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Ubuntu? Not for me, thanks

by Sam Varghese

Friday, 09 February 2007

Page 3 of 3

Some developers work across both projects; Ubuntu pays developers to work on the distribution. Hence people involved in both projects sometimes have to deal with accusations that their work for Ubuntu takes precedence over their work for Debian. To add to the mix, a pilot set up by the Debian project leader, Anthony Towns, to pay some Debian developers in the hope that release targets would be met - Debian etch or version 4.0 was supposed to be released on December 4 last year - did not quite work out and etch is still in the works.

I think the entire Ubuntu phenomenon is one big marketing campaign. What better way is there to position an operating system than as being free for everybody? Canonical has always stated that it will accept paid support contracts for Ubuntu, so there is a financial angle to Ubuntu as well and always has been. The marketing has been slick and smarmy and such things have never sat well with me.

(Not that the goal of making money off GNU/Linux is to be frowned at - Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Slackware, etc are all about making money from providing GNU/Linux. Nobody is in the GNU/Linux business to smell the roses - one may make a little less than if one were working for Microsoft but there is a feeling of having earned one's wages for doing a good job.)

To a large extent, Ubuntu's marketing campaign has worked. Ubuntu has picked the right base - Debian unstable. The man who owns Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, Mark Shuttleworth, has plenty of funds from his previous ventures and can afford to spend a lot more until things come to the stage where support contracts begin to start balancing the books. And with many people predicting that, given the resistance to Windows Vista, GNU/Linux has a timeframe of about two years to edge its way on to the business and home desktop in fairly significant numbers, the deal with Linspire comes at about the right time.

Shuttleworth was once a Debian developer so he probably knows the good and bad points of that project better than most. He has certainly used his knowledge to bring Ubuntu to the verge of being the number one distribution in terms of seats. On the way, he has shown he is prepared to be an opportunist as when he issued an invitation to SUSE Linux developers to jump ship at a time when there was dissatisfaction over the deal which Novell, the parent company of SUSE, signed with Microsoft.

The bad blood between Debian and Ubuntu isn't good for the growth of GNU/Linux as a whole. Taking from the community is fine as long as one gives back as much as one takes - and not merely in the form of wages for Debian developers. Maybe I'm a prude, but I've never been one for the big marketing campaigns. I'll continue to stick with Debian. And my live CD of choice continues to be Klaus Knopper's Knoppix - polished and one which I've found to never fail.{moscomment}

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