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.'"

Insightful indeed...

[menorikey]

Personally I think Ubuntu is great, probably one of the better distros of Linux that I've seen to date. The only problem I've run across is that it doesn't want to play nice with my Inspiron 9300, but that's not specific to Ubuntu; I have the same issue with SUSE as well, so mod me down if you think it's a dig (which it's not).

(As an aside, Ubuntu "Live" was great for testing out that OS X x86 release that was going around, so in that regards, kudos to Ubuntu for being straight-forward to provide the means to get OSx86 up and running.)

Jambo Ubuntu

[Doc Ruby]

Ubuntu 5.04 was like Windows 2000, and before that Windows95, and MacOS7.0 before that (and Win3.1 before than, and DOS, and VMS, and CP/M...): each of those was a desktop OS that "finally arrived". Easy enough to install, reliable enough to use all day, integrated enough not to miss the predecessor it supplanted. So when each of those rolled around, I switched. This time, I quarantined my old Windows machine in a closet, just opening an Ubuntu VNC window on it when absolutely necessary. If Ubuntu could just include a Multisync that syncs my Treo 600 (including Calendar and noncorrupted Contacts) to Evolution properly, I wouldn't even have to look in the VNC rearview mirror.

Propietary Software Industry

[knightinshiningarmor]

From the article: I have no interest in taking Ubuntu to join the proprietary software industry, it's a horrible business that is boring and difficult, and dying out rapidly anyway.

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?

I also agree that many businesses (Google for example) are offering a free interface while keeping their proprietary software on the back end. However, the majority of companies AREN'T going in that direction (Adobe for example). That they're "dying out rapidly" is a ridiculous statement.

Re:I disagree.

[Henry V .009]

Remote Desktop is very nice in all sorts of situations. It is far more forgiving on slow connections than X over ssh. The other thing I find myself using is XP Pro's built-in file encryption.

With all his wealth

[Trogre]

You'd think Mr Shuttleworth could afford to buy wiki.ubuntu.com a real SSL certificate...

Moving from RedHat/Fedora to Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering if any one out there has made the move from a RedHat/Fedora Core based desktop system over to Ubuntu? Was it worth the effort? Is it better? Is it worse?

I use Fedora, with freshrpms, kderedhat, and some other public repositories. I like some of the Ubuntu concepts such as the warm fuzzy humanity thing feels really good to me. But I'm wondering if it's practically worth the effort switching? The hype is enticing, but what's it really like?

thanks

Re:With all his wealth

[BigGerman]

Especially since his wealth came from Thawte ;-)

DCC...

[Junta]

I'm glad to see that explanation. A lot of people gave Ubuntu flak for not being part of it.

Honestly, I agree with him. It has marginal chance of success over the attempt that was UnitedLinux, by not having the commercial interest muddying the waters. However, the crux of the problem is that it flies somewhat in the face of the whole point of different distributions. The theory may be that distros distinguish themselves at a higher level and by forcing common underpinnings doesn't impact the ability to differentiate, but if that were truly the case, there wouldn't be such variation today.

For example, let's assume a member of the DCC is a tad more enthusiastic about GNUstep than the others. Hypothetically, GCC 4.2 releases with ObjC++ support as a significant feature. That distro may want to break with the conservative members to provid the GCC that would allow easier porting of a wider range of OSX apps. What's perceived commonly as a 'boring underpinning' becomes a potential significant factor in differentiation for a distro, but requires breaking compatibility with the rest of DCC.

Just as UnitedLinux made it impossible for the members to meaningly be different, everything ending up essentially being SuSE with different artwork and corporate propoganda, the DCC just simply can't occur and preserve meaningfully unique identies of member distributions.

Debian has always been about open source, and by not even having the illusion of binary compatibility amongst them, it perhaps encourages practices of distributing description files, tarballs, and diffs rather than binary .deb packages...

Re:Moving from RedHat/Fedora to Ubuntu?

[tfiedler]

I have migrated two servers to Ubuntu 5.04 and they run spectacularly well. I will be migrating some more later this fall too.

I hold RHCE for 9 and Enterprise 3 and while I like certain aspects of Red Hat, I can't justify the cost when Ubuntu is perfectly suited.

The problem with Fedora/RHEL is that I have to pay to get easy updating. I know I can jump through hoops to make it work without paying, but it's not worth it to me, especially when Ubuntu's apt works wonderfully. I plan on asking my employer, in exchange for not buying licenses each year for our servers which in turn saves us considerable cash, if I can give back to the community by hosting a mirror for Ubuntu. Of course, this won't happen quickly but I believe that since my employer is an edu, it will happen.

In short, switch. In long, test it for awhile and you'll answer that question for yourself.

Re:So which is it?

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

At a guess, a customised distribution would be one with the companies logo as a background, and only the apps the company deems nessecary to run. Having run the installer a couple of times, (Both times for desktop, must have a look at the server install) you are not prompted for which applications you want. I'd say in a business environment, the games would go. So businesses are paying for *LESS* functionality than typically available.

That's what I think anyway.

Ubuntu to Supplant Debian?

[Quash]

Mark wrote: "Though Linspire is not (yet) based directly on Ubuntu, it's not infeasible that the Linspire guys figure out what a good option that would be for them sooner rather than later. There are likely to be many specialised versions of Ubuntu, under other brand names, that have commercial or proprietary features. They might have proprietary fonts or software or add-ons or integration with services, etc." If I were a Debian developer and read this, this would not make me rest easy. Mark in a colourful character because he paints his life on a grand canvas and shoots for the moon (quite literally, to boot!). But, it also appears that he'd be happy if most Linux distributions were based on Ubuntu, rather than based on Debian. He talks of the important of Debian, and I think he believes what he writes. But, I'm not entirely sure he sees the roots of his own ambitions. His ambition appears to be THE core distribution, from which all others flow. And if the above quote doesn't convince you, his work on Bazaar and Launchpad should. Mark understands that to paint life on a grand canvas, you need your canvas, your brushes, your paints... you need your tools. And he is building them, in Bazaar and Launchpad. He wrote: Solving the "distro collaboration problem" would really advance the state of open source. So that's what we set out to do in Ubuntu. We work on Launchpad, which is a web service for collaboration on bugs, and translations, and technical support. We work on Bazaar, which is a revision control system that understands branching and distributions, and is integrated with Launchpad. And hopefully those tools allow us to make our work available easily to Debian, and to Gentoo, and to upstream. And also, allow us to take good work from other distros (even if they would rather we didn't ;-)). I admire Mark for what he's doing. I believe he is genuine in his desire to "always" ensure Ubuntu is free, as in beer and liberty. But, I watch him with caution. He is an ideologue and he must be the Master of his own Universe. That combination often matures in to tyranny when a sense of loss of control sets in. When the Ubuntu Foundation and development community matures and begins to have disagreements with him and, like an adolescent, is ready for independence, making different choices and wanting to take a different direction than the father who raised it might like, it will be interesting to see how Papa Mark responds. Rory

Re:Propietary Software Industry

[Matt Perry]

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

Where did you get the 90% figure? I've seen comments like this before but I've never been able to find details on the studies that arrived at numbers such as this.

Re:Moving from RedHat/Fedora to Ubuntu?

[spauldo]

What keeps me with debian is the QA and integration of _everything_. Unlike using a public repository, everything in the debian project is made to work with everything else. It's not perfect, but it's damn close.

FC3 came on four CD's, I believe. I think sarge comes on 11, if I remember right (I only download the first CD and apt the other stuff I need, personally). All that extra software is part of the debian project and fits seamlessly into it. Everything is available from one place, which makes searching for and installing packages a snap. Damn near everything I use is part of the system (which is a lot, lemme tell you), and while there are other apt sources out there for the things debian doesn't include, I usually just install those from source.

That said, change sucks, so if you're used to the redhat way, then it'll drive you up the wall at first. Use it for a while and then see what you like better.

Re:Maybe now

[wild_berry]

Considering Linus' recent words about specs and meaningful code, I reckon that Mark Shuttleworth's pragmatic efforts with the multi-distribution bug tracker (bazaar [canonical.com]) will do much better for software compatibility among the Debian family, and possibly even outside it.

In the fine article, Mark makes the great point that the strength of FLOSS stuff is the source code, which can be compiled to whichever architecture it supports. It made me wonder if ABI compatibility in LSB is a silly x86-centric mistake.

Re:I disagree.

[swillden]

better performing, platform-independant hardware RAID?

It's common wisdom that hardware RAID is better than software RAID, but I'm not so sure. Performance may or may not be better, depending on workload, but I think the "platform independence" of hardware RAID is highly overrated. Hardware RAID solutions are platform-independent in the sense that you can theoretically access the data with any other operating system, but they're extremely dependent on the hardware platform. If your hardware RAID controller craps out, your data is inaccessible unless you can get another controller from the same manufacturer, and you may even need to get the same model. So, with software RAID, you're tied to the OS, with hardware RAID, you're tied to the device. Which is more likely to change? And even if you did want to change operating systems, what are the odds that you're using a file system that can be accessed by a different OS?

I think for a lot of situations, software RAID is not only cheaper, it's *better*.

(BTW, I didn't mistake your post for a serious comment. It was funny, I laughed. Then I started thinking about hardware vs software RAID).