Interesting read about the future of Ubuntu

[Avi Greenbury]

Robert Holtzman wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:53:13PM +0000, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> > In terms of the aims of the distro. For Ubuntu that's popularity, so
> > that seems a pretty good way to measure it. I do think that the
> > sorts of things that you need to do to gain popularity are
> > generally better effected under less bureaucratic sorts of
> > leadership, if only because of their efficiency and agility.
> 
> I think that's called a dictatorship. 
> 

Perhaps. It's probably more like any other private company, though,
just one with a very small board of directors. I don't think we should
stick too rigidly to country-governance analogies.

If Marks autocracy did appear to start to limit Ubuntu's adoption, I'm
sure it would stop. As with Steve Jobs and, back in the day, Bill
Gates. As it is, techy companies do need to move quickly, and having
one person making most of the decisions is a very effective way to do
that. 

Reverting to the contry-governance analogies, there is still a 'vote' in
that the 'citizens' may use a product from a different 'party'; you're
not stuck in Ubuntu, or indeed in Linux.

> If you mean it's unswerving devotion to open source only, I tend to
> agree, except I'm not quite so fanatical.

It's more an unswerving devotion to the choice to be free-only. I've
found it substantially easier to install non-free bits under Debian
(unhash all of sources.list) than under Fedora (go finding twelve or so
repos to get mp3s working), for example.
The biggie for me is that I'm never going to boot up a debian machine
and find it's decided I should be running some crackpot closed-source
graphics driver or something. 

-- 
Avi