Feisty?
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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