It's a miracle when...

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 11:38:32AM -0500, Richard A. Johnson wrote:

> QUOTE 1::
> In the Dell keynote at LinuxWorld, company CTO Kevin Kettler demonstrated how 
> easy it was to set up virtual machines on Ubuntu. Aboutboul noted that Ubuntu 
> had made use of the "libvert" tool, which actually originated with Fedora. 
>  "Every innovative thing is coming from Fedora," Aboutboul said. "We've been 
> telling this to people all along and libvert is one example. Everyone else 
> pulls from us; we had it first."

It's pretty much true. While Ubuntu scores heavily on integration, 
polish and the improvement of the user experience, we're only average at 
producing new technology. Upstart is an example, but we're still not 
taking any real advantage of its functionality. The combined live 
CD/installer is probably the best example of us doing something new and 
exciting at the technological level. If you compare us to Red Hat 
(AIGLX, compiz, a new firewire stack, bluetooth) or Novell (Mono, large 
chunks of the kernel USB code, XGL), we've added little in comparison.

This isn't necessarily a criticism of Ubuntu. We've shown that much of 
the value users want doesn't come from new technology - it comes from 
making existing technology work better.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org