Shuttleworth on Ubuntu's Direction and Intent

cj2003 writes "Mark Shuttleworth has released a FAQ about Ubuntu's Direction and Intent. It comments on the discussions of funding, of being a Debian-fork or not, of the strange names, and many other 'hot topics' relating to Ubuntu. In his own words: 'This document exists to give the community some insight into my thinking, and to a certain extent that of the Community Council, Technical Board and other governance structures - on some of the issues and decisions that have been controversial.'"

Re:Professional Addition

[Anonymous Coward]

> all those professional adders

In fact, the original meaning of "computer" was a person who did math calculations for a living.

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[Spy der Mann]

I agree that some tactics of the proprietary software industry are less than desirable, but how many of us would be able to earn a living without them?

See here [slashdot.org].

Trend: Products (before) -> Services (after)

Re:I disagree.

[ettlz]

Windows has taught the world that "Home Edition" is synonymous with "Crippled Edition."

Come on now, XP Pro has, what, Active Directory/Windows Domain/whatever-else-Microsoft-tried-to-replace-LD AP-with support? A nice GUI for managing NTFS ACLs which you can manipulated in XP Home with cacls? As far as I know, Pro is only really useful if you're managing a large gaggle of Windows boxes. For instance, at home I run all my network services under Linux. I've a few boxes dual-booting with XP Home, and one with XP Pro. Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[gl4ss]

yeah.. in finland, there's wide amounts of software production.

but a tiny, miniscule amount of that software ends up packaged on store shelf.

Grumpy Groundhog info

[jtatum]

Mr. Shuttleworth mentions the as yet unannounced Grumpy Groundhog project in TFA. He says it's ToBeAnnounced which I took as a hint that info is in the wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GrumpyGroundhog [ubuntu.com]

It's an ubuntu distribution for developers that has the daily builds of everything:

Upstream development in the open source world moves at a tremendous pace. Many developers like to keep up to date with specific upstream products, but the work involved in building from CVS every day is substantial. With The Grumpy Groundhog Project, Ubuntu provides those developers with a ready source of packages containing the latest upstream code.

These same packages will allow cutting-edge developers to keep track of changes in the upstream codebase that might affect the distribution later down the line. For example, these packages can be auto-built with the latest compiler and toolchain packages to test compatibility with the versions that may be used for the next release of Ubuntu.

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[david.given]

From available evidence, the outstanding majority. In fact, a majority (approx. 90% by some counts) of all programmers already do earn a living working directly for companies that use the software, rather than for those companies which sell software for others to use.

Don't forget the third option: I work for a company that produces software that is licensed to hardware manufacturers who then ship actual devices. Mobile phones, in my case. The software is never sold directly to the primary users of the software.

I suspect there's a hell of lot of this going on, too.

use rdesktop for windows

[Splork]

vnc isn't idea. you should try windows remote desktop with the open source rdesktop client. it works better.

Re:Money Talks

[agraupe]

The debian devs/fanboys seem to do this in exchange for the opportunity to mercilessly tear to shreds anyone who asks about Ubuntu or Knoppix in #debian. Just speaking from experience here...

Re:I disagree.

[Skye16]

gpedit.msc

compmgmt.msc

I'm not positive, but I don't think either of those extremely useful utilities are in XP Home. (Can anyone confirm?)

The crux of the article...

[sweetnjguy29]

The most important part of the wiki is towards the end, when Shuttleworth states that the real reason for funding Ubuntu is to solve the "distro collaboration problem" by collaboring with other distros on bugs, translations, technical support, revision control systems. These tools will allow Ubuntu to make its work available easily to Debian, Gentoo, and the rest of the upstream community.

Re:I disagree.

[JFitzsimmons]

Home edition also only supports two CPUs max, is missing software RAID, and cannot be configured to host Remote Desktop connections. It has remote assistance, but not RDP. I'm sure that there are several more features that are sorely missed in XPHome.

Re:Money Talks

[Examancer2]

Actually, if you had read the interview, there is compelling evidence that this is already happening. Debian is already incorporating a lot of the advances from Ubuntu.

Re:I disagree.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.

When XP came out, the logic was that anyone on 98/ME could move to XP Home, while XP Pro was for those who needed 'that weird esoteric enterprise stuff' that was only in windows 2000 professional.

So when all these users got their new laptops and desktops with xp home preinstalled it was a pretty rude awakening that MS had actually removed the webserver and disabled the ability to connect to a domain entirely.

It wasn't simply that Home was a watered down version of XP Pro (people were pretty much expecting that)...in some significant respects it was a waterned down version of 98!!! "Upgrading" from 98 to Home actually removed 2 pretty major features.

A lot of hobbyists, tele-communters, home-based web developers, power users, savvy gamers, and so forth got burnt by Home Edition. It was aggravated by the price difference, and the fact that many system builders didn't offer XP as an option in their more home-consumer targeted products... yet many "home consumers" needed XP Pro, but had no reason to pay 60% more for an 'enterprise workstation model of pc/laptop' ... forcing them to accept the bundled home edition and then buy XP Pro separately... (and at a rather ridiculous price considering how similiar the products are.)

Additionally the watered down security model, the lack of support for encryption (what?! Home users don't need privacy??) and limiting users to the "Microsoft Way" of setting up shared folders etc (hiding all the details where users literally could not meaningfully get to them -- yet all the details were there for misbehaving software to bungle up) was a real disservice to consumers.

Finally the loss of remote desktop, has saved the day for countless thousands as more clued friends family are able to solve their problems. (Sure home comes with remote assistance which is much much much clumsier and more of a pain to setup, especially when all parties are behind NAT boxes. Getting RD up and running is a few checkboxes and an easy nat/firewall tweak...)

Home solidly deserves its reputation for being crippled.

Unstable: Perfect Storm

[dmaxwell]

There are a quite a few major transistions all happening at the same time. Debian is adopting the GCC 4.x ABI for C++, going from XFree86 to X.Org, and there are new releases of KDE and GNOME. Because of when Sarge froze, these all started hitting Unstable at the same time. I went through this with Breezy over the summer. There just isn't a smooth way for a development distro to handle this many at once. I'm sure Gentoo's dev branch went through it to but I bet they only got them one at a time. Come to think of it, they went GCC 4.x pretty early. That is the ugliest one and has directly affects KDE and GNOME.

Once these are over, Debian Unstable will be its usual not-really-unstable self.

Re:Moving from RedHat/Fedora to Ubuntu?

[concept10]

I will proudly say that I moved from Red Hat/Fedora Core and not because of the hype, but for very good reasons that I will explain.

* Centralized resources: Everything is one spot. You say that you use 'public' repositories. Almost all of the packages that you could ever want are available within the Ubuntu ecosystem. Fedora Core uses yum and I preferred apt-4-rpm. Some repos support apt4rpm, some do not. I do not know what the case is now. APT is much faster and mature than yum. Also, you may run into trouble with mixing repos with Fedora Core. Everyone doesnt package apps uniformly.

* Superior hardware detection: Developers test, improve and fix alot of thingsand as a result, more functions work out-of-the-box. The latest development release automatically configured many items I could'nt get working with Fedora Core. Examples: Processor Speed Scaling (P4 mobile), the laptop Function keys for display dimming, volume, CD eject, etc. YMMV with wireless.

* Community: The best community ever. Nice people that help anyone out. Everyone is welcomed. From power-users to noobs. Server, Desktop, Gaming, programmers. Everyone is welcomed. Less corporate politics and leet-ness with user contributions. I will admit that I still use Debian Sarge for servers.

* Vision and milestones: Criticise if you like, but Mark Shuttleworth has a great vision of what he wants to accomplish with the distro. He gives so much back to education and people. Everything also happens in the public.

If you want a stable Linux distro based on Debian with a great selection of packages and easy install, you can't go wrong with Ubuntu.

Most people just criticise the color of the default theme, or Debian ABI compatibilty or the stupid controversy regarding the codenames. These are all ignorant arguments IMHO. No one rants this much about Linspire, or Xandros..

Re:If only I didn't have to install stuff AFTER

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

try http://ubuntuguide.org/ [ubuntuguide.org]. Kinda handy for all the addons that one needs to be happy.

Re:What a nice guy

[thue]

instead of getting 8 sportcars and a larger penis.

Or... instead of using $20 million on an 8 day trip to space? ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth [wikipedia.org]

That said, I am very gratefull for his sponsorship of Ubuntu :).

Re:Insightful indeed...

[erikdalen]

that's pretty easy to do on any distro. In Lilo yo type "linux init=/bin/sh". voila, booted straight up in a root shell. unless you have password protected your lilo.

Re:Insightful indeed...

[kormat]

Hi, I'm on the laptop testing team for ubuntu, and i also have an inspiron 9300. For the most part, things just work in breezy. Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellInsp iron9300 [ubuntu.com]. I'd be interested to hear if you have any issues that aren't on that page. Thanks, Steve

Ubuntu as distros go...

[Zarf]

I installed Ubuntu on an old Compaq Laptop (a horrid old Presario) I have lying around and everything just worked! Even my Orinoco Wifi card just plain worked. Even Suspend just plain worked. I couldn't believe it. They're doing something right. I just hope Shuttleworth's profit model works out for him.

Re:Maybe now

[Qwavel]

http://dccalliance.org/ [dccalliance.org]

I think it's an organization trying to promote cooperation amoungst the debian based distro's. Cooperation towards better coordination (eg. bug fixing) and some standardizaton to make things easier for the end-user. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

All the major debian derived distro's belong to it other than Ubuntu. Obviously this is a major ommision which, on it's own, is enough to kill it.

Re:Jambo Ubuntu

[Doc Ruby]

Ah, thanks for clarifying that.Ubuntu's upgrade policy is "every six months", unlike Debian's "whichever year we get around to it". So I've stuck with just Ubuntu's "stable", rather than upgrade some packages to "unstable" like I did in Debian. In fact, I don't even really know how to upgrade only some specified packages to "unstable" like I did in Debian - I just download source tarfiles and build, navigating dependency hell manually. How can I tell Ubuntu to give me the unstable version of a package?

Re:Jambo Ubuntu

[C_nemo]

I think the Ubuntu way of thinking is that you should be happy with the latest stable release and backports if you are expecting a stable environment. As to the source.list questions, I dont know, I have been happy with a reasonably frequent release cycle, only using the unstable version the last weeks before it hits stable on my home machine, and jsut stable to stable for my work machine.

They state quite rigiorusly that the development branch/unstable is just that. however, you may have luck with changing the release and upgrading packages with "not so system core" dependecies. I think that this would be madness under the recent hoary to breezy development since a lot of core packages has seen a major revision jump.