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"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar)
TechRadar has an interview with Samba hacker Jeremy Allison covering a few different topics, including some strong opinions about Ubuntu. While that opinion gets the headline, others, such as his take on Samba development, are also interesting. "We couldn't have done this if we'd tried to do it in a proprietary way — it simply wouldn't be what it is. You watch people who've tried to do stuff like Samba in a proprietary way, and all those products failed. Had we not invented Samba, somebody else would've invented it and they would've put us out of business."
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"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 1:40 UTC (Tue) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] Echoing a remark I've had in my .Sig.d collection for quite a while:If I had charged one dollar for Samba, it would have never been successful. The way I was doing stuff was not about money, and I am not at all resentful of companies that have made money from Samba. At the same time, if they all went away, we would still have a great community to work on stuff. I think of the last year or two as being the biggest private investment in public works in decades. -- Andrew Tridgell, c. 2001
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 4:19 UTC (Tue) by jamesmrh (guest, #31622) [Link]
Linux isn't already mainstream?
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 5:42 UTC (Tue) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]
Linux'es market-share on the desktop is few percent at best. That's not mainstream.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 10:28 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] Good thing the desktop is disappearing!;-)
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 16:41 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
I keep changing my mind.
Ok, let's say that Linux has 2-4 % of desktop marketshare. How many is that? Fedora claims about 7 or 8 million users and Ubuntu claims about 6 million. My memory for numbers is often quite bad so let's say I'm wrong... but you get the point.
If we have more than 10 million users, and that is a low estimate, how is that NOT mainstream? How many millions of users do you have to have to be mainstream? Linux has been mainstream, yes on the desktop, for some time. Is it a winner in marketshare? Not when compared to Microsoft and Apple... but when compared to everyone else, yes. :)
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 21:43 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
What does it mean to be mainstream?
Is Apple mainstream?
What's Apple's marketshare in terms of OEM sales for the second quarter ? http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/17/apple-climbs-to-th...
In that article: 1.4 Million units SOLD in the second quarter equates to 8.5% market share. And that's the high estimate for Apple.
So how's Asus doing with its eee?
They expect to hit 5 million units SOLD for 2008. That's just the eee netbooks. Thats 1.25 million eee netbooks a quarter on average. So right now is the the Asus eee product line mainstream? That puts its squarely on par with Apple's total desktop and laptop sales. How many of those eee units are running Xandros? Half? 3/4? Just counting the default Xandros installs on the eee we are halfway to Apple's marketshare.
Right now the Xandros linux distribution is THE mainstream distribution because its on the Asus eee. Asus has made linux mainstrain and they continue to do it. And that's not even counting the Linpus distribution on the Acer Aspire one.
Let's look at third quarter netbook sales forecasts:
Taken together Asus and Acer crush everyone else. How much of those sales in that table are linux pre-installs? Half? How many of them are Ubuntu pre-installs? Just the Dell ones?
The Dell forecast comes in at 0.16 million. Dell netbook retails sales is only forecasted slightly ahead of OLPC (running a Fedora derivative.) I find that mind-boggling really. the OLPC, a non-commercial offering, is slightly behind the Dell retail netbook sales forecast. Are we ever going to see hard numbers for the comprehensive Ubuntu Dell pre-install sales figures? Without those numbers can we really say anything about Ubuntu's OEM marketshare compared to Xandros or Linpus? Are Asus and Acer that much more effective at retail sales than Dell in the emerging netbook market?
If you consider netbooks as more than a bubble market, and even if you factor in higher rates of return that may or may not be happening...Linux based operating systems are mainstream right now. Even though the distributions which get the most press and have the most brand recognition as operating systems aren't leading the stats.
Asus and Acer are out in front with differentiated linux distributions. It's obvious why Canonical is chasing the evolving netbook market, we simply do not know yet how large the marketspace for these things are. It's a gold rush. The netbook market is going to be a bloodbath next year as the market is flooded with more competition looking to take market share aware from Asus and Acer. A few OEM companies are going to make big dollars up until the market is saturated with competition and the product die-off starts. Asus and Acer have shown linux can gain traction there and presumable turn a profit. But to suggest that Ubuntu is leading the effort there is a bit...revisionist. If anything Canonical has to be concerned that they'll come to the market too late, with the wrong OEM partner. Is Dell the right OEM partner in the race to the bottom?
Canonical may be able to do a good sales pitch and convince OEMs its worth paying for engineering services and to get OEMs like Asus and Acer to shell out for use of the Ubuntu brand as a customized pre-install in the next round of competition in the race to the netbook pricing bottom. But Xandros and Linpus are already there, making linux mainstream doing it their way on their terms without the strength of the Ubuntu brand to bolster their engineering services pitch. Maybe at the end of the day, Xandros and Linpus actually do OEM engineering and support better than Canonical regardless of brand recognition.
Btw, Xandros is hiring multiple kernel developers:
An OEM netbook win for Ubuntu at this point in this space is more about an economic win for Canonical's business plan than a win for linux. Xandros and Linpus are business entities..directly competing with Canonical in the OEM engineering and customization services space. If either Canonical or Xandros or Linpus win more OEM support moving forward its a win for mainstreaming linux. But credit where credit is due... based on existing sales figures and forecasts that we have right now..Xandros and Linpus are leading the way and putting linux squarely in the mainstream of OEM unit sales....not Ubuntu....not Fedora. Makes you wonder why aren't we talking about Xandros more in the press.
The reality is, the operating system brand may not matter in the long run if we are moving more and more to a market dominated by mobile "devices" of varying shapes and sizes. The winning OEM model maybe to differentiate and to customize the software interface compared to its hardware competitors and to sale that tweaked interface as a differentiated advantage of the device.
If that's true, the question for OEM's becomes not if they will be using linux. They will, because open source solutions makes that sort of customization possible in a way that closed solutions can't. The question for them will be how to pay for that engineering and customization work. Can someone like Canonical make a business out of providing better operating system engineering services value to OEMs than other competitors or better value than the OEMs could do on their own?
And the question for the larger ecosystem is how do we get those OEMs to contribute back to the upstream projects. That's a toughy. If the market pressure on OEMs is to differentiate products, how do we encourage them to collaborate on the underlying functionality?
-jef
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 22:17 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
AFAIK In Germany I can buy Ubuntu on One, Gigabyte, Dell, Toshiba and a few others.
It certainly is the distro with the most different devices on sale atm .. in absolute numbers you are right Xandros and Linpus sell more.
But Xandros and Linpus have costs attached to them. Asus has to pay for Xandros and Acer has to develop/pay for Linpus.
If the race to the bottom really starts some OEMs will likely go for a distro that is free as in beer. And I think One already does that, they put pretty generic Ubuntu on their Netbooks.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 23:08 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Since this was a forecast of Q3 netbook sales and not actual sales, its not clear that any of those numbers contain Ubuntu OEM sales other than Dell. The Toshiba Ubuntu variant didn't hit Japan until October for example. Even if you did include the Ubuntu variants, taken all together they still don't add up to the Xandros or Linpus install forecasting, Canonical is reacting to the market growth into mainstream proportions, not leading it.
And more to the point, the Canonical business plan for OEM netbook remix images most certainly comes with an engineering pricetag. The OEM images Canonical wants to provide are not the same as the Ubuntu desktop product and OEMs are meant to pay for Canonical's engineering services. The Netbook "remixes" Canonical talks about are not a installable image that OEMs can download from the public intertubes and install at unit production time.
http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/nbr
"In addition to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix there will be pre-installed remixes made available on manufacturer's machines. These will contain software that is not free and built for specific hardware profiles unique to the OEM. These will not be publicly available as we do not have the right to redistribute the software."
What is on the Toshiba NB100 is NOT standard Ubuntu, it includes specific things that Canonical has cooked up for the Toshiba image and not released as part of standard Ubuntu..as owners are finding out:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=993133
You can't just install standard Ubuntu, you have to pull additional binaries from a special launchpad based repository for the NB100.
https://launchpad.net/payson
I seem to be having some trouble browsing the source for payson in launchpad. Hmmm. I wonder, do the Toshiba NB100's come with source media. Hmmm.
-jef
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 3:52 UTC (Wed) by spiv (subscriber, #9031) [Link]
"I seem to be having some trouble browsing the source for payson in launchpad."
Works for me; e.g. <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~canonical-fae-team/payson/to...>
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 6:42 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
yeah it must have been a hiccup I tried a few minute ago and i can see browse the bzr tree. Did you look in the tree at all? The payson project is marked as proprietary and gpl. I somehow doubt the proprietary code in the payson project is sitting in bzr to take a look at, but I could be wrong.
-jef
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 8:10 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]
I was wondering when you'd show up...
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 9:13 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
IIRC Linpus was a Fedora derivative just like the OLPC system
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 16:15 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
It is, and it's quite nice if you want a device that just works for web-browsing/network/pics.
They did send an update for network-manager a couple of months back that completely broke wireless networking and made it very hard to install the next update that fixed it - god knows how many punters found themselves knackered by that episode (I took me a while to work out how to fix things). I wasn't at all impressed by that bit of quality control, but I suspect Linpus have been rather surprised by their sudden huge increase in popularity.
I've just binned linpus on my aspire because I want the range of software available for Debian - the linpus repositories are _much_ smaller and after a while I got fed of things being unavailable (and I'm just used to Debian-world so trying to use Redhat-world is a bit of a pain).
Very few users are going to go through that hassle, and I'm really pleased to see the inroads Linux is making on netbooks, which ever distro people use (most of them aren't going to care). The fact that one can relitively easily put a new distro on that better suits one is just a nice bonus.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 18, 2008 7:13 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Do you spend all day every day plotting the demise of Canonical and how to better troll Ubuntu? Granted your latest stuff is more subtle. Seriously though, you must stay up at night thinking of this. As said before, use your creative energy elsewhere. You might be able to actually improve something. Maybe you can start here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
jeff "thinks jef spaleta needs to get laid" schroeder
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 21, 2008 11:24 UTC (Sun) by jbinpg (guest, #4913) [Link]
I'm sure the Red Hat brass are sitting back enjoying Mr. Spelata's railing against Ubuntu. Meanwhile, if anybody in the Ubuntu camp tried the same thing, Shuttleworth would send them to the Moon on a one way ticket. I guess that is why I am using Ubuntu.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 22, 2008 3:38 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
That's a very fascinating image. Shuttleworth as someone who throws out people from the community he controls because they express dissenting opinions concerning decision making processes. Man, I have problems with Shuttleworth, but even I think that is an overreaching image of the man. I think he appreciates the value of dissenting opinion for more than you realize.
Has Shuttleworth sent anyone in Ubuntu to the moon for being publicly critical of Debian's decision making processes yet? Cuz if he started doing that, he probably would of had to throw up several significant contributors to Ubuntu very early on in the Ubuntu community building process.
-jef
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 17, 2008 6:05 UTC (Wed) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]
"If we have more than 10 million users, and that is a low estimate, how is that NOT mainstream?"
Because the raw number does not mean that much? 10 million desktops for how man million computer-users? Billion? While 10 million alone sounds impressive, it's not when you consider the fact that the "other guys" have something like 900 million desktops. You need to compare the number to others in order to determine whether it's "mainstream" or not. And while the raw number of Linux-users might be impressive, it's not "mainstream", since the raw number of people who use other systems is few orders of magnitude bigger.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 8:37 UTC (Tue) by michich (subscriber, #17902) [Link] Does anyone know what specification the interviewer is referring to?:LXF: The nice thing about Ubuntu is that it's done what the Linux Standards Base should have done and implemented a specification where you can rely on certain things in the filesystem always being in the same place, which must be pretty nice for a developer to work with.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 10:10 UTC (Tue) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]
I think this is FHS, or FileSystem Hierarchy Standard - http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ . Some treat it as a part of LSB.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 10:25 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
LSB is inclusive of FHS but I think interviewer was talking about something more abstract possibly since nearly all Linux distributions follow FHS explicitly. A few examples,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Filesy...
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 20:43 UTC (Tue) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] Does anyone know what specification the interviewer is referring to?: Debian Policy? :-) It references and follows the FHS, but includes some extras.
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 16:53 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
I find it strange that the interview is with Mr. Samba guy and the quote they choose to pick for the title of the article is about Ubuntu. What does that mean exactly?
"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar) Posted Dec 16, 2008 17:17 UTC (Tue) by darwish07 (subscriber, #49520) [Link]
Journalism-marketing best practices ;-) ?
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