Switching blogging tools

Just in case anyone reads this blog. I'm trying out Drupal on yellowhouse.org, so I'll be blogging over there instead. Here is the address:
http://yellowhouse.org/drupal/

Ubuntu inches closer to becoming the Canonical distribution

Please forgive the simple play on words. I couldn't resist. It is well known that Mark Shuttleworth's goal for his Ubuntu distribution was to make it the distribution off which all other distributions are based. The parent company, Canonical Ltd., is working to supply all the pieces you need to build and maintain your own distribution; from a build system to enterprise-wide software management. Canonical has an uphill battle that has only been exacerbated by the announcements over the last few months by Oracle, Novell and Microsoft supporting rpm-based distributions. However, if you look at many of the upstart Linux distributions you notice an important theme: They are all based on Debian. This means with Canonicals positioning they could move to subsume all these various Debian-based distributions, and together with the already substantial (though not commercial) base of Debian, garner a significant user base. This user base will be more and more attractive to ISVs and IHVs. I know, I know. It is a stretch, but Canonical today announced what I see as a step in that direction.

Today Canonical announced a strategic partnership with Linspire, Inc. whereby future versions of the commercial Linspire, and the open source Freespire project will be based on Ubuntu. In addition, Ubuntu users will be he first distribution outside Linspire and Freespire that have access to the CNR e-commerce and software delivery technology. The Click N Run technology is actually pretty cool, and when Linspire (then called Lindows) was first released I marveled at how simple it made software management, not just] compared to the base Debian distribution but to any distribution. There may have been ugliness inside, but to the user it all "just worked." The biggest win here for Canonical is the fact that their user base will now have access to a legal DVD player on Linux, and possibly access to proprietary multimedia codecs like Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV)[1].

Who will be next? Xandros? Progeny? GNU Hurd? Oh wait, I think that is already on the way...

[1] It is questionable whether CNR will offer the WMA and WMV codecs to distributions outside Linspire and Freespire. My understanding is that Linspire obtained the right to distribute these codecs as part of their settlement in 2004 with Microsoft, and therefore it may not be in accordance with the terms of that settlement to distribute the codecs for any distribution not owned by Linspire, Inc.

How to make money with F/OSS

Open Sources | InfoWorld | The proprietary/open source continuum for ISVs | February 5, 2007 05:09 AM | By Matt Asay

Ok, in general, I am not a big fan of Matt Asay.  Often, I feel his blog entries expose him as nothing but a Red Hat shill.  Sorry, Matt, but you do tend to have a distinctive leaning in your blog entries. 

However, the entry quoted above is an excellent one, and a thought-provoking assessment on how companies can make money with Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS).  How much of that assessment is directly from Larry Augusten?  I don't know, but it is great to have it.  This is an article I'm definitely going to bookmark.  Too often, when explaining what F/OSS is I get the question, "... but if the software is free how do you make money?"  My explanation is sometimes lost on the recipient, which means I probably need to work on my elevator pitch. ;-)  However, it is nice to have a quick explanation I can send to someone.  Maybe I should memorize this and re-use the content. :-)

Blogged with Flock