The Open Road

Microsoft's hegemony depends upon two cash cows: Windows and Office. Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has his sights firmly set on Windows, and has both the means, the chutzpah, and the community to credibly commandeer an assault on Fortress Redmond, as suggested by Ashlee Vance in The New York Times over the weekend.

Others have tried to beat Microsoft at its own game and have failed miserably. The difference with Shuttleworth, however, is that he's not necessarily trying to beat Microsoft at its game. He's hoping to "fundamentally change the operating system market," something that might wrong-foot Microsoft and give Ubuntu a fighting chance.

There are signs that Ubuntu is already stealing a march on Microsoft, as noted in the article:

• Roughly half of Google's 20,000 employees run a version of Ubuntu. With this crowd of early adopters standing behind Ubuntu, a crowd with a massive profit machine behind them, anything can happen;
• IDC estimates that 11 percent of American businesses have systems based on Ubuntu, with even broader penetration likely in Europe and elsewhere;
• Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is approaching $30 million in annual revenue, which may seem like a gnat on Microsoft's bison-esque backside, but this revenue represents multi-million dollar commitments from Dell, IBM, and other large parties with an interest in unshackling themselves from Microsoft. In other words, the nature of the revenue is more telling than the amount;
• Ubuntu commands the fealty of tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers globally, despite Canonical only employing 200 or so employees. Ubuntu has leverage well beyond its means.

So, game on. However, the big test for Ubuntu will be whether it's prepared to make some concessions to business reality in order to succeed. I've talked at length with Shuttleworth on this topic and, while I remain convinced that he has his community's best interests at heart, I believe that Ubuntu's community is going to need to mature beyond the "free as in beer and freedom" mentality to also include "free as in market and profit."

Those that think that there is some fundamentally new way to make money with the Web and open source haven't been paying attention. There are certainly new ways to distribute software and associated services, but whether in the cloud or on the desktop, there's always some element of control, and that control may jar the faithful.

The big question is how Ubuntu will make its money as it goes from $30 million to $300 million. If it can find a credible cloud strategy that separates desktop development from revenue development (cloud), Shuttleworth will have managed to accomplish the nearly impossible: making gobs of money without upsetting his community. If anyone can, he can. But don't be foolish enough to believe it's going to be painless.

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:

1. Launchpad, a Web-based collaborative development platform. Launchpad breaks new ground in open-source development, and is a valuable contribution to Linux;
2. 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.

Tim O'Reilly recently defended his decision to put a political endorsement on his blog (spoiler for those who don't know how Sonoma County votes: He's for Obama), and did a reasonably good job of supporting the decision. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, however, does a much better job in a post of his own.

Mark's secret? Stick to principles, not parties.

Mark doesn't talk about politics at all, per se, though they're hiding just behind his words. Instead, he talks about the value of regulated capitalism, and gives testimony of his time living in post-Soviet Russia as a reason for believing in capitalism...but not unfettered capitalism:

The leaders and decision makers in a centrally planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one--they would probably be the same people! But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy--state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail. And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse. It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant. The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly. Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.

But I chose my words carefully when I said "regulated capitalism". I used to be a fan of Adam Smith's invisible hand, and great admirer of Ayn Rand's vision. Now, I feel differently. Left to its own devices, the market will tend to reinforce the position of those who were successful in the past, at the exclusion of those who might create future successes. We see evidence of this all the time. The heavyweights that define an industry tend to do everything in their power to prevent innovation from changing the rules that enrich them.

Mark then goes on to explain the attributes of successful regulators. It's well worth reading, and serves as a poignant reminder of how to get involved in politics without getting political.

I don't fault Tim for wanting to get the vote out in behalf of his preferred candidate. But I think public figures like Tim and Mark have a duty to use their influence with caution and care, and I think Mark's promotion of right principles is a better way than Tim's declaration of right candidates.

It's one thing to talk about open-source software like Linux becoming easy to use and a joy to look at, but it's quite another to actually fund the development of such improvements. Mark Shuttleworth has talked a lot recently about desktop Linux becoming as easy and beautiful as Mac OS X. Now he's ready to fund the talk.

In his introduction to the next Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope, Shuttleworth hints at a vision of Ubuntu's "once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine," and he says, "we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open-source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu." Jono Bacon, community manager for Ubuntu, puts a little substance behind Shuttleworth's suggestion, outlining how Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will help guide sponsorship dollars to developers that want to improve Ubuntu.

But it is in this blog entry by Shuttleworth that Canonical's ambition takes its fullest shape:

...Canonical is [increasingly] in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can't imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.

And so it begins. To date, Novell has been the primary "upstream" contributor to the Linux desktop, though Red Hat and others have also been involved. Unfortunately, these participants have primarily been concerned with the enterprise Linux desktop, which is more utilitarian in its ambition than what I suspect Shuttleworth has in mind.

The Mac has carved its way into the enterprise because it has created devout consumer evangelists who insist upon bringing its aesthetics and utility into the enterprise. For desktop Linux to succeed, it must become much more enjoyable to use. People must want to use it.

Shuttleworth understands this. This is the right step for Canonical. Some open-source developers see aesthetic beauty as a nice complement to the Linux desktop. It's not. It is core, at least if the Linux desktop is to have a prayer of going mainstream.

Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Asay Skiing Las Lenas

(Credit: Matt Asay)

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.

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:

"It's very easy to declare victory," says Mr. Shuttleworth, describing the smug attitude of some open-source supporters....Ubuntu's aim is not to conquer the software establishment and replace its products. Rather than seeing open-source software as one of two competing ideologies and focusing on the struggle, Ubuntu thinks about the user....Taking the hassle out of open source is intended to move adoption beyond politically motivated enthusiasts and encourage mass adoption of the software on its merits

All of which makes Mark's recent suggestion that Linux desktop developers not seek to clone Windows and Mac OS X, but instead to surpass them all the more interesting. Mark has been remarkably consistent in urging the open-source world to innovate, not replicate.

It's why I think Mark will win, rather than simply squeak out a great facsimile of winning.

That said, I'm still planning to leave his snowboarding tail in my skiing wake. Sorry, Mark. No idealism on the slopes. :-)

For as long as some have been talking about "The Year of the Linux Desktop," I've been hearing the same thing about "The Year of Embedded Linux." My first open-source company was Lineo, an embedded-Linux vendor. I used to preach the gospel of embedded/mobile Linux.

But its "year" never came. As with Godot, we're always waiting for Linux to own mobile and to own the desktop. And despite Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin preaching that embedded Linux's time has come, I've become a bit too jaded to lend much credence to the next big announcement about how it's really, truly, definitely here this time.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, however, may have finally cracked the code.

Mark's Ubuntu is making serious in-roads with the mobile market by helping to define and drive an entirely new class of device, the ultra-portable/sub-notebook. In this market, Mark isn't introduced in trying to steal market share from Novell and Red Hat; rather, he is attempting to create new market opportunities for all.

I suspect he'll succeed. Mark doesn't gloss over Linux's traditional UI problems. He doesn't kid himself that if he builds it, people will flock to use Ubuntu Linux for mobile devices or anywhere else. He expects to have to earn business based on a superior product, and not merely a superior development model.

There are a number of interesting tidbits floating around the web this morning. Among the best:

• The VAR Guy compares Google's impressive growth against Microsoft's and comes to this conclusion: "[S]orry, Microsoft bashers: The software giant isn't collapsing." Potty.
• Flock raised another $15 million in a Series D round. Why is anyone still funding this paltry Firefox feature? Flock claims that it gets paid for search placement, but given its niche following, who cares?
• The Guardian spoke with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth about a wide range of things, from how he hires to the changing desktop market. On this latter point, Mark said, "[P]eople are increasingly defining the desktop as the thing that they get access to the internet from. In that case, there's a real possibility that we're able to shift people onto different platforms." Like Ubuntu, of course.
... Read more

Mark Shuttleworth offers some interesting insight into the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. Two negatives may make a positive in multiplication, but they don't in mergers and acquisitions, as Mark points out:

The Microsoft and Yahoo thing is fascinating. I think the ad game is lost. So, Microsoft buying Yahoo! now on search? Come on. Two failing operators will just continue to decline together. On search, I think it's totally a waste of time....

So, for Microsoft, this deal is all about flailing. For them to succeed in that next generation game, they will need to have a vision that is better than Yahoo!'s vision, which is better than Google's vision, and they need to execute it.

Not that Mark expects them to pull it off: