Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Oct 2006 20:49 UTC, submitted by Eugenia
"Is Ubuntu an operating system? Last week at EuroOSCON, Mark Shuttleworth gave the closing keynote outlining what he believes are the major struggles faced by the open-source/free-software community. During his talk, it became clear that Ubuntu is trying to achieve a radical shift in the software world. Ubuntu isn't trying to be a platform for mass-market application software: it is trying to be the primary provider of both the operating system and all the application software that a typical user would want to run on his machine. Most Linux distributions are like this, and I think it is a dangerous trend that will stifle innovation and usability."
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Member since:
2006-04-21
I've only ever had dependency problems with rpm-based distros. I'm not too hot on them for that reason. I do use and like SuSE, but I keep to the software they have available. I've only got 80Gb on the disk I use in that machine anyway.
Sorry, but I don't accept that "for truly independent software companies it is bad news". If you work on Windows you are at the mercy of Microsoft. Apple may be better than this, but considering they control their architecture even more tightly than MS, I doubt it. The number of software companies that have been double-crossed by MS is legion. Allowing them to get into software like office suites and so on when they already have a monopoly on OSes was a big mistake, in my opinion.