Ubuntu gets the Remix right

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 12 June 2008 21:19

Opinion and Analysis

Even when the allegations are not exactly founded on fact, Shuttleworth retains his cool. Add to these variables, the fact that Shuttleworth shuns bizspeak when answering his critics through this medium and you can see why he enjoys rock-star-like status among a whole crowd of Linux users.

Shuttleworth's company Canonical is behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution and recently announced what it called a Ubuntu Notebook Remix which could be used on certain portable internet-centric devices. In the case of Ubuntu, this is aimed at devices which are built around Intel's Atom procesor. This, of course, is trying to follow in the footsteps of the eeePC which has enjoyed success beyond anybody's wildest dreams.

On a device like the eeePC, multimedia formats _have_ to be supported. Else you might as well try selling lemons. Given this, it is only reasonable that Canonical would partner with copanies like RealMedia and Fluendo to provide support for common media codecs.

The problem that arose is that this was interpreted to mean that Shuttleworth was cutting a deal with Microsoft. An extension of this argument is that Novell also cut a deal with Microsoft; ergo, Canonical is no better than Novell.

There was one person silly enough to post a message to one of the Ubuntu developers mailing lists, threatening to stop using Ubuntu if this was true i.e that Canonical had cut a deal with Microsoft. Mark Fink wrote: "I just read this article: http://boycottnovell.com/2008/06/07/ubuntu-remix-codecs/ I hope this is wrong or I will have to stop using ubuntu and find another distro to use. Such a shame... Hope you are all proud of yourselves."