Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 04 November 2008 04:27
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Not that this means Mandriva is following suit. It just means that being a public company is no assurance that everything is open and transparent. In other words, there is no downside to Canonical being a private company.
Williamson claims that Ubuntu has killed the market for GNU/Linux distributions for which people will pay money. He may be unaware that
people now have to buy codecs from Ubuntu in order to get full multimedia functionality, something the company announced about a month back.
Hence if you have two products, Mandriva and Ubuntu, both of which require payment, people will vote for the one they deem to be better. Here's a hint Williamson - the Debian packaging system and other Debian characteristics give Ubuntu the edge. Mandriva cannot compete.
If a better product is beating your own product, what reason do you have to grumble? Well, you can bitch that the man making the better product is indulging in unfair competition. That's a bit of a stretch but let's examine what Williamson has to say.
He starts off with a peculiar statement: "What Mr. Shuttleworth did with Canonical and Ubuntu was divebomb the distribution pool." I'm not sure what he means by that.
But further on, he gripes that it is unfair competition because Shuttleworth never had to take a business plan to a bank and ask for financing. After running a very successful business, Shuttleworth sold it and emerged as a billionaire. He is now using his own money to fund Canonical. And this, according to Williamson, gives him an unfair advantage. Bollocks.
Of course, the people at Mandriva may be "pretty, f******g pissed off" (Williamson's words) at the way Shuttleworth has gone in the last four years. Though the usage of Ubuntu cannot be measured, it is generally accepted that it is the most popular distribution. Canonical estimates that there are about eight million users.
