Ubuntu 9.10: confidence riding high at Canonical

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 07:29

Opinion and Analysis

There is a growing confidence evident in the Canonical camp as the countdown begins to October 29, the date for the official release of Ubuntu 9.10.
And there are reasons aplenty for this assertiveness - the company is set to unleash the best of all its releases to date. Karmic Koala will, much like its name, go a fair way to deciding the karma of the project.

The latest sign to indicate that the company thinks Ubuntu is now ready for prime time is the announcement that the programme to ship free CDs, ShipIt, will be scaled back.

Until the October 21 announcement by Canonical's chief operating officer Jane Silber, anyone who could not download an Ubuntu image could write or email the company ad request a free CD in the mail.

It was a useful way of spreading the word and increasing the use of the distribution. But it costs a penny and now, it appears, there is no longer any need to continue the scheme.

As with every marketing tactic, once it has either achieved its aim or outgrown its usefulness, ShipIt will be gradually thrown overboard.

Canonical does not choose names for its releases lightly. They may appear to be weird and attempts at alliteration, but such is not the case. The names convey the state of development of the project.

As the owner of the company, Mark Shuttleworth, explained to me last year, Warty Warthog, the first release, was going to have warts;  Dapper Drake - the first LTS release, was putting its best foot forward; Edgy Eft was playing rapid catch-up after Dapper, with its short cycle and new features, and Hardy Heron, the second LTS, was built to last.

After that came Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope and now Karmic Koala. Those adjectives tell us what the particular release was, or is, trying to achieve. In April next year will come Lucid Lynx, the next long-term support release.

Recent moves by Shuttleworth to market Ubuntu through IBM are again an indication of his cleverness at trying to embed Ubuntu in the desktop space. His competitors under-estimate him at their peril.

He must be more than encouraged by Microsoft's growing, often clumsy, attempts to gain traction in the open source space. The latest indication of Microsoft's realisation that lock-in may just do more harm than good to itself is the announcement that it will be releasing documentation on Outlook Personal Folders.

This must be music to Shuttleworth's ears. Five years ago, one could not imagine an 800-pound gorilla practising  anything but total lock-in.

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