ubuntu

Ubuntu's breakout

Ubuntu and Canonical, the Mark Shuttleworth-founded commercial entity that supports it, have done something that seemed improbable a few years back. They've emerged as a third Linux distribution to have commercial market momentum on a worldwide basis. Prior to Ubuntu, the distribution landscape consisted of commercial and community-supported versions from Red Hat and Novell's Suse--together with some regional and "flavor of the month" distros. (See my "The Scene at the Distro" from April 2006.)

Canonical and Shuttleworth have managed to make Ubuntu into a third commercial Linux distribution that's here to stay; "… Read more

Ubuntu 8.10 due Thursday. Profits? Not so fast

Canonical will release the newest version of its Ubuntu version of Linux on Thursday, Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth said Monday, but the company's profitability isn't on such a fast track.

Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex in the company's alphabetically ascending naming convention, is the latest installment of Linux for desktop computers and servers in the company's six-month release cycle. Among the new features are support for 3G wireless modems, the ability to set up an encrypted and password-protected private directory, a guest account that can help out someone needing temporary use of a computer, and … Read more

Ubuntu's rising revenue makes a small dent in Microsoft

Microsoft may not be exactly suffering right now, but as The VAR Guy notes, Ubuntu's success in the netbook market is having a material, albeit still small, effect on Microsoft's pricing power and profits.

Sorry about that, Redmond.

Ubuntu, which now claims eight million active users, is also starting to make serious money for its commercial parent, as Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of Business Development, tells InternetNews:

We're not sharing our revenues publicly but I will say revenue growth is extremely strong and we're bullish across the board both at server side and desktop. The … Read more

The Ubuntu Linux community gets its first (second?) rock star

You would think that it's a hard enough job taking on Microsoft's desktop dominance. Ubuntu's community lead Jono Bacon, however, may actually have an even more audacious goal in mind: completely change the economics of the music industry.

Bacon recently released his Severed Fifth project, a solo speed-metal music project aimed at discovering whether it's possible to open source the music industry:

Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead made very high profile successes when they changed how they released some of their work, but they are high profile bands, built on the coat-tails of the traditional recording … Read more

Desktop Linux: You've got a long way to go, baby

Despite the success of Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, in ultraportable netbooks, Ars Technica is reporting that Linux netbooks have a dramatically higher return rate than Windows-based netbooks, and for some very good reasons.

Ranging from "It's not Windows" to hardware compatibility problems, Linux netbooks are off to a rocky start. True, as Novell's Nat Friedman tells Ars Technica, it was to be expected that there would be "some hiccups on what is essentially the first large-scale consumer rollout of Linux desktops to new Linux users." That these are new Linux users is in and … Read more

Wikipedia drops Red Hat for Ubuntu

What's that sucking sound? It's the sound of money leaving the open-source ecosystem as Wikimedia, the organization behind the popular Wikipedia, has opted to dump its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployment for unsupported Ubuntu, as The Register reports. Yes, Wikimedia could get support for Ubuntu, but it has elected not to do so.

With 350 servers, I'm sure Red Hat wasn't ecstatic to lose Wikimedia as a customer. That said, it was just a matter of time:

Right now, Wikimedia is using custom Ubuntu versions that have its own software configuration tools. Carr said Wikimedia … Read more

Ubuntu misses Stallman's cloud-computing rant

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman recently went on a tirade against software as a service (SaaS), suggesting that consumers of SaaS are "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Apparently, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, missed Stallman's memo, because it's advertising for a Salesforce.com developer to help it manage its proprietary (gasp!), SaaS (gasp!) CRM system.

Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies also use Salesforce. Are they bad? Are they putty in the hands of Salesforce? Maybe. But they're also companies that need to … Read more

Gentoo's decline: A case of missing leadership (or rising Ubuntu?)

It's easy to notice when an open-source project is rocking. Downloads go up, web chatter blazes brightly, and the media swoons.

It's much harder to notice a void, but that is precisely what James Bellenger has done in his "The Decline Of Gentoo Linux" post. Gentoo used to be hot. Back in 2004 Gentoo's developer base consisted of a small but vocal crowd that touted the distribution's infinite customizability. Gentoo was the "real man's" (or woman's) Linux distribution.

A few years later, you rarely hear anyone talking about Gentoo, and developer attrition has been significant:

What happened? According to Bellenger, the departure of Gentoo's project lead, Daniel Robbins, effectively killed the project:

The most interesting thing about the current state of gentoo is that it's a very clear (and well documented) example of how the success of a large open source project, regardless of the personal devotion of its user base, is tightly coupled to the strength of its leadership. Interesting also that despite the projects strong attraction of "power users", the community has been unable to convert these users into active developers.

Robbins has tried to make a come back, but to no avail.

Despite Bellenger's thesis, it's not clear that Gentoo would have had much of a chance against Ubuntu, anyway, which has consumed much of the Linux desktop attention in the past few years, as a review of Google Trends suggests:… Read more

Red Hat is the top Linux kernel contributor, but what about Canonical?

No surprise, but Red Hat remains the top corporate Linux kernel contributor, as reported by SDTimes. As I've reported before, Red Hat is the top Linux contributor by a wide margin, with IBM, the next biggest corporate contributor, coming in nearly seven percentage points behind Red Hat.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Novell employee and prominent Linux kernel developer, recently called out Red Hat's contributions (good) but has taken far too much time to criticize Canonical, creator of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, and its apparent dearth of contributions (not-so-good).

Mark Shuttleworth defends Canonical's contributions to Linux, and I … Read more