I am fortunate to count Mark Shuttleworth as a good friend. He's the sort of person who is always genuine. I never get the sense that he's taking shortcuts with me or with the business that he's forming around Ubuntu (i.e., Canonical).
This authenticity in his personality is hugely important for an opportunity looming for him and for Canonical. Like a few big open-source projects and companies, Ubuntu sits at the nexus of various other open-source communities. Unlike perhaps any other, however, Ubuntu has Canonical, a company with a social purpose as much as a corporate purpose.
Herein lies the opportunity, as Mark implies in a conversation he had with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation:
...(It) seems to be that recognizing that enhancing the productivity of collaboration between different groups is a real way to boost the platform as a whole. And at Ubuntu we feel this very, very keenly because not only do we want to collaborate with other upstream projects like Apache or X or Open Office, but we also very much want to be part of and collaborate with Debian which is a very large project in its own right.
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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:
... Read moreTo 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.
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 for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom--including firmware, content and authoring infrastructure--to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don't belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds," Shuttleworth said.
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