Change happens. It’s inevitable. Ubuntu is not immune. Individuals are not wheels that turn forever in a machine. They grow and move on. It is time to fill the spot left by Jane Silber. Matt Asay has been chosen. Is he the right person for the job? Time will tell, but he has decent creds: Novell and Alfresco. He is well known from his blog, The Open Road. A big plus may be that he is known and knows the USA. This is important because the USA is different. While known as a technological innovator, the USA has hangups about M$. They like the home boy who does good and creates an empire out of nothing. They like that so much they tend to overlook matters of anti-competitive acts and insecure IT which M$ causes. They see M$ as a generator of wealth, not as an infinite sink of costs. The rest of the world sees things much differently and are far ahead of the USA in FLOSS adoption even though many of the core components of FLOSS began in the USA: GNU, GPL, and several important distros. The USA accepts widely held myths about FLOSS such as 1% market share for GNU/Linux, freeloading, boxes with GNU/Linux being converted to that other OS, immunity from malware is due to insufficient share, etc. Further, the USA largely ignores the explosive developments of IT in other parts of the world, eg. China. USA adoption of GNU/Linux in business has largely been RedHat/Suse. Can Matt Asay make a difference to perception of GNU/Linux in the USA and can he make a difference in Ubuntu in some way to improve acceptance in the USA?
I have some doubts. The USA is locked up very tightly as the stronghold of empire. M$ gets everything its own way from lobbying, astroturfing, ignoring anti-competitive acts for ten years or more, and billions of promotional dollars supplied by monopolistic prices. There is a long uphill road for any FLOSS business to crack the USA market.RedHat has been working hard at it for ten years and is only just a tiny niche still. RedHat ignored the desktop for many years because it was irrelevant in that market. Only this year did they get enough customers interested in FLOSS on the desktop to make it worthwhile to get back in. Dell, and HP, while having some investment in GNU/Linux actively promote that other OS. Against this, Ubuntu needs huge leverage to make a dent. Matt Asay may find his energy more useful in other markets which have much more flexibility and growth opportunities.
In his blog, Matt Asay has taken some strange views for an advocate of FLOSS:
Of course, I am paraphrasing his articles, but he looks at the same set of facts and comes to different conclusions. For example, the sales of “7″ show a record and I point out that much of that record came from deferred sales with upgrades from Vista in previous quarters while Matt Asay points out that M$ is taking the lion’s share of profit from the mouths of its partners and they may see GNU/Linux as a way to assert independence. His error is that M$ keeps their slaves hungry and liking it by pointing out the obvious fact that if they switched to GNU/Linux they wold lose huge market share and die. No OEM dares declare itself free of that other OS because the market for FLOSS is too small to sustain any one of them. They also cannot gradually shift to GNU/Linux for the same reason and more, for the $50 or so they give M$, they get $50 or more from the buyers of the PCs. If they sold the PCs with GNU/Linux or nothing they would make $50 less per PC. The OEMs are in a welfare trap. If all OEMs decided tomorrow to sell PCs with OS optional/separate things would change but no matter what Ubuntu does, that will not change until OEMs that do not promote that other OS step forward and embrace FLOSS. These are likely to be the smaller OEMs and startups, not the big guys who are stuck in M$’s pocket. It’s too bad we have to wait until GNU/Linux reaches a larger share of the market but that will happen even if the OEMs do not lead the way. When the market for GNU/Linux eats into their shares, they will promote GNU/Linux. Not before.
The GPL is what makes FLOSS work. Period. There is nothing wrong with the licence that folks trying to sidestep it would fix. Live with it Matt.
The world needs cheap IT and they can get it using mass production/Moore’s Law/FLOSS. A side effect of Free Software licences is that you cannot charge a high price for it because others can distribute the same stuff for less. This is a good thing, Matt. It means more affordable IT in emerging markets and greater innovation because the barriers to entry in any field of IT is less. Sell services, not FLOSS.
Change is good. We await signs that Matt Asay is good for Canonical/Ubuntu and whether Ubuntu is good for Matt Asay. New ways of doing business and new approaches to selling should be welcome. I only hope selling out is not in the cards. M$ has the cash and frequently buys out, embraces and extringuishes competition. It worries me that a new pragmatism may be creeping into Ubuntu. The FLOSS community accomplishes little by compromising on the principles of Free Software.
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Ubuntu seems to be drifting toward the Microsoft vortex. When Matt hops on board his inertia will not hinder that drift. No company, dependent on FOSS, would dare disrupt their relationship to the wider Open Source community by making a large shift in alliances. But by taking small steps, Ubuntu’s users will become acclimated to their new relationship with Canonical.
There’s a large army of paid Microsoft shills pecking away at the foundations that hold GNU/Linux users into a market phalanx. All the FUD, all the shills and all the phony surveys, reviews and studies put a value on GNU/Linux. If the bounty for GNU/Linux and Open Source is that high, then it’s worth keeping it safe from the bounty hunters.
I hope you are wrong. M$ is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on keeping GNU/Linux out of the running but I cannot see Matt Asay as one of the shills. I would expect his role would lead to establishing business relationships and markets rather than tinkering much with the product. M$ works harder at strengthening its monopoly than on strengthening their product. It would be worth a lot to them to disrupt Ubuntu. The mono thing is a concern but the vast bulk of our software is not based on mono and likely will never be because that makes too many layers. One can argue whether Wine/mono is good or bad for FLOSS but the hiring seems to be unrelated. Shuttleworth knew what had to be done and he will still have input on the product side. Matt will most likely add a lot to the marketing side. It sure would be wonderful if he could get an OEM to promote GNU/Linux instead of using it as leverage against M$ in negotiations.
It was my unfortunate association that makes it appear that I was calling Matt Asay is a shill. He is not, at least in my eyes he isn’t.
There is nothing wrong with earning money with Open Source. But if it’s used to launch a start-up into a $uccessful, publicly traded company that abandons Open Source while poisoning the feeding trough for everyone else, then those who endeavor to do that should at least be called on it before too much damage is done.
I’ve seen a number of comments in past months that marginalize the Free Software Movement, favoring Open Source instead. That would be killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. No more “golden eggs”, no more Open Source.
I have already given up on Ubuntu. They are chipping away at their Open Source foundation. When they are done they’ll either collapse, or they’ll be Microsoft’s Windows 9 and Mark Shuttleworth will be a few billion dollars richer.
That is going too far. Ubuntu does things differently than Debian, I will grant you, but they still support and contribute a lot to FLOSS. That they can do that and approach break-even is great for everyone. Ubuntu/Canonical cannot be bought out by M$. Shuttleworth does not need M$’s money and many of the folks who work in Ubuntu are not the least bit interested in doing things M$’s way. They have a better way now.
At a recent conference, Shuttleworth spoke about releasing on schedule and tuning the user interface. There is no goal or leadership he needs from M$. They do need some salesmanship both for OEMs/retail and business in general. Matt Asay will likely help them a lot with that. If you read some of the internal documents from M$ released through Comes v M$, you will find this gem: PX06117 which outlines the state of M$’s business in 1997. If M$ put a tiny fraction of the effort into building good software that they did in ramping up sales and excluding competing businesses and technologies, they would be unbeatable. They did not and they are not unbeatable. GNU/Linux in all its various forms is a much better product, but it still must be sold. Matt Asay can make a difference. I hope it is for the better. Canonical does not have to do anything that departs from FLOSS protocols to beat M$. They do have to make more deals with the likes of IBM and some OEMS. Canonical has to convince OEMs and retailers that there is money to be made selling less expensive PCs and gadgets. That will not be easy because the OEMs gets enough from the customer to pay M$ and the OEM well for selling that other OS. They will get less for selling GNU/Linux but they still can make money. Suppose the consumer pays $100 for the OS when purchasing a PC. The retailer wants $30. M$ wants $50. That leaves $20 for the OEM. The customer could pay $50 for GNU/Linux and the OEM and retailer get the same leaving nothing for M$. If you can convince the OEMs that they can sell as many or more PCs with a $50 reduction in price to the consumer, it might fly. They need to see a reason to change, though, like Vista, and more malware and returned PCs. Good PCs made with GNU/Linux should cost the retailers less to sell and to service, but Canonical and others will have to demonstrate that to them. All the infrastructure is out there to support or to parasitize the monopoly. Canonical has to build the equivalent structure for GNU/Linux. It does not involve using non-free software, just engineering and good business sense. You would think that business would like less expensive stuff but they are stuck on inflation and the burden of M$. They just do not see it.