Community response ...

[Jim Cheetham]

On Oct 18, 2004, at 8:59 PM, Jonathan wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 11:22:20PM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>> No sensible enterprise would>engage in a large-scale deployment
>> of pre-release software without serious >consideration and
>> commitments.
>
> They use Windows, don't they? ;-)

That made me smile :-)

Many organisations are not "sensible" - even the ones with good IT 
managers. At this stage in Ubuntu's existance, Matt is right that 
large-scale rollouts are unlikely. However, there is a lot of press out 
there about Ubuntu, and it's right now that the early adopters will be 
having a look to see if it's got the promise of being suitable (it has 
- I think it's an excellent desktop even at this stage).

For businesses of the types I've had experience with (all IT-oriented, 
from 3-man-bands to multinationals), the back-end servers are either 
Debian or support-contract-backed unixes (RedHat, SuSE, solaris for the 
hardware at least, etc). I don't know yet how Ubuntu will impact on the 
server market - I expect it will steal a goodly number from Debian, in 
order to be 'stable' with more recent apps - but I'm very confident 
that it will clean-sweep the desktop usages of the above OSs ...

It would be unfortunate if the early adopters, who are evaluating 
Ubuntu technically (by app choice, security upgrading and so on), will 
be ignored because of non-technical reasons. The corporate environment 
has survived onslaught by Tux and SuSE the chameleon without adverse 
comment, it can stand a certain level of 'cute' rather than 'serious' 
... but I'm sure there are limits.

Personally, I'm not offended - my background is European - but I don't 
want those pictures displayed on my machine. I'm capable of changing 
it, sure, but I actually really liked the abstract '3 people' logo, and 
think it's a good one.

-jim