Ask Matt Asay About Ubuntu and Canonical 310
A week after the announcement that open source advocate and blogger Matt Asay is leaving Alfresco for Canonical, in the role of COO, Matt has agreed to answer your questions about his role at Canonical, his vision for the future of Ubuntu, or the prospects for open source as we begin to emerge from recession. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. (Disclaimer: Matt is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet.)
Adoption Stories and Influences (Score:5, Interesting)
Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people, do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?
Your Version of Their Vision (Score:5, Interesting)
This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment "doesn't mark a change of direction," perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.
As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like "I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks" but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?
What about WINE and Mono? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm curious as to what efforts will be made to keeping frameworks like Mono, Java and WINE current in existing releases. It seems that by the time a release happens these frameworks are already several versions behind. It would be nice to have an "edge" set of repositories that keep up with this in addition to backports that is.
Enterprise Versus Desktop Emphasis (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft Pac-Man : gobble! Ubuntu? gobble! (Score:2, Interesting)
Now that Mark Shuttleworth has stepped aside, how long until the Microsoft coyotes come in and either implant a new CEO or insert stealth ex-employees into the fold to subvert Ubuntu or suddenly announce a new pact with Microsoft and Novell? How long can we expect Ubuntu to continue free of Redmond's grasp? Many won't speak of this, but you know the feelings are there. Just you wait, the "let's make a deal" Microsoft fairies will swarm in and around Ubuntu eventually.
: We promise we won't sue you today for the hamburger you eat from out of our interoperability kitchen, but we may always change our position once you become addicted to our hamburgers!
Ubuntu and KDE (Score:5, Interesting)
Will Ubuntu continue to treat KDE as a second-class citizen?
I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?
Quality Control (Score:5, Interesting)
Revenue (Score:5, Interesting)
Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a protibable vendure to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?
Smarthphones (Score:3, Interesting)
Smartphones have become another computing device. There is Android, and there is MeeGoo. Ubuntu has missed the oportunity of creating a phone version of Ubuntu like Apple did with iPhone OS....what is Canonical going to do in this area? Create a phone version of Ubuntu and hope that some vendor chooses it? Support Android? Or Meego?
Business apps? (Score:2, Interesting)
Continue standard six month releases? (Score:2, Interesting)
The last few Ubuntu releases have been plagued with bugs on release. Do you support steady releases every six months, and what can Ubuntu to do improve from a quality perspective?
The GNOME community is fragmenting. (Score:5, Interesting)
More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon.
Even if it wasn't as great as everyone was expecting, at least KDE managed to get their 4.0 release out the door quickly, and have been making great improvements on it since then. We see them innovating, and creating a desktop environment that keeps getting better and better. Their underlying toolkit, Qt, keeps improving rapidly thanks to the efforts of Nokia and others.
GNOME, on the other hand, has been spinning its wheels for years. It has no real leadership, and we aren't seeing any innovation out of them. GTK+ is basically in maintenance mode.
We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then.
KDE & LXDE (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a few questions as a loyal *buntu user:
1) Do you feel Kubuntu's 'Operation Timelord' is a step in the right direction for the distribution? If so, why do you feel it was allowed to slip far enough to warrant a complete overhaul?
2) Do you see Kubuntu & Xubuntu becoming purely community-supported distros with Canonical focusing solely on Ubuntu desktop & server?
3) With Xubuntu's memory & CPU requirements being on par with Ubuntu's and Mark Shuttleworth's invite 'to become a self-maintained project in the Ubuntu community' (according to lxde.org), does this signal an end to Xubuntu as a whole or at the very least the 'lightweight' *buntu distribution?
Re:Adoption Stories and Influences (Score:5, Interesting)
I like linux, I like programming on a linux machine, I like learning on a linux machine but I can't really game on a linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market.
What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?
What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?
Re:The GNOME community is fragmenting. (Score:3, Interesting)
I do think that Qt is a better framework to build upon, but I think there is room for the Gnome desktop.
They have different goals and philosophies. I think KDE 4.4 right now is a far more advanced desktop than Gnome 2.x, but the work on Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell shows that they do have an eye towards the future.
However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?
It would make it far easier to apps to fit in naturally with both Gnome and KDE desktops. Qt ships with a Clearlooks engine out of the box. You could build a Gnome desktop on top of Qt that has the design and appearance Gnome developers strive for, with better portability and better performance.
If such a huge migration were ever going to happen or work, Ubuntu would have to spearhead it.
Freedom, second? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mobile platform plans (Score:4, Interesting)
What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro?
With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardisation means that users are more willing to experiement with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?
What does a COO do? (Score:3, Interesting)
What exactly does a COO do, at an organization like Canonical? I don't mean vague organizational goals, like make us wealthy and cool, but specifics.
I do not mean rephrase the wikipedia entry for COO, but how would you APPLY the wikipedia entry for COO at Canonical?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_operating_officer [wikipedia.org]
Re:Freedom, second? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will PulseAudio be FORCED on us in 10.4 like 9.10? (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been using Ubuntu since 5.10. Sound used to work well for me, including reasonably low latency and mixing. In recent years, I've had to remove PulseAudio from every install I do, because it increases audio latency, uses more resources on my limited hardware, and sometimes breaks program functionality altogether (like Orca).
In 9.10, if you attempt to remove PulseAudio, your volume control breaks. If you try to change the sound system in preferences/sound, it refuses to open, too. This is really unacceptable.
I can tell you that the average user does not care about routing audio over the network, or combining 2 stereo sound cards to make a surround system. We just want the audio to come out of the speakers as fast as possible while using the lowest amount of resources possible. That is all.
Pulseaudio may help some folks, and that's fine. I just don't want this thing shoved down my throat.
Alfresco is not open source (Score:1, Interesting)
The same way as he used to push the hidden proprietary-ness of the Alfresco stack?
Alfresco isn't really open source --if you want support from any of the Alfresco vendors, you have to pay for the commercial version first. That includes the upgrade headaches and all that goes with it. You can't get Alfresco support on the open source version. Period.
Posting anonymously since my project affiliation might make this sound like a personal attack, we were badly burnt by Alfresco in the past, so yes -- I'm a bit bitter. But really, look into how Alfresco is structured. It has little to do with the spirit of open source, and the free version lags behind the commercial version at all times.
Re:The GNOME community is fragmenting. (Score:1, Interesting)
KDE needs to be kept out of the open source distribution. The desktop itself is very good and perhaps the most technically advanced today but it suffers from NIH syndrome and developer lock-in which leads to "okay" applications and zero portability:
Since by targeting KDE you have to use Qt which is a very good cross-platform toolkit, there is no reason to write separate UIs for every platform (which is the proper way to do multiplatform). Unfortunately, KDE uses specific libraries which are unavailable for other platforms than Linux, making your apps portable "as soon as they have ported KDE to Windows". And even if you wanted to make non-KDE frontends, Qt makes it difficult by being quite invasive (it expects you to use its own collection types, for instance). Which is why there is not a single KDE app that runs on anything but KDE.
Also, since you pretty much have to use C++, Qt and KDevelop, this means only the developers setting out specifically to write a KDE app will do it, while the people who want to write a good program are more likely to use something else. This is why all the truly remarkable applications use GTK: see Transmission and Inkscape.
(Also I think that the GNOME community isn't nearly as vulnerable as you make it out to be because many who develop for GNOME don't see themselves as GNOME developers but that's another discussion. I also agree that XFCE is better than GNOME.)