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.

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.

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.