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Ubuntu is by far the best thing to happen to desktop linux. Them & their free cds. Novell has no one to blame but themselves. They should have been paying close
by Herring 18y ago
Ubuntu is by far the best thing to happen to desktop linux. Them & their free cds. Novell has no one to blame but themselves. They should have been paying close attention to Apple all those years.
- davidw 18y agoI'm a very happy Ubuntu user, but I can sort of understand the frustration. If everyone did what Canonical did, who would do the work? That's not an entirely solved problem with open source.
- Herring 18y agoI'd just leave it to the market. Clearly ubuntu's popularity proves that hacking the kernel is less valuable than cleaning up the UI & novell should have seen this. They're quite free to start selling ubuntu support contracts.
- 1gor 18y agoThat's a bad day to say "leave it to the market".
- davidw 18y agoFree software is in some ways a "public good", and markets tend to underprovide public goods. The fact that free software is created at all, and the economics of it, is pretty fascinating, and, IMO, far from a solved problem.
- rcoder 18y agoI actually think this is a key point: the Linux kernel only provides a small fraction of the utility a Linux user derives from the system as a whole. The work that Canonical does to insure that Ubuntu releases are stable, supported, and documented pays much higher dividends to most users, and does more to attract new users. Attacking Canonical for not contributing enough to the kernel sounds to me a lot like attacking the members of local Linux user groups for not including enough core kernel hackers in their membership.
- wmf 18y agoGiven that Canonical is supposedly much smaller than RH or Novell, I wonder why they didn't devote 1/Nth of their budget to polish and reap the disproportionate rewards.