Mark Shuttleworth launched the Ubuntu Foundation on July 1, 2005 following the first release of Ubuntu, a Debian-based operating system in October 2004. Today the latest version of this has been released known as "Feisty Fawn".
It's quite a journey to observe and for the last couple of months I've been getting my hands dirty with the Fawn as it finished the final stages of testing and in the process have been learning what is Mark's Ubuntu.
In today's world of software it is more than apparent that it's not what you know, as it is often commoditized knowledge but what you do with what you know. Leaders in business and beyond often talk of empowerment - how empowerment of the employee/manager enables their business to grow and out-perform.
If this empowerment were taken for granted what could one expect - I often find myself sharing one particular thought in conversation these days - "it's about the wisdom of the crowds in the age of participation".
My first glimpse at Linux was when I got my P3 Vaio
dual-booting Suse in '2000 and it lead me to believe that from an
enthusiast's perspective it was fun but in relation to desktop computing Microsoft gave me all I needed
and a whole heap of support as well as an established, synergistic
community of solution providers, all thanks to Microsoft's partner strategies and user community initiatives. Today, thanks to the Ubuntu community and Mark's team at Canonical this has been replicated for me in the Ubuntu community.
I pondered briefly on discussing the fact that this is all 'free' to me as is much of what Microsoft provides but I don't want to highlight the significantly lower costs a community model incurs to deliver services than one which must fund all contributions - what I'd prefer to focus on is what the advantages of the community model are and how these can compete with the existing one as delivered by Microsoft. This in itself is another blog post but for a taster you really need to read this.
Having first-hand witnessed the methods and processes that support the Ubuntu community I believe this distribution has a very promising future ahead of it. There are lots of blogs appearing from people who have decided to do a thorough investigation of moving from Windows to Ubuntu and we appear to be coming to similar conclusions.
Computing just got fun again and more so, the rules have changed once again in the IT industry as demonstrated by the success of Ubuntu as an operating system, community and organisation.
Perhaps Microsoft's missed opportunity and its Achilles heel will always be that today we know so much more about the value of community, the power it possesses and the desire to belong to what I believe identifies who we are - like our brand choices.
PS. The next version of Ubuntu is in 6 months - and the next release (v4) of KDE - the desktop environment I 'chose' to run on Ubuntu will be including the Nepomuk project - so I finally get what I've been waiting for which is a semantic desktop computing experience; I had hoped this would be possible with Longhorn's WinFS architecture as promised by Microsoft during the PDC in 2003 but I gave up waiting in 2006 when it was evident that with the new branding from Longhorn to Vista that restructuring was afoot and further delay was inevitable.
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Last night I attended a very interesting talk at the British Computer Society on open source technology and health care. Here's some links that were shared during the talk.
So why multimedia-assisted requirements analysis you may ask - well during the Q&A I was keen to highlight that there currently does not exist a means for the technical community (open or otherwise) to actually 'get at' the requirements of general practices (GP) for software solutions. As part of this exercise it became apparent to me that one technique for requirements gathering would be to use multimedia i.e. a handheld video recorder to capture the 'working practices' at a GP.
This approach I believe has merit as one of the common issues we face, as architects/developers, is translating working practices into requirements - by 'shooting' videos, doing some packaging with tools such as Celtx (i.e. you might wish to blur confidential information) and sharing these on sites such as YouTube would enable the technically illiterate to actually prepare content at zero-cost (plus their time of course) that we could use to derive and model solutions that were fit-for-purpose.
It would also bring an intense spotlight on the actual issues GPs face with the current tools they use to get their work done. Does it really make sense for digital patient records to be printed out onto paper and re-entered into the exact same system when patients transfer from one GP to another - ludicrous is one thought coming to mind.
It came as no surprise that the speaker was flabbergasted at the continued cycle of broken promises relating to software projects that are never deployed due to the politics and ineptitude of the people in charge to deliver this work - how long does one wait? 10+ years is the average it seems and still no service.
What is perhaps the most depressing symptom of this poor performance is a totally disenfranchised community of NHS managers who are absolutely fearful of getting their hands dirty on an IT project because of the career risks it creates - no one wants to be known for losing £2.5m (value for example only) of budget on a failed IT project - and there have been many in the NHS yet a few people have continued to profit from this fiasco.
Today, we face an uphill struggle in trying to convince our government of the new era in software evolution - we have a pressing need to innovate around the indemnification challenge when someone like Mr. Granger wishes to ensure that when he engages with a provider that they assume liability - where this applies to software that is 'open' there seems to be an awful disconnect that is fueled by marketing spin - the problem is that this is costing taxpayers millions of pounds but no one listens because the debate is stuck in the realms of 'technical choices' as opposed to that of 'insightful strategy'.
For the entrepreneurs amongst you there is an opportunity to create a brokerage that provides indemnification for local open source providers targeting healthcare providers in their region that supports many more players, enriching and delivering choice to GPs, than those with the might and budget going after the bigger deals.
Comments welcomed, especially any links that corroborate or contradict these opinions