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Shuttleworth Answers Ubuntu Linux's Critics

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what's-in-a-name dept.

climenole writes "Technomancer wrote: 'Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Linux's founder, maintains that he and Ubuntu are doing right by the Linux community and the even larger open-source community. In recent weeks, Ubuntu has been criticized for not giving Linux enough support. Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't do enough for producing Linux source code.'"

6 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Proper link by yelvington · · Score: 5, Informative

    The IT world link takes you to an interstitial ad, followed by a godawful mishmash of crap.

    Here's a link to the original post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517

    1. Re:Proper link by MBGMorden · · Score: 3, Informative

      This I can definately agree with. I recently attended an open source software conference. Ubuntu and Fedora sent people there (I remember that Jono Bacon was there from Ubuntu specifically).

      The Ubuntu folks seemed actually far more enthusiastic about drumming up COMMUNITY support, rather than just digging up more programmers. They were encouraging everyone to help - not just with code, but with testing and QC, and their biggest push was talking up the importance of volunteers for doing user documetation and translation work. Neither of those is coding, but both are indeed very important.

      In general, it seems the Ubuntu just "gets it" as far as making Linux easier, more cohesive, and a true platform for USERS rather than just for programming geeks (even though I belong to the latter category :D). Now, I think a few of their ideas like left side buttons and their butt ugly color schemes could be imporved upon, but eh, nobody's perfect.

      I will say this though: I've used Linux in some incarnation or another (Slackware or Gentoo for the longer durations) essentially as a toy since 1998 or so. It was something interesting to play with. It wasn't until Ubuntu came along that it really started feeling like a real platform, and it wasn't until Ubuntu that I transitioned completely over to Linux (at least at home - can't kick Windows at work but that's not in my hands).

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    2. Re:Proper link by Artifakt · · Score: 4, Informative

      The value of contributions to Gnome depends so much on the rest of the Gnome community, on the long standing Gnome/KDE rivalry, and other external factors. If you use contributions to Gnome as a major metric, shouldn't Canonical get some points for indirectly contributing to KDE, XFCE and such via their Kubuntu/Xubuntu connections?
              There's also Canonical's hardware certification program and their 3rd party software certification program. The hardware cert program has three tiers, and these are designed to give some needed flexibility to hardware makers and software (particularly driver software) authors.
              Ubuntu Certified is the most involved, and from Canonical's viewpoint, probably the most rigorous. OEMs submit systems to Canonical's testing facility. Certification and testing is done by Canonical's engineers.
              Ubuntu Ready is much easier for Canonical, as the OEMs self-test their systems using Canonical's certification test suite. OEMs still have to submit their results to Canonical for final review if they want to claim to be Ubuntu ready, but can also use some elements of the test software for other purposes such as internal validation. A good way to evaluate Canonical's over all contribution to the Linux community might be to include how well they have shared this and related code and how well they have modified it based on OEM feedback.
              Works with Ubuntu. This designation is used for peripherals, such as printers or USB storage devices, that don't usually need the time and associated costs of a more rigorous certification process for testing before it's reasonable to certify them. It makes it easier for makers of such peripherals to keep up with the Ubuntu 6 month release cycle.
              Canonical offers frequent symposiums and group meetings for hardware makers wanting to use this process - in fact, there's one scheduled this month.

      --
      Who is John Cabal?
  2. Shuttleworth's Post by fandingo · · Score: 4, Informative

    We could link to Mark's actual blog post http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517 instead of linking to some crappy IT World "article."

  3. Re:Ubuntu is a distro by baka_toroi · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are getting trolled. Just thought you wanted to know that.

  4. Re:Ubuntu is good but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's a Debian peculiarity. The Debian way is quite logical and clean, and recognizes that Apache2 and Apache are separate software packages that may collide. It also supplies a nice and clean modular configuration system for Apache2 which avoids cruft, and demarcates maintainer and sysadmin configs clearly.