Sam Varghese : Mark Shuttleworth's big mistake

[grahammechanical]

You have to pity the poor guy. He has to make a living. And as he cannot create he can only criticise. Who is the parasite living off Linux if it is not the journalist.

Mind you, when I read Mark's blog I do wonder if he is writing in English. He does have a way of expressing himself that does not make it easy for people who do not know what he is talking about to understand what he is saying.

Well, he does that to me, at any rate. And I am from the East end of London. And I never went to university. So, what can you expect.

Regards.

[KiwiNZ]

You have to pity the poor guy. He has to make a living. And as he cannot create he can only criticise. Who is the parasite living off Linux if it is not the journalist.

Mind you, when I read Mark's blog I do wonder if he is writing in English. He does have a way of expressing himself that does not make it easy for people who do not know what he is talking about to understand what he is saying.

Well, he does that to me, at any rate. And I am from the East end of London. And I never went to university. So, what can you expect.

Regards.

He is from South Africa, they cannot even play Rugby there

[sffvba[e0rt]

He is from South Africa, they cannot even play Rugby there

Grrrrr.....


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[KiwiNZ]

\\:d/

[sffvba[e0rt]

\\:d/

Oh look ,it is the Bryce Lawrence William Webb Ellis Trophy...


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[bra|10n]

That's too good,

[Peripheral Visionary]

Mr. Shuttleworth "brought Linux to the people" with greater success than others who have done the same. There's Mepis doing the same thing, but without the greater success and popularity that Ubuntu enjoys. There's PCLinuxOS doing the same thing, and doing it very well, but not enjoying the same popularity as Ubuntu.

The reason is all the money that Mister Shuttleworth has been able to invest in the project. Anyone could have done what Red Hat and Canonical have done to bring Linux to the desktop as well as the server market. Doing so was a big risk of private capital and if Mister Shuttleworth finally gets some meaningful return on his years of investment in Ubuntu, I'm all for it. We see Mint doing similar stuff now and no one says a word. Red Hat has done it all along and no one objects. The only difference is that Canonical is "non-profit," and somehow that's supposed to mean that it's unethical for Mister Shuttleworth to recover some small portion of his massive investment over the years? Ridiculous. Look at the six-figure salaries of some non-profit corporations that rely entirely on donations and volunteers! Why is that okay but somehow it's not okay for Mister Shuttleworth because he "didn't invent Linux and FOSS?"

Perhaps his only mistake was founding Canonical as a non-profit instead of a commercial enterprise.

[Mikeb85]

Mr. Shuttleworth "brought Linux to the people" with greater success than others who have done the same. There's Mepis doing the same thing, but without the greater success and popularity that Ubuntu enjoys. There's PCLinuxOS doing the same thing, and doing it very well, but not enjoying the same popularity as Ubuntu.

The reason is all the money that Mister Shuttleworth has been able to invest in the project. Anyone could have done what Red Hat and Canonical have done to bring Linux to the desktop as well as the server market. Doing so was a big risk of private capital and if Mister Shuttleworth finally gets some meaningful return on his years of investment in Ubuntu, I'm all for it. We see Mint doing similar stuff now and no one says a word. Red Hat has done it all along and no one objects. The only difference is that Canonical is "non-profit," and somehow that's supposed to mean that it's unethical for Mister Shuttleworth to recover some small portion of his massive investment over the years? Ridiculous. Look at the six-figure salaries of some non-profit corporations that rely entirely on donations and volunteers! Why is that okay but somehow it's not okay for Mister Shuttleworth because he "didn't invent Linux and FOSS?"

Perhaps his only mistake was founding Canonical as a non-profit instead of a commercial enterprise.

Canonical isn't a non-profit. It is a private commercial enterprise. It's simply been more charitable than most commercial enterprises. I agree with the rest of your post.

Mark Shuttleworth gets the most criticism because Ubuntu has the highest popularity. Sometimes I think Linux users want Linux to remain obscure.

[Peripheral Visionary]

Canonical isn't a non-profit. It is a private commercial enterprise. It's simply been more charitable than most commercial enterprises. I agree with the rest of your post.

Oh, thanks! I stand corrected. And since Canonical is a commercial enterprise, it makes even less sense that people object to efforts to make it profitable.

Mark Shuttleworth gets the most criticism because Ubuntu has the highest popularity. Sometimes I think Linux users want Linux to remain obscure.

Maybe it's just one of those things about being on top. Others want to be Number One and when they can't do it on merit, they try to get there by bashing whoever happens to have the top spot.

[jrog]

Ubuntu/Canonical is a business venture not some sixties hippy flash back.

This.

Yup. All this anti-capitalist attitude amongst Linux users is silly. Fact is, Linux needs to be sustainable. . . . But no, most of the 'free software' advocates living lavishly in our '1st world' countries are hung up on 'ideology', not realizing that Canonical and Ubuntu have taken the pragmatic route, and is looking to be a real enabling technology - not simply an ideological toy...

And this.

I don't mind there being some form of money being generated by the OS. Obviously the developers need to get some living out of it as well.

But here's the thing.. Ubuntu is just a compilation of software developed by other people. It's not as if Canonical themselves "created" it. Well, Unity is their baby, but the rest is just branded works of others...

I don't think I understand this criticism. The same might be said of Red Hat, but, as far as I know, it isn't. (You might say that Red Hat has contributed more code upstream; maybe so, but that doesn't change the fact that much of the software upon which its product is built still consists of software developed by other people, or the fact that, whether Canonical has contributed as much code upstream or not, they have still contributed a lot to developing their own particular product, Unity being just one example.)

This last part isn't directed to anyone in particular, but I have to say that I really don't get the opposition to almost anything commercial among Linux users. Even the GPL itself is perfectly fine with commercial software. What's more, Canonical has seemingly spurred the most major advances toward producing what many Linux users have apparently wanted for years: a (mostly, depending on what you install) FOSS desktop OS that is a real, workable alternative to the major proprietary OSes, in at least the sense that it is much more widely known about, used, and available to those outside of the "Linux geek culture" (even coming preinstalled on a not-insignificant, though also not massive, number of computers put out by major manufacturers) than other attempted FOSS desktops. It seems to have made some fairly substantial strides on behalf of Linux. Valve's desire to bring Steam to Linux via Ubuntu is only one recent example of something coming to Linux that likely would not have come if Canonical was not doing what it was doing. Probably, this is due at least in part to the fact that Canonical is involved in commercial endeavors.