Mark Shuttleworth interview

Linux Ubuntu
Monday, October 19th 2009, 14:01
No Comments

Golem.de has published a two part interview with Mark Shuttleworth (Wikipedia entry, his blog), the founder of Canonical Ltd., the company that is behind Ubuntu. Some of the questions he tried to answer were:

  • Where do you see the Linux desktop today?
  • Does MacOS X offer a better user experience than Linux?
  • Does KDE do a better job than GNOME?
  • Besides look & feel there are still problems with multimedia codecs. Isn’t that more important than the look & feel of the desktop?
  • You already had a look at Windows 7… What is Microsoft doing better than Linux?
  • How important are netbooks for the success of Linux?
  • Reports seem to indicate that many users replace their Linux netbooks with Windows models.

The answers are sincere and very straight forward. Regarding the question about multimedia codecs, there is some ambiguity surrounding it. The problems with multimedia codecs in Linux are not related to the ability of Linux to play multimedia content or not, but whether the codecs for proprietary formats should be included by default in distributions or not. And the answer here is no, they shouldn’t be included by default in Ubuntu (or any other distribution) because of patents and copyright restrictions. Therefore the user should take the decision of installing or not the codecs for various proprietary formats. And that is really easy in Ubuntu.

On the 22nd of October the poll I launched on the 15th will close. After analysing the results I will post an article that should try to respond to all of the Windows users’ misconceptions regarding Linux by showing them how easy and nice is to use free software.

Watch what Mark has to say. It might help you decide. :)

You might also like:

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>


CODE EXAMPLES: When you want to include source code or terminal output, please use the the following tags like in the next example:

    [language]
    code lines
    [/language]

where you substitute language with the programming laguage used throught the code example (for terminal output that would be bash), e.g:

    [bash]
    /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
    [/bash]

To see a list of all the supported languages, please check this page.

If you want to include code bits inline, please use the code tags like in the following example:

    The <code>$USER</code> variable holds the current logged in username.

Recent Posts

Projects that I support

Recent Comments

  • nope said:
    yeah that was my first thought too, but: mount: warning: seems to be mounted read-write. too bad, would have been just perfect. more»
  • Klaus Deiss said:
    Dear Radu, I tried it on Ubuntu 10.0.4.2 and 10.0.4.3 with different kernel versions (amd64 server 2.6.32 kernel). No... more»
  • scompo said:
    Nope.. Now it’s not working again.. This printer it’s a real pain in the butt.. The other hp printer I had... more»
  • Dmitrij said:
    Thank you Peter and Patrice. Could you please post the updated script? more»
  • hd_flash_pains said:
    didn’t work for me more»

Recent Tweets

Geek blogs

Romanian blogs

Bear