Shuttleworth: There's more to Linux development than kernel hacks
As I've noted before, there is more to open-source development than lines of code written, important though that activity is. There is, for example, the critical work done by Canonical, the company behind the ubiquitous Ubuntu Linux distribution, which tends to involve more ease-of-use development than core kernel development.
Canonical CEO and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth highlights this "secondary" development in an Ubuntu Open Week interview, reported by Ars Technica. Arguing that "Ubuntu and Canonical are making a very big difference in free software, and that has little to do with how many patches in the kernel have an @canonical.com e-mail address associated with them," Shuttleworth points out two key areas in which his Canonical team is improving the Linux experience:
- Launchpad, a Web-based collaborative development platform. Launchpad breaks new ground in open-source development, and is a valuable contribution to Linux;
- Design and usability. Canonical has been hiring usability and design experts to feed improvements to the "upstream" Linux community. It is hard to overstate how important this work could prove to be to consumer Linux adoption.
We need more than just the Linux code jockeys to make it a viable, growing community and project. In fact, we're probably at the point where these "tertiary" contributions to Linux will make a bigger difference than core Linux engineering as we seek to make Linux mainstream for consumers.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Canonical adds very little to Linux in every area.
Ubuntu is years behind the cutting edge distros and is one of the more clunky ones. It is not even close in terms of contribution, ease of use, development tools, or anything else.
Ubuntu merely groups up packages, ties an ugly brown wrapper around it and tosses it out the door. They are not in the same league as Novel or Red Hat.
I still have the box for SuSE 8.2 somewhere but the quality has suffered in recent years.
Red Hat though? More difficult to configure in places but absolutely industrial strength.
Ubuntu is the MS of Linux, in every way, including lack of QA.
Are you seriously sticking your foot in your mouth to make such an unwarranted base criticism? Launchpad may be lacking in features compared to some of its more mature counterparts, but one would expect that from a young project. Regarding your commentary on the posts author, perhaps Matt was already aware when writing this that Launchpad has a number of parts already opened and is scheduled to be fully open source in a little over a year (allowing time first for Canonical to ensure a stable source of revenue for LP's developers)?
First be educated on the topic... then speak.
Reference:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/07/23/mark-shuttleworth-launchpad-to-be-open-source-in-12-months
http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2007/08/ubuntu-innovations.html
I dont expect these people to use or care about Slackware and Gentoo so if they want to try Ubuntu because of the marketing, fine.
It could be worse, it could have been Xandros instead.
>Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas
Every company does the same thing I see: you ask for a raise and instead they give you something from pythonesque Department of Silly Titles.
http://www.workforce.com/wpmu/bizmgmt/2008/10/27/department_of_silly_titles/
- by Aus_Engineer November 11, 2008 4:04 PM PST
- "Many of the others, things are just broken. (Yes things are broken on Ubuntu - but to a lesser degree). "
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- by supercarrot November 11, 2008 8:41 PM PST
- I have just re-upgraded from Vista because it was more broken than Ubuntu. I thought let me try out Windows again after all these years. It was quite nice after a two day setup, then after a while started to go south. So what you are saying doesnt seem too work in practice. The current open source model does work. But it is only in the last few years that we have just seen effort being put into the end user experience. Instead of "You can write that in the terminal - nothing wrong with that" The terminal has its place surely, but it needs to be kept in its place. Ubuntu is placing the pressure and the focus right where I for one really want it right now. Pulling it all together and increasing the end user experience.
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(17 Comments)this is the problem, most , well all the linux distros are broken, none work in a slick and professional manner.
release times are too frequent, business models are flawed, there is no market trust in any distro, including Ubuntu.
mabey if all that brain power just worked on one distro, and made it good, fixed the crappy parts (most of it).
you would be able to compete, but as long as ego's are in play, and there is no focus on quality over qualtity, linux is doomed to failure.
It allready has failed, after 17 years its no better off than when it started. all its tried to be is a rip off of others work (UNIX, Windows) and its failed.
It is an abject failure, and thats bad, because it had potental, and i wonder how much better MS windows would be now if it had some competition on quality.
at the moment it does not, and i dont see any competition in the near future, LINUX is focused on quantity, and a vast nuber of distros, i have no idea why, MS just focus on ONE or a very small number of OS"s and make it work and make it quality.
dont you see which model is working and which is not, if you cant, MS is working and Linux is not. and if you cant tell that by now , you need to get out of the game.