Shuttleworth: Ubuntu Is Enterprise-Friendly
The first Ubuntu Live conference just kicked off here in Portland, Oregon with a keynote from Canonical founder and Mark Shuttleworth. His talk centered around how the free operating system his company funds and supports is capable of bringing the same values it brings to the desktop — ease of use, performance and compatibility — to the server.
Over the last two or three years, Ubuntu’s popularity has exploded. Mark says Ubuntu is installed on between 6-12 million machines in over 200 countries (The exact number of installations is hard to determine since Ubuntu isn’t sold, it’s is given away and passed along between users). So now that the desktop has been conquered, Shuttleworth says the next key target is the enterprise market.
Linux is already driving into the enterprise environment through thin
clients and specialized, dedicated systems. To become a stronger
enterprise software player overall, Mark says Ubuntu needs to maintain
its ability to perform well as a virtual machine, (the current Ubuntu
release, Feisty Fawn, is already one of the best-performing Linux
distros in VMWare Workstation 6, he says) as well as serve as a
platform for better IT systems management and monitoring tools. To that
end, Cononical is putting more resources behind Landscape,
a web-based system management client for small to medium businesses.
Mark announced that Landscape is available today. It’s free for
subscribers of Canonical’s support services.
Shuttleworth concluded his keynote with "a call for discussion" in the Linux community. Mark thinks it would be much easier for Linux to compete in the enterprise market if all of the major distributions would set — and stick to — predictable release schedules. He says this would ease collaboration among kernel developers and afford better stability and support for software developers working on the platform. The idea for this strategy grew from discussions at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
