Tim Almond

An Englishman’s Castle asks for choice of someone for New Years honours.

I’m not sure that this isn’t more "Man of the Year" than a New Year’s honour, but I’ll shoot.

My choice is Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. He’s South African, so qualifies. Not only because Ubuntu works great for me, but because I believe that he is one of the few pragmatic proponents of open source.

A frequent problem that I have with the open source community is a lack of empathy. The perception is often that people should just use Linux because it’s technically better without considering the challenges faced by people trying to do so. That the software they use for their work may not be available for Linux, that their hardware may not have drivers available.

The answer that’s often given to this is "that’s not the fault of Linux". Which is true. These are the result of the external environment to it, but it’s still a problem for Linux to address. 

What Mark seems to have a grip on is this "environment" question. That to make an excellent Linux desktop that will move people off Windows is much more than just a technical problem. Issues like DVD playback, hardware drivers and so forth need to be addressed before it can more into mainstream use.

Tags: Politics, Technology, Ideas //