Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu

It's impossible to know what the future holds, but it's very possible to know what you might be personally interested in. So after Thawte, I spent some time setting up the [Shuttleworth] Foundation and some time setting up the [HBD] Venture Capital group, which I wasn't going to run personally, but which I thought was a good thing to have, and put a team in place to do that.

And then I thought: what are the most interesting challenges out there, what are the opportunities that I'm sort of uniquely positioned to do? And the opportunity to go to Russia and train there and then fly was the opportunity that I chose.

After that, it was more difficult. There were three things that I was looking at. Each of them was exploring the impact of the Internet in society and in commerce, but in different ways. And of all of them, [Ubuntu] is the project I thought was the most interesting, the most difficult, the biggest scale project. And ultimately, if we succeed, the one that will have the biggest impact. So I took this one on.

You could always run Ubuntu on a server; there was never a significant reason not to. That body of users has now reached a critical mass on the server, and so our server work is now more responding to that than a shift in strategy. We continue to make the desktop our labor of love, the server requires a very enterprise-oriented approach. We've built out a dedicated team that just handles that. We haven't re-assigned people who are desktop specialists and asked them to test a server.

Companies don't like to introduce arbitrary diversity in technology. Everybody has heterogeneous systems, but they don't like to make that situation worse without a very good reason for it. Ubuntu is a very good server for certain use-cases now, just like Ubuntu is a very good desktop for certain use-cases. Our challenge over the next couple of years is just to broaden the base to which it appeals on both fronts.

On the server, it's very much a question of taking time to build the portfolio of relationships with other vendors. There are a lot of applications - what we call solutions - which are now free software-based: standard web-serving, mail-serving and so on. Ubuntu does very well for those. Increasingly, the challenge for us now is to build out the portfolio of non-free software certifications, everything from Oracle through SAP and thousands and thousands of pieces in between. That will take time; it's not something we can achieve overnight.

The business model of the proprietary software industry is licensing software to new customers or updates of software to existing customers. You make money when you have a new version. So there's an imperative both to release new versions and to have a whole bunch of new features in those versions, specific features that you articulate in advance.

In the free software world, we don't have that to cloud our thinking. We accept that development goes at the pace that it goes. If we operate on a basis that we only integrate new features into the platform when we consider them ready, then we can effectively release the platform at any time. When you look at the world though those glasses, it makes sense then to articulate not that you'll ship the product when you have certain features, but you'll ship it at a certain time. That's actually really useful to all of your users, because they can plan for a particular time. This wasn't our stroke of genius: GNOME was the one that really championed this idea.

We took the fairly radical step of saying we could do that across the whole ecosystem. The reason that is radical is because when you're one project, you can make decisions for yourself. But obviously as Ubuntu, we aggregate everyone from the Linux kernel to the GNOME project through the Firefox web browser and the Apache web server, and a ton of stuff in between. So people said: "How on earth will you tell them when to ship their stuff so that you can ship what you want?"

We've simply taken the view that we have a very carefully-managed release process, and a new version from one of those projects just doesn't get in unless it's ready at the time it needs to be ready for us to have confidence that it can be integrated and tested.

What this has really done is it's separated, very elegantly, the processes associated with R&D, which is focused on what new features we're going to develop, and how to manage that, which is very difficult to put on a particular schedule, from the process of integration, testing and distribution.

Now, if I look at a company like Oracle or Microsoft, they have both of those responsibilities. So you end up in this horrible situation where they start saying now: "you'll have the next generation file system in this version and it'll ship on that date." And then reality intervenes, and that puts them in a very awkward situation. We just don't have that.

To come back to the original idea, we try to understand what's the essential difference between the way we produce software and the way other people produce software, and what becomes possible because of that, that wasn't possible before, both economically and technologically. That's really what Ubuntu's all about. We want to express fully the real nature of free software, as a true commercial, economic entity in its own right.

There are commercial interests that might block it. It will be interesting to see if the other commercial distributions are nervous to put themselves in a situation where they really are being compared, apples to apples. We'll see.

You can go from a hundred instances in the cloud to a hundred thousand instances in the cloud and legally pay Canonical no more money. You will probably want to have some sort of support relationship with us, but that's entirely separate from the actual licensing of the platform, and it's not required in any way. We cut a deal to support you in the way that you need support.

So, economically on the server side that's a very big winner, and Ubuntu is seeing a lot of adoption and traction there. You also want something that can be shrunk down so that in your cloud server you only have the pieces which you really need. Every extra piece is an extra piece of disk space that's not being used; it's an extra piece of memory that's not being used. It's an extra thing that can have a security issue that's not being used. And so you may as well get rid of it. Ubuntu's very modular - probably the most modular of the commercial platforms; this comes from our Debian heritage.

On the client side, for cloud computing you really want something that "speaks the Internet", and does so very well and very securely, and speaks the web very well and very securely. Ubuntu running Firefox is a really compelling option there.

So I think there's a good chance that the next YouTube is running in the cloud and running on Ubuntu.

We work with those vendors to help them understand that in fact it's to their advantage to make their source code open source. They will get much better quality. We have real examples of this. We have much better quality drivers with much better reliability that make their hardware more attractive to a bigger portion of the market.

But we are willing to put in drivers that are not yet open source, because we figure it's more important to give everybody's grandma the opportunity to actually run free software applications on a free software environment, even if they need some proprietary drivers to get their hardware going. That puts us squarely in the pragmatist camp rather than the purist camp.

Gobuntu is an attempt to create a version of Ubuntu that does away with that, but also that is specifically designed to be a platform where other ideas about Copyleft can be explored - this meme about collaborative creation of something is extremely powerful and software is just the tip of the iceberg - we've already seen Wikipedia. I think every industry is going to need to adjust its thinking to say: "How can this participative computing phenomenon energize us?"

Gobuntu aimed to do that. People didn't really flock to it, so I think we will stop doing Gobuntu. People liked the idea, but not the people who would actually invest their time in it. I think it's too closely associated with Ubuntu. There's another one called gNewSense, which is exactly the same - Ubuntu with all the non-free stuff taken out. But because it's a separate organization, people feel more comfortable participating there. I don't mind, really.

Since then, KDE has also embraced the idea of usability as a primary driver, and they've done some really interesting things on the technology front. I keep a level of awareness of KDE, and I run KDE at home just to make sure I have a sense of where it's going and how it is doing. I like the rivalry. We might [switch]; it's good to have that option.

As for patents in software, I think society does a very bad deal when it gives someone a monopoly in exchange for nothing. The traditional patent deal was you gave someone a monopoly in exchange for disclosure of a trade secret. You can't really have trade secrets in software.

Of course, the entrenched interests like to frame this as "patents are all about innovation", when they really aren't. There's very strong, academic, peer-reviewed research that suggests that patents stifle the pace of change and innovation.

The real insight with patents is that what society is buying with that monopoly is disclosure. And so the real benefit to society is accelerated disclosure of new ideas - not convincing people to invest. People have ideas all the time. You can't stop the human mind from innovating. People do research and development to win customers, that's what it's really about. It's not to file patents. So the entrenched patent holders really aren't doing much of a service to society when they articulate their position in very flawed terms.

With regard to GNOME and Microsoft, I'm not concerned. My view is that to win, you have to have your own vision. You have to have a very clear idea of what you can deliver that's unique. You can't go around sort of chasing someone else's coat tails. So while I respect the people in the free software community who invest a lot of time in making compatible implementations of other people's technology, I don't think that's the real recipe for success for free software. We have to give people a reason to use our platform for itself, not because it's a cheap version of someone else's.

And in fact, the real successes of free software have been the places where it has just blown away the alternatives. The Internet runs on free software, and not because it has copied anything from Microsoft. The proprietary software guys like to accuse free software of not innovating and not doing anything other than sort of walking down the same path that they've already walked, which is always easier. That's just not true, but guys like the Mono Project are reinforcing that stereotype.

As to the other things that I do for the project, they will have to find someone else to step into my shoes. You know, there's a lot of good talent, and both technically and commercially and socially. I think the project would continue.