)

Re:Oh I see how it is

[Bogtha]

To escape this visionary world, you have to write your own OS, own tools, own compiler, own C library, everything

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.