“Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile – bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets” – Mark Shuttleworth
Although it’s not too astounding for a billionaire such as Mark Shuttle worth to take a community where most things are free and turn them into profitable items, the Canonical / Ubuntu story is still somewhat amazing none the less. The About Ubuntu tells it best.
“Linux was already established as an enterprise server platform in 2004. But free software was still not a part of everyday life for most computer users. That’s why Mark Shuttleworth gathered a small team of developers from one of the most established Linux projects – Debian – and set out to create an easy-to-use Linux desktop, Ubuntu.”
And so we have, Ubutnu today.
In 2012, Canonical’s Ubuntu made even more amazing headway in bringing Linux to the forefront of personal computing with an numerous mass deployments. Even gaining 2% in 2012 to reach an estimated 7% “of all the world’s web servers”. By nearly all in the Linux community, Ubuntu is seen as a stable distribution built on an equally as stable Linux Debian. Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth and his team of developers surely have aspirations though far beyond just notebook, desktop and ever server use for their ever developing Ubuntu Linux distribution.
In Mark’s latest blog, he, in a way, goes over what he hopes to accomplish with Ubutntu in 2013, but the entire blog post can almost be summed up in finding out what “matters” to Mark and what he hopes to foresee in the near future:
To Mark Shuttleworth, it “matters”:
* most that Ubuntu bring the benefits of free software to a new audience and that no one is excluded
* that Canonical’s efforts pay dividends for others.
* that the Ubuntu platform can be used by anyone.
* that Ubuntu is relevant for the kinds of computing that people want to do every day.
In a nutshell, Mark wants as many people as possible to use Ubuntu and by putting it on relevant devices that people commonly use today, such as smartphones and tablets, confirming a report here in the Daily Flux more than a month ago. It’s actually perfect timing for Ubuntu to head this direction. In fact, by focusing on such, Canonical could theoretically skip over an entire segment of PC users, and focus strictly on mobile devices - though in no way do we believe that is going to happen.
Although there are a number of equally as good Linux distributions as Ubuntu abounding in the open source world, there are few to none with the kind of financial backing that Ubuntu has (with the exclusion of Red Hat). Some distributions have advantages over Ubuntu, but Canoncial has certainly proven that they’re money and developmental efforts are being focused where their efforts will “pay dividends for others”, but equally pay dividends for the Ubuntu brand itself as well. Look for Ubuntu mobile developments to come very soon.
To view the complete Mark Shuttleworth blog, click here.