Mark Shuttleworth: "Time for mass consumer sales of Linux on desktop has not yet come"

von Redaktion  |  25. April 2007, 10:23
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    Mark Shuttleworth, driving force behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution

The founder of the Ubuntu-project talks in an interview about the integration of proprietary drivers, the One Laptop per Child project and "great applications" from Microsoft

In the fall of 2004 a new distribution entered the Linux scene: Ubuntu. It's popularity grew quickly, making it the number one Linux distribution according to Distrowatch. Ubuntu was initiated by the South-African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who made a fortune by selling his own company Thawte to Verisign in the Nineties and was therefore able to guarantee the funding for the project. Till today Shuttleworth remains the "face of Ubuntu", Andreas Proschofsky spoke with him - amongst other things - about the current status of the distribution, the competition and the One Laptop per Child project.

This interview is also available in a german translation.

derStandard.at: When Ubuntu first appeared on the Linux scene, it was considered a cutting edge distribution. Do you think this is still true nowadays? For instance the current openSUSE seems to integrate quite a bit more cutting edge stuff for the desktop like Beagle / their own main menu / Compiz.

Mark Shuttleworth: Very much so. Of course I respect the stuff that the other distributions do, but I think Ubuntu has a very vibrant community and so some really innovative things happen here first. For example in our newest release Ubuntu is the first distribution to have a complete framework for detecting application failures and crashes and then inviting the users to send information about that failure back to us and we then pass that on to the developers. And that's a fantastic new innovation in terms of being able to raise the quality of the whole desktop experience.

Also we've the fancy 3D-effects, although they are not turned on by default cause we don't think they are yet mature or reliable enough to turn on everywhere.

So in a free software world we can very quickly integrate the good work that comes from other distributions and we also have a strong community to do work on our own.

derStandard.at: In relation to Novell or Red Hat, Ubuntu doesn't employ a lot of hackers. Does Ubuntu even have enough developers on its own to define their own releases, instead of just following the footpaths of the others?

Mark Shuttleworth: I think that's entirely untrue. We've 50 or so free software developers that are now working for the company, we continue to hire what we think are the very best guys from a variety communities from upstream, from Debian and from other places were innovation happens. I also think that our approach is specifically designed to work well with the free software community.

For instance if you look at our Milestone overview at launchpad.net you'll see the full set of features that were planned for this release and their various states of delivery, that covers all the work of the community and the folks that work on Ubuntu fulltime through Canonical, and I think you'll agree, that this is a substantial list of special features. And that's in addition to all the things that happen in GNOME, that happen in OpenOffice.org or at the kernel level.

derStandard.at: But still: Edgy Eft and Feisty Fawn are both more "conservative" releases than originally planned.

Mark Shuttleworth: Actually there is just one feature that I really wanted to land in both, that is Compiz or Beryl enabled by default. And the reasons not to do so was just they were not stable enough to be pushed out to the users. In Feisty Compiz is in fact installed it's just not enabled, but it's just a single checkbox to turn it on.

And also, I don't always get what I want. I'm just one person in a big community.

derStandard.at: Though in your original proposal for Edgy Eft, you encouraged the Ubuntu community to "go wild" and integrate all the "cool new stuff" and not a lot has come through from this.

Mark Shuttleworth: Well, I disagree. For instance in Edgy we rewrote the Init-System from scratch, for the first time in something like 15 years. So that was a very fundamental bit of engineering, that other distributions are now looking to adopt, like Debian or Fedora. Just because Compiz - which is done by Novell - was not ready, you can't say that either Edgy or Feisty were a failure.

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8 Postings
Bernhard Kubicek
17.04.2007 22:14
Wow

As far as I know this is the first article of derstandard.at that got slashdoted.

For all non-Austrians, derstandard.at is run by a major Austrian newspaper. In my opinion, it is one of the few newspapers actually worth reading.

dp23
18.04.2007 00:35
/. frontpage - but the server does its job

The way I read the term a server got slashdotted when after an entry on the frontpage of /. it sinks to its knees - apparently not the fate of derstandard.at
And not the first interesting linux-focussed piece I've seen here, too.
An interesting interview even when Mark Shuttleworth does what a CEO is expected to, smiling friendly patterns in every direction so you have to read between the lines. (when I ran vista in a vm myself, it felt like MS Fiasko.)

Andreas Trawöger 
18.04.2007 10:44
Microsoft-IIS running on Linux

derstandard.at uses a Linux / Squid Proxy in Front of a Microsoft IIS Server. Which lead to some funny reports on netcraft.com a couple of years ago.

Nowadays you sometimes run into a Squid page not found error message on derstandard.at, but its a very rare event.

Cheff vom Dienst
18.04.2007 09:53

"The way I read the term a server got slashdotted when after an entry on the frontpage of /. it sinks to its knees - apparently not the fate of derstandard.at "
That's because it runs under Microsoft IIS *SCNR*

suka
17.04.2007 22:42

Not quite ;) Actually the interview with Miguel de Icaza was also slashdoted a few weeks ago:

http://developers.slashdot.org/developer... 9212.shtml

Not A. MS Troll
17.04.2007 23:08
And ...

And I submitted the interview with Nat Friedman two weeks ago, but it is still pending ;)

Nomen est Omen
17.04.2007 14:53

well, i'm a happy ubuntu user since their first release in 2004 and since their LTS release in 2006 (which has 5 years security support!) i use it on our server.

I must say they did a good job in making debian more usable in an working environment for the average end user.

Andreas, why are you so enthusiastic with this whole compiz / beryl stuff? I tried it also but it's just not a big enhancement in the work flow right now (more of the opposite...)

Andreas Trawöger 
18.04.2007 11:13
Wonderfull for Presentations

If you enable all Beryl / Compviz plugins you get sea sick after about 30 Minutes. So there is not much use for it in everdays work (or you have to disables most of the plugins).

But Berryl rocks for presentation and live demos. Nothing is more funny than a virtualized Windows Server on your laptop which you squeeze and bounce visually using Beryl.

There is no better way to show what's possible if you really have control over your servers.

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