ubuntu

I've been very fortunate to get to spend some time with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, during my trip to Argentina. Mark and I spent the day skiing in Las Lenas, with some soft snow by the middle of the day and a lot of great conversation throughout the day.

One question we discussed at length: what is Mark's ambition for Ubuntu?

In trying to get at the answer to this question, InternetNews today asks: why doesn't Canonical work with SAP and Oracle to get them to support Ubuntu? But this sort of question doesn't get anywhere near Mark's ambition for Ubuntu. It doesn't anticipate the intersection of the web and the desktop.

The more I talk with Mark, the more I think he's a very, very smart person. He recognizes that Ubuntu needs to be more appealing on the desktop than the Mac to generate user adoption, but that's not really where his attention is focused, so far as I can tell. He's thinking bigger than desktop bits.

He's thinking of cloud-plus-desktop bits. And this, my friends, is why Mark may end up winning the "desktop" war.… Read more

One of the interesting threads within this year's O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) was a variety of collaboration tools and platforms aimed at what might be called "mid-weight" collaboration. Which is to say, collaboration that is something more than mailing lists or user forums but something less than the code repositories that primarily target a core group of developers.

Here's the basic issue. Some popular projects, such as the Linux kernel, have a pretty broad range of contributors. However, many other projects--even successful ones--are the product of a much more constrained group of people. With … Read more

Following on the heels of my post about why the Linux desktop fails, Joe Panettieri describes precisely why Ubuntu has a chance of bucking the trend and making Linux relevant to a wider audience:

Canonical/Ubuntu gets marketing.

Speaking of Canonical's decision to cancel Ubuntu Live, Panettieri writes:

Spending big bucks on Ubuntu Live -- and preaching to a niche audience of Ubuntu fanatics -- wasn't a great use of Canonical's marketing dollars.

Instead, Canonical hosted a range of education sessions at OSCON [as as well had a presence at LinuxWorld]....Many attendees were Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux and Windows Server administrators, who were seeking more information about Ubuntu. In other words, Canonical was preaching to new listeners rather than the same-old Ubuntu crowd. Smart move, Canonical.

Indeed. Mark Shuttleworth and the Canonical/Ubuntu crew understand that it's not good enough to be good enough when you're trying to displace entrenched incumbents. You have to be better, and you have to tell the world why.… Read more

I was just reading through old Open Road posts, and was excited to find how appropriate two posts were, in particular, given my activities this week. I'm in Argentina for work, family (my parents live here), and play (skiing with Mark Shuttleworth), and this last one prods me to link to an old post and recapture some of it here:

Mark does an excellent job of balancing idealism and pragmatism in how he approaches open source, which comes across perfectly in the article:

Zimbra, the open-source e-mail software that Yahoo acquired for $350 million last year, is officially coming to Ubuntu Linux.

Coinciding with this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Zimbra has announced a partnership with Ubuntu parent company Canonical.

Ubuntu users have been able to access Zimbra for the past year. But now, the e-mail software will be in the Ubuntu Partner Repository, providing easy access to both offline and online Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, and any IMAP or POP e-mail accounts. Zimbra also offers document and spreadsheet functions, as well as mashup features with services like Flickr, Amazon.… Read more

Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky.

The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure.

"The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.

Being Red … Read more

Just days after Mark Shuttleworth asked the Linux desktop community make pretty things, Make Tech Easier has come along and created a UI for Ubuntu that looks just like Mac OSX.

It's pretty astounding how quickly this was able to be done. Now if only someone could port all the necessary apps.

It's shoot for the moon daze, people! Following up on Al Gore's challenge to convert all electricity production to wind, solar and recumbent bike power in the next 10 years, two other probably even less likely to be accomplished challenges were raised.

First, TechCrunch wants users to build them a dead-simple web tablet for $200. There's that can-get-other-people-to-do-it spirit that made this country great! Make sure you get a tetanus shot before taking those test models for a spin! Some of those edges might be sharp.

Now one of the founders of Ubuntu maker Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, … Read more

Chris Blizzard of Mozilla gives a great interview to der Standard in which he highlights how Firefox is increasingly pushing the envelope on browser innovation. If you've taken a look at Mozilla Labs lately, you'll understand what he means.

While Mozilla may not have innovated everything in the browser wars (e.g., tabbed browsing, which arguably came from Opera), it is responsible for driving these innovations onto more than 150 million desktops worldwide.

The most salient point for me is that Firefox is gaining market share because it is better, not because it's open source. Firefox, then, … Read more