Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

Congratulations to all 5 nominees to the CC, and thanks to all the Ubuntu members who voted to confirm their appointment. We now have a CC of 8 members (one membership will expire in a day or two) that covers substantially more time zones and has experience in more parts of the community. I’m looking forward to working with this team!

I’d like to thank Colin Watson for what can only be described as an extraordinary contribution of wisdom, energy and leadership during his tenure as one of our Founding CC members. Colin has accepted a nomination to the Technical Board, which we’ll act on shortly.

I’ve been on the road solidly for the past 10 days but itching to write about Dell’s announcement of pre-installed Linux for consumers.

This is a significant milestone, not just for Ubuntu but for every flavour of Linux and the free software community as a whole. While there are already a number of excellent companies like System76 offering Linux pre-installed, Dell represents “the industry”, and it’s very important for all of us that the industry sees a future for Linux on the desktop.

Device compatibility is the top issue people raise as a blocker of broad Linux adoption. Many hardware manufacturers don’t yet provide zero-day Linux drivers for their components, because of the perceived lack of market demand for those drivers. The Dell announcement is already changing that. Those manufacturers who are Linux-aware will have a significant advantage selling their components to global PC vendors who are shipping Linux, because those PC vendors can offer the same components across both Linux and Windows PC’s. That commonality reduces cost, and cost is everything in the volume PC market.

I believe that the free software approach is a better device driver development model for component and peripheral manufacturers, and that once they have learned how to work with the Linux community they will quickly ensure that their devices work with Linux as soon as, or before, they work with proprietary platforms. It will take some time to help those vendors understand the full process of working in a collaborative forum with the upstream kernel community, to ensure the widest possible benefit from their efforts. I’ve no doubt that vendors who start out thinking in proprietary terms will, over time, shift towards providing free drivers in partnership with the Linux community. I would credit companies like Intel for their leadership in that regard, it’s great to be able to show how their free drivers make it possible to reach the widest possible audience with their hardware.

The most important thing for all of us is the commercial success of Dell’s offering. A sustainable business in pre-installed Linux in Western markets will give credibility to the Linux desktop as well as providing an opportunity to build relationships with the rest of the consumer PC ecosystem. We don’t have to fix Bug #1 in order to make Linux a top-tier target for hardware vendors - we just need to show that there’s an economic incentive for them to engage with our community.

Ubuntu members, it’s time to expand the Community Council! After much discussion, we have five candidates for the CC-2007. In my capacity as project BDFL I’m nominating each of them for a 2 year term, and need your approval to get them onto the council.

There are 5 separate polls, one for each nomination, and all Ubuntu Members (developers, advocates, artists, forums contributors, whatever their contribution) get an equal say.

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers/+poll/cc2007-dholbach

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers/+poll/cc2007-mdke

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers/+poll/cc2007-mikeb

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers/+poll/cc2007-burgundavia

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers/+poll/cc2007-jsgotangco

I very much hope all of these candidates meet your approval! We will be able to cover more time zones and respond more quickly to community issues with this expanded governance board. That said, the CC is the most important body and you should feel empowered to vote accordingly if you feel a candidate is not suitable. It’s a secret ballot.

The doors are finally open to register for Ubuntu Live, our first global Ubuntu user conference. It is being hosted by O’Reilly Conferences in the prelude to OSCon in the same venue, and exists “to provide a meeting place for Ubuntu users, contributors, and partners–and the Ubuntu-curious”.

The list of sessions is already impressive (we had a phenomenal set of papers and presentation proposed, but had to whittle it down to this initial list). I’m sure there will be some additional sessions too. But the thing I’m most excited about is the list of speakers, so you will find me in the front row for every keynote on those dates.

Let’s meet up in Portland!

I was thrilled to see a slew of new Beryl packages land in Ubuntu yesterday.

There’s been a furious amount of activity from the MOTU and Beryl upstreams to get these packages ready for Feisty inclusion - cleaning up copyright issues as well as getting the packages themselves into first class order. Now the rest of us can test Beryl simply by:

- enabling universe in /etc/apt/sources.list (or, in Ubuntu, just use System->Administration->Software sources)

-  installing Beryl (”sudo apt-get install beryl”)

After I’d done this, I could get Beryl up pretty much immediately by just running “beryl-manager” at the command prompt.

A huge thank you to the folks who worked so hard to get this done in time for Feisty - lupine_85, racarr, imbrandon, pricechild, and others! The MOTU team’s response to this challenge was awesome.

Jonathan, I’m afraid you’ve misread the announcement that proprietary video drivers will not be switched on by default in Feisty. This was the result of a long telephone call including the entire TB and CC. During the discussion, we re-affirmed the Ubuntu policy of including proprietary drivers where these are required to enable essential hardware functionality.

We define “essential hardware” as functionality which exists widely and for which there are free software applications that are broadly useful, that we wish to include in Ubuntu’s default install, and which require full use of that hardware. The canonical example has always been wifi drivers, some of which only come in proprietary blobs, but which of course enable huge parts of the free software stack to Just Work. We have always shipped those, and intend to continue to do so.

The big discussion has been about whether or not 3D video functionality would be considered essential for Feisty. I and others do believe that 3D is an essential part of the modern desktop experience. It is difficult to buy a PC or laptop that does not include such hardware, and in terms of transistor count it’s almost as much as your CPU these days. However, when we reviewed the status of the free software applications that depend on that hardware functionality we found that they were not ready for inclusion by default in Feisty. Neither Compiz nor Beryl have the requisite stability and compatibility to be a default option in Feisty.

It was this which blocked the decision to enable proprietary video drivers by default, not an aversion to their inclusion. For better or worse, we already crossed that line right at the beginning of the Ubuntu project, and reaffirmed that policy during this debate. It is highly likely that Feisty+1 will see the inclusion of Compiz or Beryl by default, looking at their maturity and ongoing community involvement, and that will catalyse the decision to enable this hardware functionality by default too, even if that means using these proprietary drivers.

Now, the discussion did highlight a couple of key issues and result in a number of additional decisions:

1. We have not been forceful enough about our policy on software patents and other, similar threats to software freedom. As a result, we have joined FFII and other organisations that are fighting software patents (I am personally co-funding an EFF representative in Brussels to focus on this and other work related to software and content freedom). We will also shortly announce participation in another patent-related initiative aimed at preventing a hostile take-over of the free software space by those with entrenched software IP positions.
2. We will actively support Nouveau and other efforts to develop free software drivers that enable the requisite functionality. I am happy for folks working on these efforts to contact me directly or to follow the community channels in Ubuntu. Either way, we will provide financial and development support for those groups and will integrate their work as soon as it does the necessary hardware magic. Proprietary drivers are not the preferred solution and will be eliminated once the community delivers a free alternative.
3. We will work closely with the hardware vendors concerned, and part of that will be to continue to make the strong case in favour of free drivers.

In addition to all of this, we have restarted the effort to produce a flavour of Ubuntu that includes no proprietary drivers or firmware at all. In fact, this flavour will take an ultra-conservative approach to all forms of content on the .iso, whether that be artistic or code. More on that initiative later.

So, I’m sorry if this is not the resounding rejection of the drivers that you were looking for, but I hope that the discussion has proven open, comprehensive and ultimately reasonable.

Calling all Ubuntu developers! There are 5 very good nominees for the MOTU council up for confirmation, please do take the time to vote.

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-dev/+polls

The UI on those pages is a mess so please check carefully that you’ve voted in all 5 ballots, it takes just a few minutes. I opened up each of the ballots in a separate tab rather than trying to navigate between them. In each case you need to indicate that you approve or disapprove of the nomination. Voting is open to all ubuntu-dev and ubuntu-core-dev members.

Two of the nominations are for a one-year term, the others are for two year terms, so we can start getting some rotation of the council in a year’s time. If there are other worthy candidates please send your nominations to the tech board. Cheers!

After six developer summits, many more sprints and countless informal meetings amongst our developers, maybe it’s time to invite our users, customers and partners to the party? Together with O’Reilly we are thrilled to be inviting the WHOLE community, individual and corporate, technical and social, from small businesses and global giants, to join us in our first annual business conference - Ubuntu Live 2007. Planned to mesh well with the schedule for OSCON, there’s now another powerful reason to travel to Portland for the week of July 22!

If you’d like to make a presentation, there’s a call for participation that begs your attention. We’d like to here more about how you are using Ubuntu today and how it fits into your future plans, what’s working well and where we need to invest to smooth things out, what functionality is critical in future releases and what you think is overdone.

Quoting from the announcement today:

“The three-day event will aim to give participants all the knowledge they need to explore and set in motion the powerful features in Ubuntu and related applications. Program chairs are building an event that will offer expert-led tutorials, big-picture plenary gatherings, focused sessions, and a lively “hallway track” to bring participants face to face with the worldwide Ubuntu community. Ubuntu Live is happening July 22-24, 2007 in Portland, Oregon, right alongside the O’Reilly 2007 Open Source Convention (OSCON). Proposals are due by February 14, 2007.”

Yup, Valentines Day.

The initial list of areas of interest include:

• High performance computing
• Ubuntu in small and medium businesses
• Thin client deployments with Ubuntu
• Building Ubuntu derivatives
• Ubuntu in education
• Building Ubuntu-based appliances/products
• Point of sale, mobile, scientific research, banking, and other verticals
• Performance optimization in large enterprise
• Community contributions
• Ubuntu in the NGO/non-profit sector

Looking forward to seeing you there!

This is one post in a series, describing challenges we need to overcome to make free software ubiquitous on the desktop.

We have to work together to keep free software freely available. It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows to paying for shrink-wrapped Linux.

As free software becomes more successful and more pervasive there will be an increasing desire on the part of companies to make it more proprietary. We’ve already seen that with Red Hat and Novell, which essentially offer free software on proprietary terms - their “really free” editions are not certified, carry no support and receive no systematic security patching. In other words - they’re beta or test versions. If you want the best that free software can deliver, a rock solid, widely certified, secure platform, from either of those companies then you have to pay, and you pay the same price whether you are Goldman Sachs or a startup in Rio de Janeiro.

That’s not the vision we all share of what free software can achieve.

With Ubuntu, our vision is to make the very best of free software freely available, globally. To the extent we make short-term compromises, for drivers or firmware along the way, we see those as bugs, and ones that will be closed over time.

The dream for me is to be able to keep free software free of charge for the people who want it on those terms. To have people sharing the same high quality base and innovating on top of it - from Beijing to Buenos Aires - will create something that we’ve never had before, which is a completely level software playing field for every young aspiring IT practitioner, and every aspiring entrepreneur. I believe that’s how we will really change the world, and how we will deliver the full benefit of the movement started more than two decades ago by Richard Stallman.

This is a personal challenge - I benefited hugely from the existence of Linux in 1996, it was what made it possible (together with SSLeay, now OpenSSL) to get into the crypto game and ultimately found Thawte. Now my goal is to make Ubuntu sustainable so that it can continue to grow while at the same time making all of that opportunity, all of those tools, freely available to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

I’m glad to say our commercial support operation in Montreal is growing and that users are turning into customers, so the ball is rolling. As Ubuntu moves into the enterprise, with some of the world’s largest companies deploying it, I think we’re starting to show that it really is possible to have a platform that is both free and self-sustaining. We’ve come a long, long way from that first meeting in April 2004.

If this is a dream that inspires you too then get involved and contribute! We’ll take whatever time and input you can give - from documentation and advocacy to local training and support. Art, energy, code… it takes all sorts to build something as complete as Ubuntu can be.

This week’s Ubuntu Weekly News is, I think, the best ever. Just wanted to say “thank you” to the marketing team for pulling it together and making it the best bite-sized way to keep abreast of the amazing diversity of effort going on in our community. For those that haven’t tried it, there is an archive or you can subscribe to get a well-written weekly summary of what’s goin’ on.

Thanks, Corey & co!