Shuttleworth To Step Down As Canonical CEO In 2010

LinuxScribe writes "In a blog announcement today, Canonical Founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed he will be stepping down from his CEO role to be replaced by current COO Jane Silber. Both execs do not see major strategic changes on the horizon. Silber's official blog and Linux.com each have more details on how the change will be implemented."

Comments

Thanks Mark

[Abreu]

Linux operating systems are better thanks to you and your contributions.

Re:Thanks Mark

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet everything but Ubuntu sucks even worse. I mean, if you're looking for something that doesn't require manual configuration of everything. Gentoo and its ilk are the best thing around if you 1) know what you're doing, and 2) have time to read docs and fiddle with things. If you just want a fucking OS that gets out of the way and lets you do your work...well, my recent experience with OpenSUSE and Fedora has been that they're horrendously broken. Debian's package manager is incredibly annoying if you've used something nice like Portage or Paludis. Ubuntu typically works, does WiFi networking the way it fucking obviously should be done, and allows easy addition of third-party package repositories.

There are plenty of idiot devs and stupid decisions to go around in all major open source projects, but Ubuntu has managed to scrape together something that I can install on my laptop and quickly set up as a platform for Android development. Which, sadly, is a hell of a lot more than you can say about other distros.

Re:Thanks Mark

[jim_v2000]

> I mean, if you're looking for something that doesn't require manual configuration of everything.

OpenSUSE? Mandriva? PCLinuxOS?

Re:Thanks Mark

[ChrisMP1]

No, the secure repos are to make sure the packages are coming from where you think they are from. Ubuntu is still an operating system - it operates. If the user tells it to do something, such as download from an alternate repository, it can and should.

Re:Thanks Mark

[clang_jangle]

I wouldn't be so fast to cry "elitism". Those of us who already know our way around *nix and have tried Ubuntu (or openSuse, PCBSD, etc) have been struck by how crappy our fave OS is once it gets dumbed down with automatic everything. Perhaps it's unavoidable.
I'd rather see my non-geek associates using dumbed-down, buggy ubuntu than windows, but let's face it -- those of us who use and love Debian, FreeBSD, etc just can't help but feel disappointed by the fact that we can't share our experience of vastly superior performance via these distros aimed at non-geeks. And it's a shame that for a lot of users there is no compelling argument to switch from windows. From their perspective, "it ain't broke, why fix it?".

I know, I know... "-1, Uncomfortable Truth"

Re:Thanks Mark

[armanox]

Guess you should thank Red Hat and Feodra for that WiFi manager, they wrote it afterall....

Re:Good

[pinkushun]

Remember, Mark injected the 'usability' factor while the development community kept focus on technical issues. You can't scapegoat a prominent individual in a community project, because it's everyone involved that counts, even if they don't have a face on a blog somewhere.

Take for example the various Karmic regressions that left many users upset...
Me: "Sadly proprietary drivers make it hard for developers to create solid GNU/Linux drivers. Did you test your hardware on the beta? User feedback helps squashing bugs, before the final release."
User: "Um... No, why should I? It should just work."

That's not Mark's fault, or lack of decision on his part, but a real-world technical problem FOSS faces in the fight against, well, Free Open Source Software.

That will only happen when we shift from "Who's fault is it" to "What can I do to help?".