Ubuntu Conference: The Mataró Sessions

The Ubuntu Conference was already in full swing by the time I arrived, late last Friday. Canonical employs thirty-seven people, located in twelve countries, and most of them are here in Mataró. For some this is their first chance to meet and talk to fellow developers face to face. The entire conference has been a series of workshops, BOFs and hack sessions all revolving around Ubuntu, LaunchPad and the various components of LaunchPad. A few visitors have joined in here and there, but only the sessions last Saturday were targeted to visitors. Presentations have mostly been in English, although Saturday's sessions were translated into Spanish and Catalan for the benefit of the many Spanish visitors. People drift in and out, but over all attendance averages around fifty people, and at least double that on Saturday.

The conference is located at the Hotel NH Ciutat de Mataró, also home for most of the Canonical staff and your LWN editor. A typical day starts out with a buffet breakfast in the hotel dining room. All Canonical staff meet in the main conference room at 9:00 AM before breaking into smaller groups to talk about and hack on the various projects. The hotel provides a pack lunch so people can munch and continue working. By around 8 or 9 PM it's time to head for dinner at one of the many restaurants in Mataró. This is also done in smaller groups as some continue hacking until late and some go looking for different types of food. Mataró is on the Mediterranean coast so the weather is mild. Natives wear coats and scarves and hats, but those of us from more northerly climes find it pleasant with no more light a jacket even late at night.

Canonical projects underway here at the conference include Ubuntu and the upcoming Hoary Hedgehog release, the proposed KDE version called Kubuntu and the application suite LaunchPad, with many a late night hack session devoted to one of the LaunchPad applications. For more on LaunchPad and its applications see Ubuntu Conference: The LaunchPad workshop. Briefly, the applications so far are the translation tool Rosetta, package manager Soyuz, version control system Bazaar, and bug tracker Malone.

I chatted with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth briefly on Wednesday over lunch and asked him how Canonical plans to make money. Ubuntu is free, and LaunchPad will be free to use, but Canonical does aim to make some money in support. Additionally, he hopes to get some government grants to build localized distributions. By using the still incomplete LaunchPad suite it will be easy to create distributions for a wide variety of the world's subcultures.

For now he keeps costs low by limiting the number of developers assigned to any particular project and by not having a centralized office, and enjoys Python hacking with his staff of talented developers. He also knows what he's willing to spend to make Canonical self-sustaining and how long that should take (though he did not share details with your editor). If it doesn't happen he'll pull the plug and move on. We're hoping that it does work out and Canonical will manage to survive, not only because Ubuntu is a nice distribution and quite stable on this laptop, but also because if LaunchPad can become the suite that Mark envisions, it could be as revolutionary as Linux itself. For now LaunchPad remains largely vaporware, with the exception of Rosetta, so it is too soon to tell if it can really live up to its potential, but with the team that Mark has put together it stands a good chance.

This is Rebecca Sobol reporting from Mataró Spain.

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