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Shuttleworth To Step Down As Canonical CEO In 2010 163

LinuxScribe writes "In a blog announcement today, Canonical Founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed he will be stepping down from his CEO role to be replaced by current COO Jane Silber. Both execs do not see major strategic changes on the horizon. Silber's official blog and Linux.com each have more details on how the change will be implemented."
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Shuttleworth To Step Down As Canonical CEO In 2010

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  • Thanks Mark (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Abreu ( 173023 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @04:17PM (#30478306)

    Linux operating systems are better thanks to you and your contributions.

    • 3rd World thanks Mark for https://shipit.ubuntu.com/login [ubuntu.com]
  • Why a Debian logo instead of the Ubuntu logo?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Because slashdot hasn't done a logo for them yet. It's only been 5 years after all...
    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Because it's Debian's retarded love-child conceived after a drunken bender and unprotected sex with a mongoloid [wikipedia.org]?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      it's a lame attempt at being retro-cool, just like the retention of the Gates Borg icon for Microsoft.

      They can screw with the slow-as-molasses Web 2.0 Javascript on a weekly basis, but downloading a icon from Wikipedia to use for Ubuntu would be too much work.

      tag: giveubuntuanicon

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Why a Debian logo instead of the Ubuntu logo?

      Did you buy that uid because I'd normally say "you must be new here"...

      • by gringer ( 252588 )

        Did you buy that uid because I'd normally say "you must be new here"...

        Anyone with a 6-figure UID is "new" on /.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Anyone with a 6-figure UID is "new" on /.

          But Ubuntu is "newer" so my point was he's been here ever since it became possible to raise that question.

          • LOL - I had just foolishly *assumed* that by now Slashdot would get their stuff together.

            And sadly no, I'm not that new. I started in 2000 or so, finally registered when it became too hard to track my posts :) I'm just naive enough to think they will eventually figure it out :D

            What are they up to now, 7 digits?

      • by fm6 ( 162816 )

        Ubuntu is an offshoot of Debian. Not a fork, exactly, more like a companion:

        http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian [ubuntu.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 )

      Slashdot hasn't made a new icon since like 2004. Even when they did the redesign a couple years ago, one of the requirements was to be compatible with all their existing (read: shitty) icons, because they were too fucking lazy to make new ones, and they don't care enough to hire someone to.

      If you ever have a question about anything relating to Slashdot, just imagine what the laziest person on Earth would do and you'll have your answer.

  • Self Appointed Distator For Life? SADU2010?

    • I think this is a joke, but just in case, he is stepping down as CEO of Cannonical, not as SABDL of Ubuntu. So far, it looks like he will remain self appointed benevolent dictator for life, as he has made no announcements to the contrary that I saw.
  • by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Thursday December 17, 2009 @04:28PM (#30478450) Homepage Journal

    And all this time I thought that the "canonical" executive for any open-source project was "Ty Coon, President of Vice".

    • by julesh ( 229690 )

      And all this time I thought that the "canonical" executive for any open-source project was "Ty Coon, President of Vice".

      So is Shuttleworth now a non-canonical CEO?

    • Offtopic? Mods should really read GPL - I for one thought this post was funny.

  • by Meshach ( 578918 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @04:31PM (#30478504)
    From the article he is not leaving the project (as the Summary sort of implies). He is switching his focus to product design, partnerships and customers.
  • Thank you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Saija ( 1114681 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @04:56PM (#30478912) Journal
    Mark for making possible a linux distro usable, friendly, and gather mainstream and users around the world, but i wonder if the poor quality of the late ubuntu incarnations(karmic, jaunty and that PulseAudio affair, i'm looking at you!) was something Mark was responsible(of some sorts), or at least, know of it, and i'm saying this as a former Ubuntu lover, i just loved and liked to polish, tune and debug to some extents some issues with this distro, but the adittion of that PulseAudio and the almost impossible task of remove it for the system make me switch, now i'm a OpenSuse user and i liked, now i can listen to amarok and youtube videos at the same time without the need to kill -9 some of them.
    Again, thank you very much Mark for the past 3 years and i hope your new roles make this great distro return to his old quality.
    </rant>
    • If your writing style is any indication of your age, your enlightenment-era lawn might be the oldest on slashdot. I'll keep my distance.

      • I wish people would give the whole PulseAudio issue a rest, for fuck sakes. This issue has been run-over like interstate road-kill.

        The reasons that Ubuntu decided to go with PulseAudio have been clearly stated (see http://ossguy.com/?p=347 [ossguy.com] and the Ubuntu wiki entry it links to). I don't doubt that some users are having problems, but with any OS there are bound to be users who have problems with one thing or another. I have run Ubuntu Desktop on a wide variety of hardware and sound has just worked for me.
        • Pulseaudio might work on some systems but on others its broken to one extent or another. What really upsets people is that audio used to work fine and now it doesn't. /bin/sh -c "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1 skype"

          This allows Skype to use the system audio hardware just as well as it ever did.

          Trouble is without this work around the internal microphone is a complete mystery to pulseaudio alsamixer knows its there and can switch it but pulseaudio can't.

          I'm sure we will all feel better towards pulseaudio once its wo

      • by Saija ( 1114681 )
        I'm not a native english speaker by any means, as you could see, but i try to do my best with the few english skills i have, if that deserves to become me some kind of "keep him at distance" guy so be it.
        • These people that complain about form/syntax, disregarding completely the meaning/semantics, are pretty useless. But don't worry, the intended audience of your message was reached.

          Btw, I very nice book recommendation involving this context (the superficiality of your critic): Zen & The Art of Bicycle Maintenance (odd title, but very nice book).

        • It was a joke. In the colonization & US revolution era, englishman used a ton of commas and it made it very hard to read and follow by today's standards. It is uncommon to see more than two or three commas in a sentence in english today, and you used 14. I was saying I'll stay away from your lawn b/c you write like a dinosaur ("get off my lawn" joke). Apparently it failed.

          • by Saija ( 1114681 )

            I was saying I'll stay away from your lawn b/c you write like a dinosaur ("get off my lawn" joke)

            Hehehe ok, no problem, btw i'm currently 29 years old so i just wonder how much commas i'll be using when i got the "get off my lawn" age

    • To be fair, a lot of the problems you mentioned were the result of upgrades, not clean installs.

    • didn't notice audio problems in my Ubuntu machines. ha, some of us are more focused on tasks to not be running two multimedia apps at once. were you playing WoW at the same time too? kids these days.

    • but the adittion of that PulseAudio and the almost impossible task of remove it

      apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio

      Works perfectly on my box. YMMV.

  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @05:02PM (#30478992) Homepage Journal

    Famous last words we have all heard before.

    • ...but better than "he is leaving his position to spend more time with family and friends"...
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      So what's the worst that could happen? They could start to suck... or go pay only like Red Hat did (yes, I know about Fedora but the earliest versions were nothing like RHL). At which point I'll check out Debian and OpenSuse and Mandriva and Fedora and maybe a few more and choose whichever sucks the least. The good stuff either comes from upstream or gets picked up by other distros, the distro is mostly who has the most polish right now, Linus and Gnome and KDE and OpenOffice and Firefox and whatnot will ke

  • by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @05:03PM (#30479008)

    ...which is all good and great, because he cares about end users - which matters most for Ubuntu Linux to succeed.

  • Soo..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by crazyvas ( 853396 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @05:38PM (#30479650)
    Will this event be labeled a "COO d'état" ?

    Oww, ouch, OWW, stop the beating!
    • by grcumb ( 781340 )

      Will this event be labeled a "COO d'état" ?

      No, not "a COO d'état," it will be "the COO d'état."

      It is Canonical, after all.

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        No, not "a COO d'état," it will be "the COO d'état."

        It is Canonical, after all.

        I hereby promote you to bureaucrat grade 13.

        • by grcumb ( 781340 )

          No, not "a COO d'état," it will be "the COO d'état."

          It is Canonical, after all.

          I hereby promote you to bureaucrat grade 13.

          Dammit, there goes any hope of a life outside this basement!

  • Good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Norsefire ( 1494323 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @06:48PM (#30480652) Journal
    Shuttleworth is one of the biggest problems with Ubuntu. His focus on "usability" has left the OS in complete disarray; while the developers are busy fixing 100 little papercuts they're shipping a release with broken DNS resolving [launchpad.net]. What is less user-friendly: a poorly labeled checkbox in the installation screen or "breaking the internet"? Canonical and Ubuntu were good in the beginning, they righted the wrongs of Debian, brought Linux closer to the desktop and then threw all that away with some really bad decisions (update notifier popup, software update policy, shipping releases with very serious bugs). Hopefully with someone new in charge Ubuntu can try and become what it used to be, given that Shuttleworth's hubris seems to be the most major bug in Ubuntu at the moment.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pinkushun ( 1467193 )

      Remember, Mark injected the 'usability' factor while the development community kept focus on technical issues. You can't scapegoat a prominent individual in a community project, because it's everyone involved that counts, even if they don't have a face on a blog somewhere.

      Take for example the various Karmic regressions that left many users upset...
      Me: "Sadly proprietary drivers make it hard for developers to create solid GNU/Linux drivers. Did you test your hardware on the beta? User feedback helps squash

    • they righted the wrongs of Debian

      Debian wasn't doing anything *wrong*, merely different, because Debian was never focused on being a noob-friendly desktop Linux.

  • by TheDarkener ( 198348 ) on Thursday December 17, 2009 @06:56PM (#30480744) Homepage

    that shipping an LTS (Long Term Support) release doesn't mean "This release is just as buggy as all of the other releases were when they shipped, but we'll be updating security issues for longer". :) Don't get me wrong, I 3 Ubuntu more than most people, but this is just something that always irked me (especially since I run multiple production terminal server environments with Ubuntu LTS & LTSP)

  • Dear Jane,

    Will it still be an ugly Brown?

    Thanks,
    rhY

Everybody needs a little love sometime; stop hacking and fall in love!

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