26 Jan 2009

Ubuntu to take new path?

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The Register recently published an article in which Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and CEO of Canonical, praises the beta of Microsoft’s new flagship operating system Windows 7. I’ve posted on this blog before how Ubuntu is making at best glacial progress on the desktop front, and at worst is stagnating completely.

It’s both magnanimous and brave of Shuttleworth to make these public statements, but I wonder what the motivation behind it all is. After all you’d never hear Steve Jobs saying this about Windows 7, or Steve Ballmer saying something similar about Snow Leopard.

So what gives? Is this Canonical trying a bit of positive PR? Or is this a sign that the real battle is for server dominance – a battle in which the competitor is not Microsoft at all, but other *nix distributions, notably Red Hat, Novell, Debian, etc.

I suspect that it is, and that last paragraph very informative in this respect – that the server version of 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will have Amazon EC2 hooks implemented. EC2 is a technology that we’re following closely here at SWAT, and we believe that it is a game changer. Evidently Shuttleworth does too.

I’m sure that there will still be focus on the desktop and effort will continue there (after all it is open-source and the Linux community is a determined group of souls), but Canonical makes its money from support. And Enterprise support yields much bigger bucks than home support does.

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  • Bradley Wells

    There are a couple of goals that the release of Jaunty that leads me to disagree. They are particularly focusing on decreasing the boot time, this is because of the whole new sector of netbooks and their need to have super-fast startup times.They have already cut down up to 10 secs with the new extf4 filesystem. As you have stated that a Ubuntu desktop facelift is long overdue, this is where Shuttleworth stated that he wants the Ubuntu to have the best looking interface, even better than OSX.

    It might not be a bad thing if Ubuntu is focusing on dominating in the *nix server market, it will give the project a backing while the community is sure to improve on the desktop side of the project. But because the above mentioned goals for the next release are surely desktop focused I dont think that it will be happening soon.

  • Mike Raath

    I’m not sure that you are disagreeing with me there, Brad. Yes of course the desktop edition will continue. But I think there’ll be much more focus on the server edition going forward.

    I don’t think Ubuntu Server has made that much of an impact up until now, but the point I’m making is that I think Canonical is trying to change that now. And if they are, it makes perfect sense. Or cents.

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