To me this sounds very much like the line, "if you don't do what I say, then I'll come to your house and slit my throat on your doorstep and you'll have an awful mess to clear up." But never mind, let the tale continue.

Fink was referring to the BoycottNovell.com site, which, as the name implies, was set up after Novell and Microsoft signed a patent deal in November 2006 which enabled Microsoft to spread plenty of FUD about alleged patent violations in Linux.

He got a bit of flak from some developers before Shuttleworth turned up to calm things down. He replied: "The recently-announced netbook remix is a prototype of the sort of platform that Canonical is working on with OEM's. Those OEM's (sic) almost always want to make sure that media is *legally* playable by the users who purchase their devices, and Canonical will gladly work with companies like Real Media or Fluendo to make sure that is possible. If you are an OEM you should be able to ship machines based on Ubuntu and not break the law, and if you are an individual user you should be able to purchase media codecs and not break the law. Those codecs include things like Flash, MP3-4, WMV, QuickTime and so on."

But what marks Shuttleworth out as different is what he said next. "That said, I will defend (again) the importance of being willing to work with Microsoft, under reasonable and transparent conditions, to further goals that we share, if the opportunity arises."

If people who had less street cred in the open source community had made a statement like this (and as Shuttleworth points out this is the second time that he has done so) they would have been burnt in effigy many times over. But Shuttleworth is different - he has proved that he is willing to respect the ideals of the FOSS community.

What one finds difficult to understand is the attitude of people like Fink. When will it sink into the head of people like this that nobody is developing free operating systems for users? There is one class of free operating system that is developed for the developers - Debian is a good example. If a lot of others happen to use it, good. If not, the process of development would not cease.