[tlug] Shuttleworth Interview at Red Herring

["Roger Markus" <rogermarku@example.com>]

There is an interesting interview with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth at Red Herring (http://www.redherring.com/, with the specific article here: 
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20495&hed=Linux%3A+Ubuntu+Founder+On+Microsoft+%E2%80%9CChallenge%E2%80%9D+)

A few quotes from the article:

Regarding the previously discussed issue of Novell dealing with Microsoft, Shuttleworth commented (in part):

   Microsoft is going to claim that deploying Linux anywhere, unless you pay Microsoft a patent fee, is a violation of their patent and they haven't proved that yet. But they certainly seem to be positioning themselves in such a way that they could do so.
   They are really trying to get something to legitimize their claim, so the deal with Novell had a lot of money attached to it. And as a part of that deal, Novell is lifted up in its stand to legitimize much of its claim. So it's a very interesting strategic move and there are a lot of people on the other side saying that there are absolutely no intellectual property issues with Linux - that this is kind of a game.

Regarding Vista:

   In other senses, Vista is going to drive a whole round of applications development, a whole round of other things, which will become incompatible with Linux. In Vista, Microsoft has taken steps to break compatibility with pieces of the Windows' infrastructure, which Linux has already reverse engineered. So if you look for example at the pop-sharing capability in the previous versions of Windows, Linux is very compatible with that. So you can easily deploy Linux in the same environment as Windows, and Microsoft has taken some very specific steps in Vista to make that hard for Linux to do...

Regarding Microsoft:

   I think that they should be credited with competing with software developers, and if we go back to the days before Microsoft, software was enormously expensive because everybody customized their product. [They] turned it into a real commodity for computing and for software development, and at the same time they are a convicted monopoly.
   I think there is an interesting thing that Microsoft is going to learn and that is that maybe in the eighties and nineties, the most efficient way to produce software was to hire the smartest guys in the campuses far away. But maybe in the year 2000 and beyond, the most efficient way to produce software is allowing people to gravitate to the parts of a software environment that they are most interested in and then to choose to collaborate in real time from wherever they want to be in the world.

In any case, see the full article here:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=20495&hed=Linux%3A+Ubuntu+Founder+On+Microsoft+%E2%80%9CChallenge%E2%80%9D+

It's worth taking the time to read.

RM