Ubuntu 9.10: confidence riding high at Canonical

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 07:29

Opinion and Analysis

Right from 2004, Shuttleworth has shown the patience of the proverbial ox - and then some. He has even tolerated attempts to paint him as sexist by people in the open source community, people who appear to be jockeying for position.

And he is still plugging away to try and get releases coordinated with projects like Debian so that problems in the Ubuntu releases can be ironed out.

He is a shrewd businessman and, in many respects, exactly what Linux needs if it is to make bigger inroads as a desktop operating system.

As a company evolves, it needs different kinds of people in place to ensure growth. As tech journalist Robert X. Cringely once put it, there are commando types, infantry types and police types, and they are needed in that order.

The commandos make the first bold moves, the infantry secures those changes in place and the police then fuel growth by adding people and building economies and empires of scale.

Canonical is clearly in the third stage now. One characteristic of Shuttleworth is that he is a quiet operator; no-one can accuse the man of being flashy.

But then one cannot discount a man who was able to bank $US600 million before he kicked off this project, solely through his business and technical acumen.

People can talk about business models till they are blue in the face but every argument dies in the face of someone who has done it all and then come back for seconds.

The fact that Ubuntu lives at a .com domain and Canonical is registered in a known tax haven, the Isle of Man, are clear indications that Shuttleworth does not intend to keep having red ink on his hands. Those books will be balanced some time in the near future.

Five years after he did what many considered lunacy at the time - start a GNU/Linux distribution in 2004 - Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are set for takeoff. Perhaps the only mistake he made was in hiring the former GNOME media spokesman, Jeff Waugh, a self-publicity seeker. He must have been relieved when the man left.

But he has weathered several such small missteps to arrive at the point he is right now. Unless he does something really foolish, it is difficult to see Ubuntu going anywhere but up from here.