Ubuntu: A Universal Bond of Sharing

The answer, of course, is Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu, a Zulu word representing a belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity, gave the name to a new Debian-based Linux distribution, which very few people heard of as little as two weeks ago. Despite being a new kid on the block, Ubuntu has a potential to turn the Linux distribution world upside down and make rapid inroads into our minds, not to mention hard disks. The reason? Ubuntu Linux is the first distribution since LindowsOS that has serious capital behind it, a substantial financial backing from a wealthy open source advocate.

But let's start from the beginning. It is the late 1999 and we are in Cape Town, South Africa. A company called Thawte Consulting, the world's second largest provider of digital certificates, has just been sold to Verisign for $575 million. The name of the entrepreneur behind Thawte is Mark Shuttleworth, a young man who thus became a multi-millionaire just four years after he graduated from a university. The local press excitedly reported that Mark had paid bonuses of one million Rand (about $163,000 at the time) to every one of his employees, including those who had been with the company for a very short time.

Young and rich, Mark pursued some of his extravagant dreams as he became only the second space tourist when he visited the International Space Station on board of the Russian Soyuz shuttle in April 2002, in exchange for some $20 million. Part of his fortune was also channeled into more selfless projects, such as The Shuttleworth Foundation, established with a goal "to invest in projects that provide innovative solutions to educational challenges in an African context, focusing on maths, science, entrepreneurship and technology in education and open source." Note the magic words "open source" in the above statement. Then, earlier this year, he teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to launch Go Open Source, a massive campaign designed to increase the awareness of open source software solutions in South Africa. He also founded Canonical Limited, a Isle of Man-based company now funding the development of Ubuntu Linux.

According to the company's web site and some of the early interviews with its representatives, Canonical employs over 40 developers, most of them from GNOME, Debian and GNU Arch projects. Among them, one will find Sebastien Bacher (Debian GNOME packages), Carlos Perelló Marín (Debian PowerPC port), Nathaniel McCallum (Gentoo Linux), Dave Miller (Bugzilla), Martin Pitt (PostgreSQL packaging for Debian), Daniel Stone (Release Manager, FreeDesktop.org), Colin Watson (Debian QA and Debian installer), Jeff Waugh (GNOME Release Coordinator) and Matt Zimmerman (member of the Debian Security Team), just to name a few.

Besides being a free project (in both senses of the word) and the fact that the developers are getting paid for their work, what else is special about Ubuntu Linux? And why would an average Debian user consider switching to it? One of the most interesting attractions is the promise of regular stable releases in roughly 6 months' intervals. In fact, the distribution's versioning scheme is time-based, with version 4.10 representing October 2004, while the next stable release due in April 2005 will be version 5.04. All releases will be supported by the security team for 18 months after the release. Ubuntu's default desktop is GNOME, with much less attention to other desktops (KDE is available too, but only as an unsupported "universe" component). One other peculiarity, rarely seen in a distribution, is the fact that the superuser account is disabled by default. The first user created during the installation has administrative rights on the system, and can run programs as root with "sudo". Although it is easy enough to reset the root password, the default setup encourages good security practices. Ubuntu Linux currently supports three architectures: i386, ppc and x86_64.

It is important to realize that Ubuntu Linux is not trying to compete with Debian, and those Debian developers who now work on Ubuntu will continue with their Debian duties as usual. But an interesting debate is starting to revolve around the relationship between Ubuntu and other Debian-based projects, especially the ones with commercial interests, such as UserLinux or Progeny Componentized Linux. The three of them have a lot in common, with the goal of developing a commercially supported Debian-based Linux distribution. Bruce Perens of UserLinux has already indicated his readiness to meet with Mark Shuttleworth later this year and discuss issues of mutual interest. This would certainly benefit UserLinux, the development of which has been moving forward at a remarkably slow pace. Progeny's Ian Murdock might be interested in this meeting too. It really is hard to justify the existence of three projects with roughly similar goals, much overlapping work and a risk of further fragmentation in the market place. After all, it makes sense to combine resources if a small start-up intends to compete with the likes of Novell or Red Hat.

Whatever the outcome, it will be interesting to watch the development of Ubuntu Linux during the next few months. Will a Debian-based distribution finally break into enterprise, with an offer of a superior product, matching hardware and software support, certified by some by the major industry players, such as IBM or Oracle? With Ubuntu Linux on the table and Canonical Ltd behind it, hopes are higher than ever.