Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 7, 2006 14:16 UTC (Sat) by richo123 (guest, #24309)
Parent article: Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu (ZDNet)

I have used all the Ubuntu releases since warty and been involved in the community from then as well. A few observations

1) My impression is that Shuttleworth IS serious about taking on Microsoft. The number 1 bug on their bugzilla is humorously listed as "Microsoft market dominance". Despite the humor I think the target is clear.

2) The principal effort to date by developers has been to ease the life of end-users by a) polishing and polishing the desktop and device support b) improving the boot process c) building a large helpful community. This together with the huge amount of cleverly engineered hype is aimed at increasing general acceptance amoung consumers and small businesses of Linux with Ubuntu as it's public face. Giving it away free fits in with this as well as does the 6 month release cycle because linux is rapidly maturing.

3) Open Source Software takes a while to catch up with it's proprietary equivalent but when it does it is at least as good because it has iterated through so many users/bug reporters. I used to use Windows until 2001 but am quite happy now with the large range of rapidly maturing open source apps available now. It appears that Shuttleworth has timed his run so that this helps Ubuntu. After all having powerful, bug free and gratis apps is a strong selling point.

In the last year my whole family has switched away from Windows because of the problems with malware. I only get the occasional complaint about a website not working with firefox. A couple of years ago I was constantly tearing my hair out with linux solving network and systems problems. This happens infrequently now.

The long term trend is clear....

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Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 9:17 UTC (Wed) by jfj (guest, #37917) [Link]

Shuttleworth should probably give money to Debian.

OK. We know that Debian people are volunteers with a vision. But when you are doing volunteer work and then somebody uses your work to make a -very big- profit, then this feels unfair. That in effect is the best way to kill voluntarism. The fact that you do something for free, does NOT mean that you don't want/need money.

So while the general perception is that Shuttleworth is doing good to linux, it actually indirectly harms debian, which is one of the few distributions controled by the community left (along with Gentoo).

Humble opinion, of course.

Canonical seeks profit from free Ubuntu (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 13, 2006 0:53 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

What would Debian do with the money? They have plenty to support their hardware, and many of the developers have made it clear that using Debian money to pay for Debian development is unacceptable.