Mark Shuttleworth Interview
derStandard.at published an interview they had with Mark Shuttleworth about many things Ubuntu, Sun, Microsoft, FOSS, and enterprise desktop related.
There’s a lot of comparisons between the new Ubuntu release (Feisty Fawn) and what Novell is doing with SLED, regarding AppArmor and Xen, i.e. mainly centralized management and enterprise readiness, and while Mark agrees that Novell is doing a great job and acknowledges that Ubuntu is not enterprise desktop ready, he does cite some great examples where Ubuntu is already used in massive deployments and running successfully though.
One of the main parts of the interview that really stood out for me, and which I think firmly indicates where Ubuntu is being positioned is the following from Mark:
“At the same time , the exciting challenge for me personally is to build something that the world has never seen before. Which is an enterprise quality infrastructure, that is freely available – globally – and has commercial support and a commercial ecosystem around it, but on the other hand is also available to people not willing to pay for support. It’s important for me to focus on that as a personal goal. ”
Clearly Mark has a great vision of where he wants Ubuntu to go, and while he is not the only person to determine the outcome and the path for Ubuntu I do think it’s refreshing to find such a strong commitment and vision in the Linux space, which seems to be getting more and more cluttered by yet another new distro almost monthly that does one thing better than any of the already numerous distributions available…
