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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."
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.
Linux is great, I use Ubuntu, but that is one funny photo. It's like he's posing for a catalogue or something. Or maybe: 'Shuttleworth, for men. The new Open fragrance from Mark Shuttleworth'
A review by Richard Stallman said: 'It smells like GNU piss, and did nothing to cover up my body odour!'
His comments on Beryl/Compiz are quite telling. That's a fork that should never have happened. Also interesting are snippets about Canonical customers (from the article):
We all like to think that Ubuntu costs Shuttleworth a fortune but they're obviously meeting with some success. This is something I've worried about before: what happens when Shuttleworths' money runs out? Seems that we needn't worry for much longer. :)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I feel compelled to chime in -- I'm an Ubuntu user who had hopped around from Red Hat to Fedora then to Mandrake, finally settling in with Ubuntu starting with Hoary or Breezy, I think. Simplistically, yes, all they do is repackage someone else's work, but as far as I'm concerned, they've put together something better than the other distros I've tried.
The argument about whether Linux is ready for the desktop has been going on for quite a few years now. I'm about as tired as the next Linux Fanboy about hearing that next year will be the year of Linux. Hasn't happened yet. If it did, it would be a gradual shift, not an overnight "whoa!" type of thing.
For me, Linux has been ready even before Ubuntu made things easier. Then again, I didn't mind doing the extra work of running through config files and doing BASH basics. I'm not a Linux/unix expert by any means, but I don't mind a little adventure or two. (Not daring enough to try Gentoo)
What Ubuntu did was make things a LOT simpler. For multimedia stuff, I still turn to an ubuntu guide (last time I tried automatix, I don't think it worked properly...but a while ago). Otherwise, it's synaptic for a few other things and I'm set to go. I try to write down all the extra apps I install so I don't forget next time I have to do a clean install/upgrade.
Now to the whole business side of things -- Ubuntu is one of the free ones. Yes, they offer paid support, but this doesn't seem like the same business model as what MS uses. I'm not really sure what money Canonical will be milking by releasing version after version. The software will always have improvements, and in that sense, won't ever be absolutely "done" -- it isn't like making macaroni and cheese, dude.
Linux (especially Ubuntu) is ready for my desktop. Most other people, on the other hand, won't "switch" without being given a compelling reason to do so. That's unfortunate.
Ok, I'm just a developer, but I've used Linux off and on for various things over the years, and I'd like to think I have a pretty good feel for what Linux needs to really take off on the Desktop (and no it's not there yet, but it's getting closer every day). There are essentially three different flavors of "desktop market", and you really need to cover at least two of these three in order to have an impact.
The first market, and the one that Linux is more than capable of supporting as it stands now with little trouble, is that of the enterprise desktop, which is distinguished from the enterprise server by the fact that the likes of the CEO and marketing department would be running these systems, rather than the IT guys. The main problem with this market is one of image. You need to actually convince the CEOs that Linux on their desktop is just as good or better than Microsoft. To a great extent IBM, Novell, and other major corporations are doing a very good job of getting the word out, and I think we're really seeing progress on this front.
The second market, and once again, one that Linux can handle without much problem is that of your typical non-technical home user. The problem with this market is that it needs to be easy. Dead easy. One button, very small words, short sentences easy. For an example of how to handle this market perfectly, see the install process of the latest beta of Ubuntu (7.04). The key to winning over this segment is to first get a distro that is so simple they never have to use the command line to do everything they need on a day to day basis. This means, they need to be able to setup and install new hardware and software, perform updates, and configure everything from GUI without any particular technical knowledge outside of that supplied by said software/hardware. Once you've got the distro nailed, have some technical user install it for them the first time and get them using it, once they use it on a day to day basis, become comfortable with it, and realize it's better than what they had before, they're sold. Distros like Ubuntu are making headway in this market, but still have a little ways to go, I think this is the source of at least part of the comments in TFA.
The third market, which is the hardest one for Linux, and also the most critical right now, is the power user and gamer market. In order to win this market, Linux needs two things, it must support the latest and greatest in graphics cards out of the box (look to intel for some interesting developments in this department), and it must encourage game developers to produce cross-platform games. Now, the second of those two requirements can be mitigated by using things like Cedega to run non-ported games, but in that case graphics cards need to be fully supported in order for the games to play on par with the windows counterparts. To a certain extent this market revolves around hardware support, followed by market demand. Intel and AMD are positioning themselves to be strong players in this arena, in particular the moves by Intel to package Linux drivers with their Windows drivers on new graphics cards, as well as to open source graphics drivers is very encouraging. AMD (ATI) has recently started to release drivers for their cards if not at the same time as the Windows ones, at least in the same time frame, and adopting a common versioning number for all the drivers has also helped in comparing support progress. Once the hardware support is in place, it's just a matter of demonstrating to manufacturers that the user base is sufficient to justify the cost of developing on Linux. One of the best ways to do that would be to get a large enough portion of the casual computer user population switched over to Linux.
If linux can get a large enough portion of two of these markets, or even a relatively small portion of all three, it will have enough momentum to finally interest the likes of Dell, and HP. From that point forward, it's just a matter of free market dynamics.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
yes, but the time to rip things out without adding things in isn't that significant, and if it gets ubuntu's criticizers off of attacking them for not being free, as well as attracts them to the distro, it can only help, and it doesn't hinder the vanilla ubuntu users any. Sam
I don't watch DVDs on my computer. I watch DVDs on the TV as do most people. I don't play console games on my computer, I play them on the Nintendo.
Most people don't want their computers to be all things to all people. They want to do chat and email and youtube and surf the internet and download MP3s to their player and a bit of word processing. Linux does those things just fine. Most people will get Linux at home after they start using it at work. Linux, being a disruptive technology, is gaining acceptance away from the desktop mainstream but it will eventually achieve critical mass.
What I enjoy about Mark's comments int he inteview (and in others) is that he tends to be genuine, calm and honest in his talkings, and uses very few corporate buzzwords. Maybe that's because he rolls his own distros, cigarettes and whatnot, but it's refreshing to see an important IT headcheese soundling like you're talking to him as a person and not a bot.
Here's wishing Ubuntu a long, prosperous future! \ \\//
Fluendo is developing/selling (has to sell them due to royalties) MS codecs for Linux. Also they are working on legal DVD player. Morever gstreamer has DRM stack in it, for HD/BlueRay protection schemes. If any distribution put money to pay for licence fees for codecs, they can release those codecs bundled. There's nothing to stop them, however nobody would like to use DRM unless it's enforced, and with a typical Linux distribution you can't enforce that.
In past it was not possible for computer manufacturers to offer Linux because they were not enough consumers to choose Linux over Windows and Windows might charge them with higher oem licenses. However today they see that people would like to buy pre-installed Linux boxes, and computer manufacturers yet see that they can support them as well. Dell will soon bundle his own build of Fedora if I'm not mistaken. Maybe they will offer other distros as well. Then we'll see if Linux is already lost, or you're talking non-sense.
Well, GCC has a GPL exception in it. GCC builds code that contains code from GCC itself, and links to libgccs, and links in some entry point code (there's code for PIC, non-PIC, relocatable, non-relocatable, etc). This code is all under GPL; if you link it to your program (by building your program with GCC) you get a program that must be GPL'd. The GCC exception is a clause that states that you can do this without GPL'ing your code, if and only if the linkage is a result of using GCC and not of your explicit -lgcc_s or whatnot.
If glibc were GPL and not LGPL, every Linux app would have to be GPL or link to the BSD Libc and demand a copy of libc-bsd.so be installed. GNU Readline is like this.
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Right, exactly. As near as I can tell, that is Stallman's vision in a paragraph.
First off, a slight caveat: he's not backed down on the compiler - the compiler's output wouldn't be a "derived" part of the software anyway. He has backed down on the library, exactly as you say.
The rest of your paragraph is (again, IMHO) exactly what the FSF has been trying to achieve for the last twenty years! Way Back When, most of the compilers/operating systems/system utilities/Unix toolkits were all proprietary. The FSF has been recreating all these tools "100% GPL licensed" so that when you buy a new computer, you don't have to rely on XYZ Corp's C compiler, or ZMachine's operating system; you have the option of taking the GNU system and porting it to your new computer, giving you (a) exactly the same experience you'd have on any other GNU system, and (b) the ability to tinker around with the system as much as you like, with (c) a known set of restrictions (the GPL rules). As compared to the proprietary systems, which could have arbitrary restrictions ("you cannot release software written in this program without paying extra for 'distribution'") or - heck - sensible restrictions, too (per seat pricing, vendor lock-in, incompatible formats, etc.)
My point is that while you seem to think that this "visionary world" is a conspiracy of some sort, it is actually exactly the world the FSF has been trying to bring into existence since 1985, and they're pretty open about it. If you disagree, there are always alternatives. The nicest thing about GPL software is that it's so hard to lock you in anywhere.
Yes, yes, he does. And as an aside, the FSF does claim that all GNU software copyrights should be turned over to the project. Not all GPL software, just anything with the "GNU" name on it, really.
Personally, I like having an extremist organisation in my corner. I don't think anybody should be forced into this Brave GNU World, but I like the trend that's going on of people working together to improve common pieces of software, while still making money for their effort and knowledge in doing so. Like any large inhabitant in the ecosystem, the FSF makes a lot of noise
The interviewer asks some very good questions about the weak areas in Ubuntu-Canonical's business strategy and Shuttleworth has to dodge many questions and hide behind half-truths, handwaving and his usual marketing gobbledygook.
Ubuntu allegedly has a "policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed" -- with the few rare exceptions like the Upstart init system. Ubuntu-Canonical doesn't hire any top developers to do upstream development like some other commercial distros, Red Hat and Novell, do. For this precise reason, the GNOME hacker Jeff Waugh had to leave Ubuntu when he wanted to concentrate on developing GNOME.
Given this background, I'm inclined to believe that Shuttleworth is heavily distorting the reality when he claims that a lot of KDE 4 development is now happening inside of Ubuntu. This is one of the several points where I would have wished the interviewer to be a bit tougher and to push a bit harder in order to dig out the truth behind Shuttleworth's marketing talk. Of course, if Ubuntu-Canonical has indeed changed their policy lately and if they are now hiring KDE developers to do upstream development for KDE 4, then this revelation would have greatly added the news value of the interview. It's unfortunate that the interviewer didn't push this question (and some other questions) any further but, instead, left Shuttleworth's dubious claims open for speculations.