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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."
It is a kernel.
The 'GNU' part adds a shell userland and some libraries that are nice for systems programmers. But the bulk of high-level functionality that defines a 'desktop' is included/excluded pretty capriciously by the various distros.
Without a standardized core of UI and API functionality that makes system environments relatively easy and predictable for end-users and application programmers alike, then you don't have a platform. Without a platform (like a desktop version of LSB), these people will feel like "Linux" is a waste of time.
Also, the platform should have its own name, not "Linux". You'll know that Linux is succeeding on the desktop PC when people commonly refer to the platform containing Linux, instead of the kernel.
Remember Stallman's vision is a world where everything-- libraries, the OS, programs-- every strip of code is GPL. If you try to introduce a new, non-GPL strip of code, it needs to be a license which is "GPL Compatible" so that as soon as it links to any library it becomes GPL (rather, anything that links to it implicitly links to GPL code by proxy, and thus is forced to be GPL or "GPL compatible").
To escape this visionary world, you have to write your own OS, own tools, own compiler, own C library, everything; he's backed down on the C library and compiler (LGPL and GPL with an exception clause) because he knows nobody will use it, but by the same turn if the world was in his vision then nobody would use your new OS stack either. You would have to write a completely new application base; it'd be just like the uptake of Linux, except all your own stuff, i.e. imagine having something like Ubuntu but 100% BSD/MIT licensed and you'll understand how hard this would be to accomplish.
Stallman's vision is effectively that, in the software world, everyone contributes "for the common good." You write code, you release it, you open the source code to everyone and leave it free for use to everyone. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits. This is the core of Marxism; the only thing missing is that the copyrights aren't all turned over to the FSF (if we claim that everything "should" be turned over to the FSF or some central copyright holder to "ensure that it stays open," then this does become Marxism).
Stallman is the next Lenin, not Stallin.
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very few pieces of firmware ship their source code, so this new flavor of Ubuntu won't ship any firmware unless we can also ship the source code for it.
There are kinds of content out there - like PDFs and so on - which are not editable but where there is an editable source document effectively, and we won't include this content unless we include the source document. Things like video content: Well, an edited video is nice, but what about the source materials? So this version of Ubuntu will not include any video footage unless it also includes either the source content or access to the source content. By this we are extending the concept of "freedom" to cover not just applications software, all the way down to firmware and content which is further than any other distribution goes.
So for example we get a lot of reports now of developers who install computers for their parents and they put Ubuntu on them, because it's not gonna get spyware, it's not gonna get viruses, it's very easy to maintain remotely and keep up-to-date. And so they are not getting constantly called by their parents saying their computer won't work or "my ISP tells me that I got viruses on my computer". It does everything they need, it does web and e-mail, office and spreadsheets and things like that. So in those cases Ubuntu is a very good option for everyday users.
I haven't actually tried Vista final, I tried to run a Vista Beta under VMWare and wasn't very successful, but I can see, that they have tried to raise the game.
From this we can draw some conclusions:
It is more important for a distro to be "politically correct" than to meet the needs of users for whom access to source will always be meaningless.
The geek stereotype of the home user is alive and well in Ubuntu. No mention of media play, no mention of games.
Ubuntu is the OS of choice if you have son or daughter willing to install and maintain it. For everyone else, there is OSX and Windows Vista.