Is Ubuntu the way forward for Linux?

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"It does take time," he says. "There's a very big complex eco-system out there, and Ubuntu is relatively new, so it's natural that it'll take time to achieve the certifications required to establish ourselves more widely, but I'm very pleased with progress."

On the desktop

"We are really best known for being a great desktop distribution. We believe that Linux can be a truly functional alternative to Windows and the Mac, with substantial benefits in terms of reliability and predictability. It does have some disadvantages, and its very hard to breakdown those barriers to adoption, so we've been working hard on that." The latest release of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, includes a complete Windows migration tool, and enhanced plug and play wireless and multimedia support, both of which necessitate support for proprietary drivers.

"We really dislike proprietary drivers," Shuttleworth notes, "but we have to tolerate them. We try very hard to make the case to the vendors that isn't in their best interest. But more and more vendors are learning how to work with the community. You would be very pressed to launch new server hardware and not provide good Linux driver support. Most companies assume that when they produce Linux drivers they'll have the same problems as they have with Windows. You have to write a lot of infrastructure in Windows to make your driver work. For instance, Windows XP doesn't have internal support for wireless drivers, so each individual Wi-Fi driver requires huge amounts of Windows code to enable it to work, whereas with Linux the preferred approach is for vendors to get together and work out what they need in common, and write that into the kernel itself, so each individual driver demands far less specific code. They can leverage what other companies are doing and devote much less effort to developing code for their own drivers."

The other big obstacle to desktop adoption of Linux is the issue of patents, which prevents some Linux vendors from supplying native MP3 support on their desktops. Microsoft recently lost a judgement for infringing a patent held by Alcatel-Lucent on MP3 audio compression technologies. "It is becoming clear to everybody that the patent system as it is currently implemented is badly broken," observes Shuttleworth. "We need to step back a little, and ask the question: why do we have a patent infrastructure? what are we trying to achieve in society? The critical thing is that its all about patents stimulating and accelerating the pace of innovation. The encouraging thing is that a big company like Microsoft has historically taken the view that it can use patents to block other companies entry to markets, but now they have to realise that the way the patent market is structured today they are vulnerable, and its easy for them to trip up too. Hopefully sooner or later they'll realise that a change is needed."

Asked how his trip into space had changed his perspective on the work he does Shuttleworth says: "It had a profound effect on the sorts of projects I am interested in getting involved in. You can't help but come away with a sense of the connectedness of the world. You visibly see how pollution from one country moves right over and affects the next country along. You realise just how interdependent we are, how artificial the geophysical lines that we read about in newspapers are, so you long for projects that are global or universal and Ubuntu is certainly one of those."

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