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.

Well, that didn’t take long. Ars Technica is reporting that further vulnerabilities in the HD DVD content protection system have been uncovered. As I noted previously, any DRM system that depends on offline key distribution will be cracked. This latest vulnerability is one step closer to the complete dismantling of the HD DVD protection system.

How long before these guys ask the question: “what do our customers want”? From experience, 5-7 years.

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.

Read on for something that’s either hilarious or baffling, depending on which IRC channels you’ve been hanging out in. 5 hit die Lich indeed. And that’s just the left hand.

One of the very interesting issues-du-jour is the interaction between the three “legs” of “intellectual property”. Traditionally, those three are copyrights, patents and trademarks, and they have quite different laws and contractual precedents that are associated with them.

Recently, however, I’ve observed an increase in the cross-talk between them.

Classically, “software freedom” was about the copyright license associated with the code. But patents and trademarks are now being brought into the mix. For example, the discussion around Mozilla’s trademark policy was directly linking the concept of “freedom” to trademark policy as much as code copyright license. And much of the very hard debate in the GPLv3 process is about linkages between copyright license and relevant patents. And like it or not, the GPL is widely considered the reference implementation of freedom so GPLv3’s approach will be, for many, definitive on the subject.

In the Ubuntu community we’ve recently gone through a process to agree a trademark policy. This was recently approved by the Community Council, and the final draft is here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/trademarkpolicy

We’ve tried to strike a balance that keeps the trademarks of Ubuntu meaningful (i.e. if it says Ubuntu, it really is Ubuntu) but also recognizes the fact that Ubuntu is a shared work, in which many different participants of our community make a personal investment, and which they should have the right to share. So we’ve made explicit the idea of a remix - a reworking of Ubuntu that addresses the needs of a specific community (could be national, could be an industry like medical or educational) but preserves the key things that people would expect from Ubuntu, like hardware support and certification.

I’m sure this isn’t the last word on the subject, but I hope it’s a useful contribution to the debate, and would welcome other projects adopting similar licenses. For that reason, our trademark license is published under the Creative Commons Sharealike with Attribution license (CC-BY-SA).

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’ve long believed there’s a general phenomenon that underlies the free software movement. It’s “volunteer-driven, internet-powered collaboration”. I think it will ultimately touch every industry that has any digital workflow. Lets face it, that’s pretty much every industry.

The phenomenon has three key elements:

1. Freedom-driven licensing. If you want the magic, you have to set it free, because it’s the possibility of doing things for themselves that motivates people to build on your work. Just exposing the “source” (whether that’s code or other content) isn’t as interesting. Microsoft will show you the source to Windows these days, but they won’t give you the freedom to remix it.
2. Community. The net allows us to build a community of eyeballs and fingers based on personal interest rather than personal geography. It used to be that companies always had to do the best they could with local talent - or fly people in and deal with visa issues (that’s why Microsoft is a big proponent of greater H1-B visa allocations). Today we can find the best talent wherever it is, talent that is really personally interested in the underlying issue. And we call that talent pool “community”.
3. Revision control. I’m much happier to give you read AND write access to my stuff, if I can know who changed what, when, and easily revert it. And if that revision control allows cheap branching, then there can be multiple, parallel efforts to solve a particular problem.

Consider wikipedia in this light: it clearly meets all three criteria. Its content has a license that gives you genuine freedom. There is a big community that takes a personal interest in that content (actually, multiple communities, one which I call “the librarians” wants to make sure the institution itself is healthy, the others are communities that form around specific content, given the nature of wikipedia as a repository of knowledge). And of course every change is logged with some level of identity associated with it.

The linux kernel is the same, as are most of the components we associate with a GNU OS.

But why stop at just code and knowledge? I’m a big fan of the work of the Creative Commons, because they have taken to heart the idea of generalizing the licensing problem. And conferences like the Digital Freedom Expo in South Africa this week, which TSF has agreed to sponsor, are forums for discussing the ways in which these principles can apply to other domains. I would love to be part of the exploration of this phenomenon at all levels but Ubuntu is plenty of work for one lifetime. Nevertheless I think there are real opportunities, both social and commercial, in this idea.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I picked the Bazaar revision control project for use in our infrastructure, and why I sponsor it, is because I think it will be great to have a revision control system which can be adapted to manage LOTS of different kinds of content, not just code. And the Bazaar guys abstract things to an appropriate level to be able to do just this. I’d like to be able to see a house I like, and “bzr branch” the plans to that house, then share my modifications together with my experiences of living in that house so that others can merge the ideas they think worked best. All we need is bzr embedded in an architectural drawing application

A number of folks have asked about the new “radical freedom” flavour of Ubuntu that I hinted at in the announcement of work on Gutsy Gibbon.

Part of that initiative is focused on code freedom - going further than anybody else, though, beyond the CPU down to the level of the code running in firmware on your peripherals. We want to highlight the good work of hardware vendors who have completely embraced that idea. Of course - if you REALLY want freedom then you need to run that flavour on a SUN SPARC chip in an FPGA, in which case you would have freedom to modify even the CPU itself, and everything running on it. Raising the profile of genuinely free hardware is one way I hope we can reach the point where we no longer choose to include any binary drivers in vanilla Ubuntu.

But a broader part of this “radical freedom” thrust is to explore freedom in other domains. If we ship a PDF, do we ship the source document? If we ship a JPG, do we ship the source artwork? If we ship a nicely edited video, do we ship the original, unedited recording so you can really remix it? If we ship music, do we ship the samples and the separated tracks?

Potent medicine indeed. I’m looking forward to seeing how far we can push the concept, just inside the Ubuntu project.

Isn’t StumbleUpon wonderful?

…to Debian on the release of Etch!