Ubuntu: where to from here?

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 22 October 2007 22:43

Opinion and Analysis

In business, as in many other things in life, it is relatively easy to plan for failure. I guess we all do it in some small way, one of the most common being the way people back up their digital personal files to guard against hardware failure or file corruption. But how does one plan for success?
In October 2004, when Canonical, the company owned by former Debian developer and one-time astronaut Mark Shuttleworth, released the first version of Ubuntu - 4.10 aka Warty Warthog - nobody would have given the new distribution much chance of becoming the most widely used Linux around.

And even when Ubuntu - and its cousins Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu - grew in popularity, many were not convinced that the polls would continue to bring good news on user numbers.

But three years later, Ubuntu is more widely known than ever. The reason why it is still number one among distributions is evident in the seventh release, Gutsy Gibbon. The word that I would employ to best describe it is slick - the interface is nice (even though the brown colour doesn't go down well with me) and things, for the most part, do work well.

But even as Shuttleworth sits back to contemplate three satisfactory years of funding a project which has grown beyond anyone's dreams, there must also be a thought nagging him: where to from here?

At some stage, Ubuntu has to become a self-supporting project. Shuttleworth is a wealthy businessman but nobody can keep pouring money into a project without seeing some end in sight, a stage when things start looking after themselves. In other words, a project that can balance its own books. It doesn't have to be a profit-making enterprise, it can just be a non-profit, as long as the developers' needs are met.

Some progress has been made towards paying the bills: Ubuntu is now sold on Dell machines in the United States. It is also sold by other much smaller companies in a number of other countries, with Canonical providing the commercial support. But this is chicken feed considered to what is needed to sustain such a project.

It seems evident that Ubuntu will have to undergo some changes if further inroads are to be made. There will have to be a point where one has to make a decision - do we include proprietary software as part of the regular distribution or not?

The lacunae in Ubuntu become most apparent when one tries to use the live CD on a laptop. The lack of wireless drivers for Linux is well-known; when a distribution that is fine in most respects omits the means to connect to the internet via a common wireless card, then the chances of adoption drop dramatically.

The difference can be noticed when one uses the Mandriva 2008 live CD on the same laptop; along the way, the user is given the chance to copy drivers from a Windows partition. The lack of proper Linux drivers is acknowledged and a solution - which may not be everyone's taste, true - is provided. PCLinuxOS takes a similar approach though in this case one needs another device, a floppy drive most likely, from where one can load the drivers.