[fsug-thrissur] The Linux Astraunet
- From: Tinku Sampath <tinkusam@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bestfriendsatmca2k3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, bestfriendsatmca2k3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, fsug-thrissur@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, measscollege@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:09:32 +0530
The Man Behind Ubuntu
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Interview for 'LUG Radio', released 2005-02-14:
Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu Marketing
- http://www.lugradio.org/download.php/episode/19/version/ogg-low
- Time: 07:05-22:14
-
Playing: lugradio-s2e7-170105-low.ogg
Ogg Vorbis stream: 1 channel, 16000 Hz
Title: Season 2 Episode 7
Artist: LugRadio
Date: 17.01.2005
OGG Comment: Copyright 2005 Jono Bacon, Adrian Bradshaw,
Stuart Langridge
and Matthew Revell. [Audio] Released under a
Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence.
Interview: 2005-01-12
Transcript: Paul Sladen <http://www.paul.sladen.org/>,
2004-02-14. Edited slightly, see HTML comments.
License: 17:35 <jono> You may use the
http://www.paul.sladen.org/lugradio-shuttleworth/
transcript for any purpose so long as
attribution to LugRadio is given and the
views of those [below] are not
mis-represented. 2005-02-14, Jono Bacon.
20:39 <sabdfl> looks great, thanks! all
grammatical errors are my own :-)
Matt: Mark, thank you very much for joining us today, as you know this
interview is really about the marketing side of Ubuntu. Will you be able to
start by telling us what marketing means to the Ubuntu project?
Mark: We're not approaching [Ubuntu Marketing] from a corporate
point-of-view. What we're really trying to do, is see whether the
fundamental values of the Ubuntu-project-community resonate with the Open
Source community. We focus very much on the technical platform because
technical excellence is one of the one of the hallmarks of a good Open
Source project and a good open source community.
We are focusing very heavily on the community aspects; the way we organise
ourselves, the way we distribute Ubuntu and the way we encourage and support
people to *change* it—those aren't really marketing efforts, but positioning
efforts—they're saying ''this is what we're all about''. My hope is that if
those ideas resonate with the open source community we'll move to the
centre.
Jono: When I heard about Ubuntu, like many people, when it was quite an
underground thing and there were a few rumblings about it here and there...
Mark: ...Yeah, "SSDS". [Shuttleworth's Secret Debian Startup]
Jono: At the moment, there seems to be no massive hype attached to it.
People seem to be using it because they've heard that it's a technically
good system. Do you plan to go down the same route as many of the other
Linux distributors and hype it as much as possible?
Mark: Absolutely not. I think the way this is going to pan out; people will
converge on something that works for them and so my focus is very much on
making Ubuntu something that *works for people*. When you look at the
structure of our team, it's very, very technically oriented. We don't have
any real presence on the team that takes a traditional marketing approach. I
think open-source is a phenomenal-phenomenon, but it's not a phenomenon that
one should approach the way you would any consumer product.
The audience to market to—the users—are just not interested in that
approach. For Ubuntu we want to take a completely different approach.
I imagine that some people will take Ubuntu and—if they want to—add
proprietary software [to] produce "high-gloss", as it were, commercial
products. They probably wouldn't carry the Ubuntu brand at all, we're not
going to do that ourselves. I hope we start building a family of
distributions that are derivatives, that share code, that share work, but
which potentially take a different approach in identifying their core users
and marketing approach to them.
Matt: Who do you see as the core Ubuntu users. Is it almost a
meta-distribution where you provide the platform for other distributions or
do you see there being direct end-users who are important to the project?
Mark: We do already have a very strong community and even with derivative
distributions there is already a tremendous amount of cross-talk and
cross-flow ...the sharing of ideas. I think derivative distributions and
derived works are really important not just to distributions but to the
whole open-source process. I think that's been borne out when we see a
webserver, like Apache, gets stronger when other people take it and rebrand
it, add[ing] to it... effectively investing some of their corporate or
community culture in the product. I think we'll see the same thing happening
with Ubuntu.
Jono: I was just going to say—this is related to the marketing-angle—it
seems that that Canonical is basically a bottomless pit of cash at the
moment. I don't want to dwell too much on the fact that you're filthy rich,
Mark (and we're both very jealous...)
Mark: ...Yeah, disgustingly so! :-)
Jono: In terms of how much funding you've got, what is your focus on where
you're going to spend this, is it going to be mainly spending it on
employing the "cream of the crop" as you're done so-far?
Mark: That's the primary focus, there is a sort of pain-threshold which I
won't cross, in the sense that I'm quite comfortable spending a certain
amount of money to employ the very best team to focus on the work. But I
fully appreciate that if your game plan is never, ever to charge for
software then you have to keep costs quite tightly under control.
So while I maybe disgustingly wealthy and have been very fortunate in the
past. I'm conscious that if we blow alot of cash now, we greatly reduce the
chances of becoming sustainable because the revenue opportunities are always
going to be somewhat indirect and so yes, we have picked up a phenomenal
team and a team like that is not cheap, but in the bigger picture we're also
running a very leen operation.
Jono: Do you think it's sustainable, obviously we're going through the
honeymoon period at the moment, as an example, I was chatting to Jeff Waugh
and he was saying how if a device isn't supported in Ubuntu, submit it as a
bug—because it *is* a bug. I did that about a wireless-card and it was fixed
and implemented in two weeks, which was incredible.
Do you think this can be sustainable so that one/two/three years down the
line people are still going to be as responsive and reactive to the
community?
Mark: One of the advantages we have is that we've said we'll focus our core
team on regular releases, what that means is that there's a limit to the
amount of stabilisation and testing that we are able to do, simply because
we're forced into a six-month release cycle, which means that our team is
focused on the 'head' effectively—we're much closer to the 'head' of
development than Red Hat or Suse are ever going to be because they have a
different definition of what they would consider a ''good release''. I think
we will shall certainly be able to keep up with the current 'head' of
open-source development.
In teams of breadth, I think alot of our ability to scale is going to depend
on how quickly we can build a good community.
That's really just a question of being there and seeing who else comes
along—the indications are phenomenal; we're constantly taking on requests
for new-maintainers. We're trying to stretch to a process that is welcoming
and supportive, even to folks who haven't yet proven themselves, but who
demonstrate a willingness to participate and to participate with the right
values and the right approach. If we can grow that community, then yes, I
think we can stay right at the head.
In particular, if we can become—as I think we will—the distribution for
upstream guys to participate in; the best distribution to showcase your own
tools, your own software, your own platform. Then I think we can really grow
the team dramatically.
Matt: Mark, what role do you think LUGs [Linux User Groups] and grass-roots
advocacy play in the promotion of Ubuntu, is that pretty-much central to the
way you see Ubuntu being promoted?
Mark: Absolutely, as I said, we don't have a formal marketing programme,
we're not going to be buying newspaper ads and approaching this in a
classical marketing sense. The community that we very much hope to be apart
of, to share with, is the open-source community and that is best defined
from an advocacy point-of-view and a growth point-of-view through LUGs,
through volunteer efforts and through individuals.
...It's extraordinary, I think if you were to look back at this time in
history in ten years time you'd say that this was a time of real change in
the software-industry and that doesn't happen very often. That change is
being driven by individuals, more than by organisations or marketing
budgets.
Matt: What role do you think there is for the more-traditional distributions
who are combining commercialism with the grass-roots promotion with the more
commercial side of things. Red Hat is the typical example who are trying to
build a community through Fedora, but at the same they're hoping to make big
bucks through selling licenses and through the more traditionally commercial
approach.
Mark: I'm never a fan of balancing opposing ideas, it's very difficult to
do. If you look at the Space Shuttle, it was designed to do too many
different things. As a result, it's too big, too cumbersome and too
dangerous. What works best in life is to have something which has a clear
idea of what it wants to be and runs at that.
I think if you try and define yourself as someone who's trying to sell Free
Software and then at the same time, want to build an Open Source community,
you have depth philosophical divides within your organisation which are
always going to be difficult to bridge.
The community-oriented guys are going to be saying ''Use Fedora'' and the
marketing guys are going to be saying ''Use Red Hat Enterprise''.
It's very difficult to cross that divide and that's why I've set out with
Ubuntu saying we will define ourselves as a non-commercial entity in the
sense that we will never, ever, charge for Free Software.
Jono: In terms of your involvement with Ubuntu, if anyone is to go along to
the Ubuntu mailing-lists and have a browse around, or read Ubuntu traffic,
obviously you do take part in the discussions—which is an admiral thing in
itself—because I'm guessing that not many people in your position in
competitive companies are so involved in the process. Where does your
involvement with the technical decisions of Ubuntu begin, and where does it
end?
Mark: I sit on the Technical Board, but I recognise that there are far
better qualified people than me to make some of these decisions. Where I
push very hard, is in terms of having a clear idea of what the end product
should look like.
I'm a big fan of simplicity; a big fan of openness and the ability to
recognise that other people may want to do something differently, so I'll
drive ideas that I think will stimulate the Ubuntu community in those sort
of ways. That's why I'm a really big fan of the Kubuntu [KDE Ubuntu]
movement.
We picked GNOME, but I recognise that there are alot of people out there who
love KDE and I'm working as hard as I can to encourage the KDE community to
do their own version of Ubuntu. I think that's going to be a reality for
"Hoary [Hedgehog"] which is our next release in April and that's fantastic!
That's the area I'll really drive.
The 'deep back-magic Foo', I leave to Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson, James
Troup and so on—They are a superb team and I feel like I have to paddle very
fast to keep up.
Matt: On the business side of things, I think all of us have already used
Ubuntu and find it the best distribution for what we want to do. I think a
question many of us want to know the answer to—if you're never going to
charge for it and you're putting all this money in, how do you see Ubuntu
turning into a self-sustaining, self-funding project?
Mark: The first side of that is sustainability, which is matching revenues
and expenses, so we have to keep the expenses as tight as possible. It's not
cheap to hire a fantastic team, keep them focused, keep them interested in
the project. But at the same time we don't have a lot of the 'fat' of a
large corporation, we certainly don't have alot of excess of the
dot-com-bubble years. If you talk to the guys, they'll tell you that we stay
in cheap hotels, we fly economy and everybody shares rooms at our
conferences. It's very much a cost-conscious focus and the aim of that is to
maximise our chances of getting to sustainability.
The next thing really has alot to do with gaining a critical-mass of users.
I really do believe that if we have wide-spread adoption, even if that's
wide-spread adoption—not specifically of Ubuntu, but of one of the
Ubuntu-related products or derivative distributions—that within that
critical mass of users we will be able to generate revenue without charging
for the software or doing offensive stuff like forcing particular software
choices on people, or fighting over preferences of choices of particular
media-streamers... Now clearly, that is defining our role as being
substantially more limited than the way Microsoft would like to define their
role.
I just don't believe that there will be another 'Microsoft' and I think that
anyone who starts a business now with that as an end-goal is barking up
completely the wrong tree.
But that doesn't mean we can't play a highly-professional role, charge good
rates for professional services, [for users] who need very specialised
support and want to get it from the people who produce the actual platform
itself.
Jono: Unfortunately, we're going to have to wrap things up—first of all, on
behalf of all the LugRadio listeners thank you for taking the time to sit
and talk to us. But before you go, there's one question which I think all of
us want to ask; What's it like being in Space?
Mark: It's everything you might imagine and quite a bit more, it's moments
of terror, moments of absolute bliss; moment of... I won't ever say moments
of boredom, but if I think you were up there for six months you'd have times
when you were very ready to come home...
Jono: I'm assuming you went on that machine that you see in documentaries
and films where you spin around really fast and your face goes all rubbery?
Mark: That's quite an extraordinary feeling. The very big one at Star City
draws more electricity than the rest of Star City combined and it'll drive
your chin through you chest! It's quite an incredible experience.
Matt: Just one final question from me—you mentioned the Shuttle earlier,
when you went into space did you actually find out how much a Shuttle is
worth?
Mark: I reckon they'll be museum pieces pretty soon, I don't think there's
much future for the Shuttles, as soon as they retire it and build something
that looks more like a Soyuz, the better for everybody.
Jono: Thank you very much, Mark. It's been great talking to you.
Mark: Cheers!
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Read the February 2006 issue of LiFY for the latest comments apart from this
brave man. A detailed chat with Fedrick Noronha is given in the issue.
Contact me if you want to read that.
--
Tinku Sampath
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