shuttleworth

That's right! It's time for another episode of The Register's Open Season podcast, this time with special guest Mark Shuttleworth. We talk about a wide range of topics, including whether Larry Ellison/Oracle can out-Red Hat Red Hat (nope), what strange things are afoot at OpenOffice (and whether developers can write good non-developer products), and a host of other things.

Well worth a listen.

Back in April I was fortunate to host Mark Shuttleworth at an Arsenal game and then dinner. Today, we repeated the day with an amazingly fun day at the Arsenal vs. Tottenham match, coupled with an exceptional dinner at Asia de Cuba (fantastic food). This time the day was made even better by the addition of my good friend, Bryce Roberts, of O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures.

We had a great conversation in the Tube and over dinner, which I'll report below. But it's first worth mentioning the match.

It was INTENSE. We were seated right on the fault line between Arsenal and Tottenham supporters (in the Tottenham seats), and the energy there was negative and wild. You get a slight taste for it in this video that I took with my camera after Arsenal's first goal:… Read more

Let's be very clear: nobody but Apple gets much desktop love from Walt Mossberg's influential consumer tech column in the Wall Street Journal. Not Windows. Not Linux. Not anything except OS X.

Part of this is because of his audience ("This column is written for mainstream, nontechie users of digital technology"). Part of it is because he simply prefers the Mac or other Apple technology to just about anything.

Whatever the reason, it's not all that surprising that Mossberg largely pans the Ubuntu desktop in a recent article, as CNET's Stephen Shankland notes on his blog.… Read more

I was fortunate to keynote this year's Ubuntu Live conference. I rarely give the same presentation twice, as I figure people are paying to hear something new. In UL's case, I spent a long time thinking through lessons I've learned from my time with Novell/SUSE and my interactions with Red Hat, and tried to come up with ways that Ubuntu could be successful yet leverage what makes it different.

In many ways, I find myself agreeing with Stephen O'Grady's Ubuntu Live keynote. Not surprising, since I think highly of Stephen. Stephen suggests that community defines the Ubuntu experience, and should be one of its primary differentiators:

To take the pebble, then, Ubuntu needs to reframe the debate. To do that, it must turn the conversation from basic operating system shootouts to the operating experience. A conversation that, in my opinion, favors Ubuntu.… Read more

Canonical has released its first test version of Gobuntu, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux software that's devoid of proprietary software.

Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth announced the version's availability this week on his blog. The test version of Gobuntu, based on the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" version of Ubuntu due in October, can be downloaded from the Ubuntu Web site.

Regular Ubuntu includes proprietary software such as video drivers that enable accelerated 3D graphics. Shuttleworth called on programmers to lend a hand building Gobuntu into a version on its own right.

"This is a call … Read more

Mark posted "news" over the weekend: Ubuntu (Canonical) is not negotiating a patent license with Microsoft. Well, of course not, Mark: no one ever accused you of being lame. :-)

Seriously, Ubuntu is not in the same league with the other s that have capitulated to the Microsoft FUD machine. Ubuntu is on a serious upswing, not downward spiral. Why negotiate for phantom benefits unless that's all you can hope to achieve?

All that said, Mark isn't writing off collaboration with Microsoft (or anyone else) forever. He just doesn't feel that this particular kind of &… Read more

Mark Shuttleworth is on a quest to control the British media. Or maybe he isn't, and it's the British media that is on a quest to give him maximum coverage. Whichever it is, my recent trip to London had Mark on the BBC and in this Economist article about free software, and Ubuntu's role in it.

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

...[O}pen-source software tends to polarise opinion. It has vociferous critics who suspect that software written by idealistic nerds, and made available free to anyone who wants to download it, must be some kind of communist plot. Zealous believers, meanwhile, long for open source to triumph over the evil empires of commercial software. This clash is often depicted as an epic struggle for supremacy between Linux and Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system. But the truth is that most computer users do not know or care about the politics of open-source software. Mr Shuttleworth says most people simply want to read their e-mail, browse the web and so on.… Read more