Is Ubuntu the way forward for Linux?

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He also maintains that "Software Libre provides the very best IT platform for education. Not only do you have thousands of tools covering almost every area of academic interest, but you also have the ability to study the tools themselves. This means that a student with an interest in, say, astronomy, can find software that supports her interest, and then analyse the software itself. She might improve the software and make those improvements available, or just use that right as an opportunity to deepen her understanding of the subject matter," thus giving access to technical knowledge in areas that wouldn't otherwise be as readily available.

The Great Leap Forwards

To date the professional desktop and server markets for Linux have been dominated by Red Hat and SUSE. Ubuntu is the new kid on the block, but this carries some advantages. The distribution has already been widely adopted as the preferred desktop by developers in many organisations. Given the pace of Linux adoption at all levels of the enterprise, and the popularity of Ubuntu among developers, it follows that Canonical's strategy for wider adoption of Ubuntu is to encourage organisations to take the leap straight from the developer's desktop to the server.

From the outset, Ubuntu caught the imagination of users and developers. Shuttleworth hopes that Ubuntu's popularity on the desktop will translate into wider uptake in the enterprise.

"We already have good adoption", he says. "Sometimes among very large organisations who host 10s or 100s of servers, and want to try new approaches to Linux. In many of those cases they have begun with Ubuntu on their developer machines, and have begun to migrate that infrastructure onto their production systems. A good example is Joost, the company formed by the guys who founded Skype and Kazaa." Skype was sold by its founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, for a reputed $2.6 billion. Joost distributes TV channels over the Web by means of peer-to-peer technology, and already has deals with Warner Music, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Endemol and others to distribute their content on Internet TV channels. Joost employs 150 developers and uses Ubuntu as both the developer and server platform for its media distribution infrastructure.

The attraction of Ubuntu to such organisations is its strength and simplicity. Implementing the standard distribution as a server is a simple option during installation, and there is deep support for thin client integration, allowing the distribution to be easily deployed in large scale installations without having to physically install the media to every workstation. The standard installation uses LVM (Logical Volume Manager) out of the box, and includes optional support for a variety of clustered file systems. In addition, Canonical now offers worldwide round the clock support services to commercial users, and certification and training for Ubuntu System Administrators.

"The first part of our strategy is simply to maintain leadership in the desktop and developer segments, and support a natural migration for work that starts on the desktop, from the developer machine onto the production servers. The second part of the strategy is to partner with people to build Ubuntu-based solutions. So for example, we are working with a large German company to provide a streaming solution for 3G video on 3G phones. The entire solution is running on Ubuntu, and each time they sell their solution to phone providers they sell Ubuntu with the hardware. The third leg of the strategy is to partner with the providers of hardware. We've been quite public about our partnership with Sun....and others are in the offing." The relationship with Sun is primarily about providing Ubuntu as a server system on both AMD and Sun Sparc processors.

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