Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Mark Shuttleworth kicked off the business track of ApacheCon '06 with an introduction to Ubuntu, its ideals and how Canonical fits into the whole Open Source initiative.
Ubuntu is working at making a great product, with Canonical as the anchor-tenant providing quality assured support. It's a meritocratic dictatorship (possibly?) rather than a democracy : Canonical is about finding great people and publicising their works. Forks are actively encouraged, supporting the concept of genuine freedom and flexibility.
We're on a race to zero licensing fees, with Ubuntu merely being slightly ahead of the curve at its price tag. Certification and Standard compliance is gradually coming, as is internationalisation and localisation. This is a slow process, but is starting to happen.
We're still limited as we won't ship non-free software, so until things like Harmony happen, there's a limited amount for support for things like a J2EE environment, etc.
Try to stay close to upstream distributions, so we're facing the same issues at the same time. This means that bugs can be fixed once and once only. Work is published early and often, so feedback can be gathered. Services like launchpad.net allow work to be submitted, tracked and ensure there's the best chance of finding, tracking and solving bugs in the right place. If this means pushing materials upstream, and that's the right thing to do, launchpad makes that easy (or at least trackable and manageable.)
Ubuntu supports rebranding. People like to take a product and 'own' it - this means that we might see Ubuntu in lots of countries in the future, but it might be called something other than Ubuntu. There's already a family of distributions, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, etc. Many more are envisaged.
Getting involved is what it's all about.
Dapper is the first release with a guaranteed support, including commitment financially that support will continue even if Canonical shuts down. Three years on the desktop and five years on server distributions means that Ubuntu is being put forward as enterprise ready.
Ubuntu is going from strength to strength. Pretty much every hand in the room went up when Mark asked who used or had used the distro. Serious financial committment to support over 3 and 5 years respectively means that there's no reason for industry to be scared that they'll be left with a broken infrastructure and no support. We just need to keep making sure that Bug #1 remains the top priority.
posted at: 11:21 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
