Software Free

A distribution occupies a very specific niche in the free software ecosystem. Among other things, we need to accept some responsibility for ALL the software defects (”bugs”) that users actually experience across the entire stack. Most users don’t install their apps from upstream source tarballs, they install them from the packages provided by their distribution.

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The life of South African Mark Shuttleworth has been a kind of geek dream: found and sell Internet company for $500+ million in mid-20s; spend $20 million to become the second space tourist; and create a GNU/Linux distribution with a cool name that has become the most popular on the desktop.

Rarely does one find the proprietor of a company that is closely connected to any kind of software getting on mailing lists to try to correct public perceptions of his product. In that respect, Mark Shuttleworth stands apart from all his peers.

On LWN.net.

"You would think that a GNU/Linux distribution dedicated to shipping only free software would be uncontroversial. After all, isn't free software what GNU/Linux is all about? Yet, when the latest version of GNewSense was announced recently, Slashdot readers were divided in their reactions..."

"There is nothing new in what is being done with the netbook remix. It is not an edition of Ubuntu. It is not even a real "finished product"[...]There is no intentions to put proprietary codecs into standard Ubuntu - that would be against our stated principles."

The Canonical OEM team has been approached by a number of OEM’s who want to sell netbooks (small, low-cost laptops with an emphasis on the web) based on Ubuntu. Almost universally, they’ve asked for standard Ubuntu packages and updates, with an app launcher that’s more suited to new users and has the feeling of a “device” more than a PC.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Shuttleworth Foundation has sent out a press relase explaining what it believes is wrong with OOXML as a standard, and stating its conviction that the the South Africa Bureau of Standards has a strong case for appeal.

"Achieving synchronization on the scale that Shuttleworth desires would require some open-source software projects to radically change their current development models and adopt a new approach that isn't going to be viable for many projects."

An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS.

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Mark Shuttleworth writes about another advantage that free software sets enjoys over monolithic, proprietary code collections:

An update on the long term plans for Ubuntu release management. 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. To the best of my knowledge there has never been an “enterprise platform” release delivered exactly on schedule, to the day, in any proprietary or Linux OS. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. Kudos to the technical decision-makers, the release managers, and the whole community who aligned our efforts with that goal.

As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010.

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Source: open...

New comers to Linux sometimes think that Ubuntu sprang forth from Linux as a totally new creation, the next generation of Linux. Old-hands at Linux know better. Now, Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, sets the story straight for those to whom Ubuntu 8.04 is the be-all and end-all of Linux.

The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive, has said AGPL is "a strong candidate" for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical's developer collaboration tool.

The public perception of open source software is changing fast, said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads distribution of the Ubuntu operating system (OS).
A new version of Ubuntu, a version of the Linux OS, is released on Thursday.