Funny Thing about Shuttleworth

[tonyr1988]

I read something in Linux Format Magazine about Mark Shuttleworth (fyi, "creator" of Canonical / Ubuntu). It was an interview with Jeff Waugh, who recently left Canonical (on good terms) to work on GNOME. He said:


Mark was actually on his way to Antarctica on an ice-breaker, and he took six months of Debian mailing list archives with him, because he knew that his downtime on this ice-breaker would be pretty boring, so he could do some reading. His goal with that was to find out who were the great Debian contributors that he wanted to employ.

Also...


Well, we sat down and Mark laid out his vision. The first thing he said was, "I want to create a Linux distribution." I was pretty much ready to stand up and walk out, because at that time it sounded like the stupidest thing ever. But then he started explaining his vision behind it, the model and what it all meant. Even back then he was absolutely clear on things like six-monthly releases, Gnome desktop, single CD, making it absolutely free to redistribute, building support networks on top, distributed revision control and building up the operational effectiveness of the developers working on the distribution, going for a completely different model from what the other Linux distributions had and building it on top of Debian.

[Burgresso]

Sounds like a smart guy.

[qalimas]

While Mr. Shuttleworth is quite sneaky, he is very, very smart =) You have to respect that, and the fact he gave us Ubuntu, and pays to have CDs shipped to us out of his own pocket =D

[bastiegast]

While Mr. Shuttleworth is quite sneaky, he is very, very smart =) You have to respect that, and the fact he gave us Ubuntu, and pays to have CDs shipped to us out of his own pocket =D

Why is he sneaky?

[qalimas]

Why is he sneaky?

His attempts on the Open SUSE developers and such (which was a pretty interesting post..) :-D

Edit: For reference, I did not mean sneaky to be offense ;)

[Koori23]

I wouldn't call that being sneaky... I'd call that seeing a oppurtunity and trying to make the best of it. You are only as good as the people you surround yourself with and many of those OpenSuse guys are very smart.. Why not try to recruit them?

[RAV TUX]

vulgarities edited from post....please refrain from using vulgarity

[Johnsie]

Well, it is pretty ruthless trying to take developers like that but you dont make millions in business by being a nice guy all the time. However since all distros pretty much use a lot of the same software it doesn't really matter who works for who as long as the code is being shared out it doesn't really matter.

[steven8]

I don't think Mark was being ruthless or sneaky. If he was sneaky and ruthless, he would have been going to those developers on the sly, trying to provoke them into leaving Suse. Instead, he posted a wide open for everyone to see message. Nothing sneaky or ruthless at all. I don't believe he is 'trying to win at any cost'. He is a guy with a vision who wants to see it a reality. A vision, I might add, which could benefit many people, not just Mark Shuttleworth.

I'd call that being a pretty good guy.

[kylevan]

self-appointed-beneficient-dictator-for-life represent!

[aysiu]

I agree with steven8. Sneaky is going behind people's backs. Posting on a mailing list for all to see is not sneaky. If that's trying to be sneaky, that's failing miserably.

[amessina]

Shuttleworth is the Anti-Gates, don't you think?

[Soarer]

Shuttleworth is the Anti-Gates, don't you think?

=D>