Author: johnmark

I’m happy to say that things are moving forward on the ubucon planned for February 16 at Google’s offices in Manhattan. It will be a mixture of un-conference, installfest and user group meeting for Ubuntu users, developers and the simply curious. Visit the wiki Join the mailing list And stop by #ubucon on irc.freenode.net. We will have the first IRC get-together for anyone interested on Friday, January 26 at 6pm ET.

Matt Asay had a mild critique of Mark Shuttleworth to which I responded in the comments. Read Matt’s critique first, and then I’ll repost below what I wrote there:

I think his [Mark’s] main point is that it’s difficult to get a polished, end-user friendly product out of the other guys. I agree that the “going from shrink-wrap to shrink-wrap” is a bogus comment, but I don’t think that was the real point. The real point is that he’s slamming other community editions and stating that Ubuntu is a better supported and more polished community distro.

I happen to agree – not because Ubuntu is perfect, which it certainly is not, but because I’m a former Fedora user who was ultimately frustrated by the lack of devotion to something that actually worked for end-users.

I agree that Red Hat has every right to charge for services and must do that in order to survive. I think Mark is just trying to position Ubuntu favorably against the other guys. Whether he’s successful at that is another question. IMHO, Linux supporters and distros will have to work very very hard to offer a compelling reason for Windows users and sysadmins to switch, and I don’t feel that the current tactics of either Red Hat or Novell do that. In my mind, they have to have a compelling community edition in order to seed the earth in preparation for enterprise upselling.

I have long been a proponent of Ubuntu’s community-based approach, mostly because I feel that the larger distributions get it wrong and aren’t really helping win more market share for Linux.

Viva la Ubuntu!

More details coming very, very soon. Rest assured, this will happen, and things are coming together rather quickly.

You know you want to do it… Here’s a page where you can start.”Edgy Edge” will be the next version of Ubuntu, and it’s scheduled to ship this month. Kudos to the Ubuntu folks for sticking with the original release schedule – as you may recall, 6.06 was orginally supposed to be 6.04, but then it was delayed for 2 months. Sticking to Ubuntu’s mandated 6-month release cycle means that Edge will be 6.10, although I don’t think anyone would give them too much grief if they had decided to make this one 6.12 instead. Confused? Meh, just download it and don’t worry about it :@)Relax… don’t worry… have a homebrew install Ubuntu 😀 😀 😀

Now I know why someone asked if I knew this was a Blog of Note. Hey, it was only on the right-hand side of blogger.com under the big heading “Blogs of Note”. Nope, don’t know how I could have known that 🙁 Thanks to whoever put it there, and please forgive my ignorance.

The Ohio Linuxfest: Coming to an Ohio near you!

As a follow-up to my thoughts on Ubuntu, I posted my thoughts on Red Hat. Basically, Red Hat is the standard-bearer for commercial open source, and they appear to be stumbling in that role, suffering from an acute case of myopia and fighting battles that never really existed.

Forbes magazine online has been publishing a series of articles on open source. Most of them have been decent, but Daniel Lyons continues, annoyingly, to persistently get certain things wrong. Today’s article is on Shuttleworth and our favorite Linux distro, Ubuntu. I must say that it strikes me as odd that the same type of FUD used by RedHat and others against Ubuntu seems eerily similar to Microsoft’s FUD against Linux in general circa 1998 – 1999. Back then, it was all the rage for folks who didn’t think Linux would survive to talk about how the enterprise would never buy into something with no guaranteed viability. Of course, we see how that changed over time. In fairness to Ubuntu critics, things will certainly have to change in the future. After all, losing money can only be fashionable for a limited time. However, it would seem to me that Mark is looking at this as a long-term gig and understands what needs to happen. To me, it would seem that Ubuntu is in what I consider the pyramid-building phase – building a solid user base, some percentage of which will eventually represent annualized revenue as a result of upselling. The idea is that if your base is large enough (or wide enough, continuing with the pyramid analogy), the top of the pyramid will provide the revenue needed for future growth. This, of course, carries with it a certain amount of risk, the largest being that the height of your pyramid will be too small as the result of too few users converting to paying customers. In any case, I would estimate that Ubuntu is at least a full year away from really needing to convert users en masse to paid customers. Right now, they just want the largest base possible to build on. The larger the base, the more leverage you have.

Jordan Mantha, aka LaserJock, gave 2 great talks at The UbuCon, both on how to contribute to the Ubuntu project. One was more technical going into detail regarding the various aspects of Launchpad, and the other was targeted to a beginner audience, who wanted to learn what this Ubuntu thing is. He was kind enough to send his notes on the conference, so I’m posting them here: from Jordan: – Google rocked, it was awesome to see the place and see Google people there. Plus the food and rooms were really good – Great mix of attendees (beginners all the way to the CTO of Canonical). The “What non-geeks want” session was really good because lots of non-geeks showed up and in the end we were able to have some things to take to the developers to get into Edgy – Great talks. Mostly informal, quite a bit of discussion. I think the Beginner Track was especially successful. People seemed excited and wanted to make Ubuntu even better. However, it didn’t seem like an Ubuntu love-fest either. People had tough questions and discussion was often about to current problems in Ubuntu (and Linux in general) and how to overcome them – T-shirts, CDs and books, way cool! Overall, it was lots of fun and should definitely happen again. The only thing I would like to see for the next one is earlier planning. There were a few people I know who would have liked to have come (from all over the US) but needed more notice to make arrangements. If it is going to be after LWE again then it shouldn’t be too hard get the date out there for people. Thanks again for all the hard work, it’s not easy at all. Rock on!