OSNews

I think that this whole stuff about whether Ubuntu contributes to the kernel or not is not a non-issue.
Wouldn't it be better if Mr. Shuttleworth spent more money on improving Ubuntu instead of marketing?
Is Ubuntu marketing really hurting Windows market share or other distros' market share?
here is an interesting point of view: http://www.happyassassin.net/2008/10/28/why-i-dont-like-canonical/

Pretty decent analysis from Adam, and he's brought up a lot of points that I've came up with before about funding, where that funding comes from, how long it can last and what you can actually sell to people as a distributor. Mark always mentions services as a source of future funding. Adam says "What services?". There is no answer. He gives a decent example of Canonical's service page versus Red Hat's services page as to what they're up against.

There's an element of "It's not fair!" from Adam from the perspective of Mandriva, but he makes a fair point in that sucking away the market for other distributors contributing to the very same software Ubuntu uses doesn't strike me as a great idea - for Ubuntu or anyone else - all for something that, as we know, (and they've admitted) is not sustainable.

Unfortunately, you can't make these points to the vast majority because the hilarious luser posters on places like ZDNet and on SJVN's blog think that a trust fund is going to be set up with Mark's money that will keep Ubuntu going in perpetuity, without bringing in enough to fund itself ever, and it is going to live forever without all those pesky venture capitalists demanding their money back like they have done with so many before - Eazel and Ximian spring readily to mind. It's a really refreshing new take on how to keep a Linux desktop business afloat.

It's all so clueless it brings tears to the eyes. Linux Hater might have rode off into the sunset and caused a large rumpus, but he/she(?) was spot on in most cases.

The way you say it , is as if the marketing budget was more important then the development budget. Most of Canonnical marketing is done by it's user's. Red Hat , Novell and other's spend millions more on marketing to the business. It's a balance you need otherwise people don't know you exist.



Windows market share , it used to be only Microsoft OS on default hardware. The other's don't have any real interest on the general desktop market. Since Canonnical as opened the door a bit wider , others are getting in too. Strangely Linpus is almost never discussed but they are a company who's been default on major OEM for years.



It's not interesting , neither factual or accurate.

Adamw is a nice person , who do a decent job at Mandriva. He is also entitled is opinion and has earned the community respect.

That being said , AdamW was hired to take care of the MandrivaClub , not the Mandriva user club , The Mandrivaclub is now closed , costing hundred of million in development funding to Mandriva.

Mandriva is also a company that should be on par with Red Hat and Novell budget wise , But with a Management who pay itself millions when the company is in the red , who take paying user's customer money to divert in business product that don't sale and when you undermine and hide the product you have and make them only for France , you really don't have any business talking about other's people who's management at least make them be seen as #1 in mind share.

Ubuntu user's , customer's and partners are not scared that Cannonnical is going to fold every week.

No. One of the biggest reasons why Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva/whatever is less popular is because of less marketing. But face it: no matter what you do, unless you market your product, people aren't going to know about it. Marketing is important. Marketing is not evil, it is necessary and normal. Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva/etc fanboys fail to realize this, and as long as they fail to realize this they will always stay behind.

Perhaps that what he'll do once Ubuntu/Canonical is in the black.

Uh, Mandrake, Bussines Model, Keep company in business. Does not mix.

Canonical's marketing is successful because they do have a product to sell. As opposed to the other distros that have no nothing.

Ubuntu has the best hardware support, the best package manager and repositories, and one of the very best desktop experiences.

Somehow, companies and communities with 20 times as many people working for them than Canonical has employees, are unable to release a usable OS.

The other distros should be worried about their own internal organization if they are unable to put the code they themselves developed to good use and stop blaming Ubuntu for their demise.

Edited 2008-11-11 17:33 UTC

I don't like the tone of that blog text by Adamw. If I had to choose one word to sum it up, the word would obviously be: envy.

Adamw considers money to be the deciding factor in the success and development of Linux distributions and forgets all other facts. His excuse for Ubuntu becoming more popular than Mandriva is only: it has to be because of Shuttleworth's money. He forgets, for example, that Ubuntu is based on the solid Debian foundation, and thus had a very good infrastructure from the start and that it still depends on.

The problem for Mandriva, or for other commercial desktop distributions is not competing with Ubuntu. They had problems already before Ubuntu. The basic problem is that it is difficult to make money selling free software. many have tried and failed miserably. Mandrake / Mandriva tried many kinds of ways to do that too (Mandrakeclub, expensive pro versions of their distro etc.) but not very successfully, and pissed of many of its users in the process of doing that.

The Redhat way of doing Linux business has been succesfull, however.

There are also many quite succesful non-commercial Linux distributions: Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mepis, PCLinuxOS etc. Is Adamw pissed off also because neither do those distros follow the same business model as Mandriva does but are popular nevertheless? Ubuntu is as much a non-commercial as commercial distribution too, so not very much different from Mepis or PCLInuxOS, for example.

It is a free world and Linux (+GNU and other open source) is free software. Mark, Debian, Mepis, Mandriva and anyone can do what ever they like with it, as long as they follow the licenses of that software. And in this free world there's also nothing preventing Mandriva or others from becoming more popular than Ubuntu. Just because Ubuntu has sent people free CDs containg their distro is not enough for making anybody, not to mention former Madriva users, to convert to it.

It was quite enlightening to read that comment by Adamw anyway in order to understand the reasons for the large amounts of similar anti-Ubuntu and anti-Canonical comments elsewhere. Maybe it also tells something about Novell's GrekKH's motives too, I don't know? After all, in business sense Novell's SUSE distro is in quite a similar situation with Mandriva, although doing better financially. Simply, many people at Novell's SUSE business must have had similar emotions of envy when they watch Ubuntu's growing success.

I'm not sure that it is a non-issue, and Mark Shuttleworth tries to wave it away with something of very little substance:

Like what? In the free software world the ultimate argument, and answer, boils down to code. Ultimately, pushing free software, and the desktop forwards which is Ubuntu's main interest, boils down to making the software do what you feel it needs to do, feeding off others and taking a lead, taking an interest in how your kernel performs in a desktop setting and getting code into various desktop projects to move the Linux desktop forwards. I don't see Canonical doing what other distributors aren't, and it can't all be run by marketing.

For example, we get this question:



and this as the answer:


How can an office suite and an e-mail client not be a focus for a desktop focused organisation?! Regardless of the specific applications, how can that functionality not be a focus? If it's too difficult to do what you want by yourselves then collaborate more with others or choose projects where the burden is far less, but that can be improved at a faster pace.

This is where he really doesn't get it:



and the answer:


Hmmmmm, why would Microsoft do that Mark? That's your job. People just want to be able to install some non-free apps so they can use your platform.

You've got a piece of software sitting there that would allow lots of people to potentially get lots of software up and running on Ubuntu, some of which have been abandoned by newer versions of Windows, and give developers and users an 'upgrade' path by potentially allowing them to import existing functionality and keep on programming for your platform into the future - and you're going to say "Thanks but no thanks"?! (Mind you, you can level that at other distributors, but Mark chose to produce a desktop)


Yer. Very slowly ;-).

OK, you want to channel people to your own native applications, and you can certainly still do that by paying attention to legacy applications (what few you have - see above), but you've potentially got a very large disaffected userbase there that you're passing up completely.

What does Mark think is really needed?



Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

When Steve Ballmer got up on stage and shouted "Developers, developers, developers, developers" I think a lot of people claimed to know what that meant, but when it comes to putting it into practice no one has a clue. In short, I wouldn't hang your hat on Ubuntu ;-).

Edited 2008-11-10 23:54 UTC

No. A large part of a software's success is thanks to marketing, whether free or not. Firefox wouldn't be where it is today were it not for both marketing and technical merit. Chrome wouldn't instantly have gained 1%-2% market share were it not for both marketing and technical merit. If you leave out the marketing and rely on technical merit only, you will not become successful.

And this is what you anti-Ubuntu fanboys keep failing to realize. Marketing is important. It is not evil, it is necessary. You are constantly underestimating the need for marketing, which is why Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva/whatever will always stay behind. You are constantly complaining about Ubuntu being a leech/being unfair/taking all the credits/etc but when will you stop complaining and actually do something about it? Complaining is always easy, but until you start improving your marketing, you really have no right to criticize Ubuntu for their success.

You are not fair to the man, I'm afraid, and read into Shuttleworth's comments claims and words he didn't have and never said.

He obviously doesn't think so and never said anything like that anywhere. The only thing he meant - also adding the words "I'm afraid" to the comment - is that they may unfortunately not have lots of resources to put into OpenOffice and Evolution upstream development now, although they are already taking some part in the OpenOffice development too:

Shuttleworth:

So the restricted Ubuntu resources concentrate on integrating software, not so much on usptream development. It is good thing to focus, you know... Neither does OpenOffice.org team take a huge part in the development of, say, Linux kernel, or of your favorite Linux distro...

I also don't quite understand what is pissing you off in Mark's reply to the Codeweavers / CrossOver / MS Office on Ubuntu related question?

Ubuntu is free, both in money and as in free software. MS Office is not free in neither sense of the word, nor is there a Linux version of it. Of course it would be a non-optimal and extremely difficult thing to try to make MS Office for Windows to run on Linux fluently and withouth bugs using some unstable and easy to break Windows emulation layer on top of Ubuntu. Besides, the commercial alternative supporting it, CrossOver Office is commercial software. If you want to buy it as an Ubuntu user, nobody is preventing you. According to a review it should run fine on Ubuntu too. Ubuntu just doesn't have it by default because: A. it is not free software, B. it costs money.

How many other Linux distros have MS Office support by default? Xandros? Not sure how bugfree their CrossOver solution is? Xandros also costs money partly just because of that reason, while Ubuntu wants to stay free. If you want to use commercial proprietary software, you buy it yourself - that simple.

He also adds:

But Shuttleworth and Canonical themselves don't have endless resources to put into such projects as making a complicated non-native MS Office suite run seamlessly and without endless bugs and crashes on Linux. And like Shuttleworth says, Microsoft itself could lend a helping hand too.


Nowhere he claims that ipod compatibility would be of highest priority in the Ubuntu development. He simply tells what do potential Ubuntu users tell him are among the biggest obstacles for not using Ubuntu yet. It is not Shuttleworth's fault if so many of those people seem to love their iPods and Britney Spears MP3 collections so dearly...

But, obviously supporting iPods on Ubuntu would be way easier than running MS Office on Ubuntu, so iPod support may also be a much more realistic short term goal of those two now.

Edited 2008-11-11 19:18 UTC