Linux Solutions

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, has urged the development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple Inc. has achieved.

Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, yesterday, he also pressed for the development of a new revenue model to fund free software, and set his sights on a services-based mechanism. He also stressed the importance of interoperability with Windows.

Shuttleworth, who is the CEO of Canonical Ltd, emphasised the development of the Linux Desktop as well as mobile development.

“Can we go right past Apple in the user experience we deliver?” Shuttleworth asked the audience. “Certainly, on the desktop experience, we need to shoot beyond the Mac, but I think it’s equally relevant [in] the mobile space. The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean” without sacrificing the community process,” he said.

“It would be hard to do from a free software point of view, I think, because so many people have so many different opinions,” said Brad Cavanagh, data reduction software engineer at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii.

“That’s not to say you can’t get good things out of open source. Obviously, you can, but it’s going to be tough,” Cavanagh said.

Shuttleworth went on to emphasise the need for new business models beyond advertising for free software. “We had the Web for quite a long time before we figured out how [to do] ad-funded Web businesses,” Shuttleworth said.

But Shuttleworth said he didn’t know how advertising could fund Web-based and free applications. He instead noted an emerging emphasis on services, calling them the engine for funding investments in free software.

“I think advertising works very well in the search case, but I don’t think it’s the sort of final solution in terms of business models to drive investment in free software,” Shuttleworth said. “A more general view of services is required.”

“The free software world is in a quest for a complementary economic model. When we look back at this era, we’ll be looking at economics as much as factors such as technology,” Shuttleworth said.

“Technology,” he said, “provides the opportunities to drive economic change, create wealth and change society. The way we run our lives today, software determines more and more of it,” Shuttleworth said.

“In a very real sense, everything is becoming software,” he continued. “There have never been better opportunities to create wealth, better opportunities to change the world. Recent wealth creators such as Google Inc. have been built on free software. Free software, meanwhile, is the ultimate form of disclosure and serves as an engine for innovation,” he noted.

“The question we should be asking the free software world is how can we stimulate that? How can we drive innovation faster?” Shuttleworth said.