Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 06 March 2008 20:46

Opinion and Analysis

Shuttleworth recently went on the record with his take on Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET application; there are fears that Mono may create a minefield for patent suits. Shuttleworth's take is that "the real patent risk to free software, in my view, is not a large-scale industry participant like SONY or IBM or Microsoft, instead it is a small, hard-to-identify patent holder who does not actually need to get products out the door. We cannot live in fear of that threat, we can only respond to it as an when it arises."
Mono is now part of the default install of Ubuntu simply because it is part of the default GNOME desktop; however, this insidious bit of software can be stripped it out in toto and one will only lose two pinprick applications, F-spot and TomBoy.

Shuttleworth appears to be busy on the networking front these days if the decisions by well-known vendors to start providing hardware loaded with Ubuntu are any indication. Dell started selling Ubuntu on some of its hardware last year and Acer has now started offering Ubuntu as well.

Canonical, the company which owns Ubuntu, is changing too; a year ago, Shuttleworth encouraged media queries to be sent to his own address; these days, understandably, the geek within him has to yield (reluctantly, I hope) to a more hierarchical system where someone else acts as the gatekeeper.

The grand-daddy of all technology writers, Robert X. Cringely, once made reference to the kinds of people one needs at different stages in the life of a technology company; likening the growth of such companies to military operations, Cringely wrote in his seminal work Accidental Empires that commando types, infantry types, and finally police types were needed in that order. The commandos made the first big bold moves, the infantry types secured those changes in place with some restructuring if necessary and the police types fuelled growth by adding people and building economies and empires of scale.

Using this analogy, one can theorise that Shuttleworth is now almost at the end of the second stage, the most difficult of the three. After that, comes the growth phase.

Shuttleworth has been walking a very difficult path in trying to make this project sustainable. Dealing with the FOSS community is not easy, dealing with developers less so. But given his background, he appears to have created some kind of happy medium for success. How he will handle that success, how he has planned for it, remains to be seen.

Ubuntu is not meant for users like me. I don't need it. An indication of the kind of user who needs Ubuntu can be gauged by perusing the Brainstorm site which Canonical set up recently to invite ideas for incorporation into Ubuntu. My reading of it is that a majority are people who would like to first experiment with Ubuntu as a replacement for Windows and then, once they are satisfied, invest in hardware which comes loaded with the operating system.

Even though I have no need for Ubuntu, many others do and there is certainly space in my universe for all these users. That's why I would like to see the Ubuntu project succeed if only because some people in the non-Linux world will then be able to eat cake, rather than stale bread. (And I hope I don't have to explain that one!)