A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows (Ubuntu)

A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows

“It feels pretty clear to me that the open
process produces better stuff,” says Mark Shuttleworth, whose team at Canonical
is leading the Ubuntu project.

In
December, hundreds of these controversial software developers gathered for one
week at the Google
headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. They came from all over the world,
sporting many of the usual signs of software mercenaries: jeans, ponytails,
unruly facial hair and bloodshot eyes.

But rather than preparing to code
for the highest bidder, the developers were coordinating their largely
volunteer effort to try to undermine Microsoft’s
Windows operating system for PCs, which generated close to $17 billion in sales
last year.

All the fuss at the meeting centered
on something called Ubuntu and a man named Mark Shuttleworth, the charismatic
35-year-old billionaire from South Africa who functions as the spiritual and
financial leader of this coding clan.

Created just over four years ago,
Ubuntu (pronounced oo-BOON-too) has emerged as the fastest-growing and most
celebrated version of the Linux operating system, which competes with Windows
primarily through its low, low price: $0.

More than 10 million people are
estimated to run Ubuntu today, and they represent a threat to Microsoft’s
hegemony in developed countries and perhaps even more so in those regions
catching up to the technology revolution.

“If we’re successful, we would
fundamentally change the operating system market,” Mr. Shuttleworth said during
a break at the gathering, the Ubuntu Developer Summit. “Microsoft would need to
adapt, and I don’t think that would be unhealthy.”

Linux is free, but there is still
money to be made for businesses flanking the operating system. Companies like I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Dell
place Linux on more than 10 percent of the computers they sell as servers, and
businesses pay the hardware makers and others, like the software sellers Red
Hat and Oracle,
to fix any problems and keep their Linux-based systems up to date.

But Canonical, Mr. Shuttleworth’s
company that makes Ubuntu, has decided to focus its near-term aspirations on
the PCs used by workers and people at home.

The notion of a strong Linux-based
competitor to Windows and, to a lesser extent, Apple’s
Mac OS X has been an enduring dream of advocates of open-source software. They
champion the idea that software that can be freely altered by the masses can prove
cheaper and better than proprietary code produced by stodgy corporations. Try
as they might, however, Linux zealots have failed in their quest to make Linux
mainstream on desktop and notebook computers. The often quirky software remains
in the realm of geeks, not grandmothers.

With Ubuntu, the devotees believe,
things might finally be different.

“I think Ubuntu has captured
people’s imaginations around the Linux desktop,” said Chris DiBona, the program
manager for open-source software at Google. “If there is a hope for the Linux
desktop, it would be them.”

Close to half of Google’s 20,000
employees use a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, playfully called Goobuntu.

PEOPLE encountering Ubuntu for the
first time will find it very similar to Windows. The operating system has a
slick graphical interface, familiar menus and all the common desktop software:
a Web browser, an e-mail program, instant-messaging software and a free suite
of programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

While relatively easy to use for the
technologically savvy, Ubuntu — and all other versions of Linux — can challenge
the average user. Linux cannot run many applications created for Windows,
including some of the most popular games and tax software, for example. And
updates to Linux can send ripples of problems through the system, causing
something as basic as a computer’s display or sound system to malfunction.

Canonical has tried to smooth out
many of the issues that have prevented Linux from reaching the mainstream. This
attention to detail with a desktop version of Linux contrasts with the focus of
the largest sellers of the operating system, Red Hat and Novell.
While these companies make desktop versions, they have spent most of their time
chasing the big money in data centers. As a result, Ubuntu emerged as a sort of
favored nation for those idealistic software developers who viewed themselves
as part of a countercultural movement.

“It is the same thing companies like
Apple and Google have done well, which is build not just a community but a
passionate community,” said Ian Murdock, who created an earlier version of
Linux called Debian, on which Ubuntu is based.

Mainstream technology companies have
taken notice of the enthusiasm around Ubuntu. Dell started to sell PCs and
desktops with the software in 2007, and I.B.M. more recently began making
Ubuntu the basis of a software package that competes against Windows.

Canonical, based in London, has more
than 200 full-time employees, but its total work force stretches well beyond
that, through an army of volunteers. The company paid for close to 60
volunteers to attend its developer event, considering them important contributors
to the operating system. An additional 1,000 work on the Debian project and
make their software available to Canonical, while 5,000 spread information
about Ubuntu on the Internet. And 38,000 have signed up to translate the
software into different languages.

When a new version of the operating
system becomes available, Ubuntu devotees pile onto the Internet, often
crippling Web sites that distribute the software. And hundreds of other
organizations, mostly universities, also help in the distribution.

The technology research firm IDC
estimates that 11 percent of American businesses have systems based on Ubuntu.
That said, many of the largest Ubuntu customers have cropped up in Europe,
where Microsoft’s dominance has endured intense regulatory and political
scrutiny.

The Macedonian education department
relies on Ubuntu, providing 180,000 copies of the operating system to children,
while the Spanish school system has 195,000 Ubuntu desktops. In France, the
National Assembly and the Gendarmerie Nationale, the military police force, rely
on Ubuntu for a combined 80,000 PCs. “The word ‘free’ was very important,” said
Rudy Salles, vice president of the assembly, noting that it allowed the
legislature to abandon Microsoft.

Without question, Ubuntu’s rapid
rise has been aided by the fervor surrounding Linux. But it’s Mr. Shuttleworth
and his flashy lifestyle that generate much of the attention Ubuntu receives.
While he favors casual attire matching the developers’, some of his activities,
including a trip to space, are hardly ordinary.

“Look, I have a very privileged
life, right?” Mr. Shuttleworth said. “I am a billionaire, bachelor,
ex-cosmonaut. Life couldn’t easily be that much better. Being a Linux geek sort
of brings balance to the force.”

The first installment of Mr.
Shuttleworth’s fortune arrived after he graduated from the University of Cape
Town in 1995 with a business degree.

He had been paying bills by
operating a small technology consulting company, setting up Linux servers for
companies to run their Web sites and other basic operations. His business
leanings and technology background inspired him to try to capitalize on the
rising interest in the Internet.

“I’m more of an academic than a
cut-and-thrust wheeler-dealer,” he said. “I was very interested in how the
Internet was changing commerce and was determined to pursue it.”

Mr. Shuttleworth decided to start a
company called Thawte Consulting (pronounced like “thought”) in 1995 that
provided digital certificates, a security mechanism that browsers use to verify
the identity of companies. As a 23-year-old, he visited Netscape to promote a
broad standard for these certificates. Netscape, then the leading browser
maker, bought into it, and Microsoft, which makes the Internet Explorer
browser, followed.

As dot-com mania surged, companies
became interested in this profitable outfit, based in South Africa. In 1999, VeriSign,
which manages a number of Internet infrastructure services, bought Thawte for
$575 million. (Mr. Shuttleworth had turned down an offer of $100 million a few
months earlier.)

Having owned all of Thawte, Mr.
Shuttleworth, the son of a surgeon and a kindergarten teacher, became very
wealthy at just 26.

So what’s a newly minted millionaire
to do? Mr. Shuttleworth looked to the stars. Paying an estimated $20 million to
Russian officials, he secured a 10-day trip to space and the International
Space Station on the Soyuz TM-34 in 2002 and became the first “Afronaut,” as
the press described him.

“After selling the company, it
wasn’t a blowout yachts and blondes situation,” he said. “It was very clear
that I was in a unique situation where I should choose to do things that were
not possible otherwise.”

In the following years, Mr.
Shuttleworth set up venture capital and charitable organizations. Through
investments in the United States, Africa and Europe, he says, he has amassed a
fortune of more than $1 billion.

He spends 90 percent of his time,
however, working on Canonical, which he considers another project that
challenges what’s possible.

“I have done well with investing,
but it has never felt very fulfilling,” he said. “I fear getting to the end of
my life and feeling you haven’t actually built something. And to do something
people thought was impossible is attractive.”

CANONICAL’S model makes turning a
profit difficult.

Many open-source companies give away
a free version of their software that has some limitations, while selling a
full-fledged version along with complementary services for keeping the software
up to date. Canonical gives away everything, including its top product, then
hopes that companies will still turn to it for services like managing large
groups of servers and desktops instead of handling everything themselves with
in-house experts.

Canonical also receives revenue from
companies like Dell that ship computers with Ubuntu and work with it on
software engineering projects like adding Linux-based features to laptops. All
told, Canonical’s annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million, Mr. Shuttleworth
said.

That figure won’t worry Microsoft.

But Mr. Shuttleworth contends that
$30 million a year is self-sustaining revenue, just what he needs to finance
regular Ubuntu updates. And a free operating system that pays for itself, he
says, could change how people view and use the software they touch everyday.

“Are we creating world peace or
fundamentally changing the world? No,” he said. “But we could shift what people
expect and the amount of innovation per dollar they expect.”

Microsoft had an estimated 10,000
people working on Vista, its newest desktop operating system, for five years.
The result of this multibillion-dollar investment has been a product late to
market and widely panned.

Canonical, meanwhile, releases a
fresh version of Ubuntu every six months, adding features that capitalize on
the latest advances from developers and component makers like Intel.
The company’s model centers on outpacing Microsoft on both price and features
aimed at new markets.

“It feels pretty clear to me that
the open process produces better stuff,” Mr. Shuttleworth said. Such talk from
a man willing to finance software for the masses — and by the masses — inspires
those who see open source as more of a cause than a business model.

In his spare time, Agostino Russo,
for example, who works for a hedge fund at Moore Europe Capital Management in
London, created a program called Wubi that allows Ubuntu to be installed on
computers running Windows.

“I always thought that open source
is a very important socioeconomic movement,” Mr. Russo said.

Ultimately, however, parts of Mr.
Shuttleworth’s venture continue to look quixotic. Linux remains rough around
the edges, and Canonical’s business model seems more like charity than the next
great business story. And even if the open Ubuntu proves a raging success, the
operating system will largely be used to reach proprietary online services from
Microsoft, Yahoo,
Google and others.

“Mark is very genuine and
fundamentally believes in open source,” said Matt Asay, a commentator on
open-source technology and an executive at the software maker Alfresco. “But I
think he’s going to have a crisis of faith at some point.”

Mr. Asay wonders if Canonical can
sustain its “give everything away” model and “always open” ideology.

Canonical shows no signs of slowing
down or changing course anytime soon.

“We already have a sense of where we
need to compete with Windows,” Mr. Shuttleworth said. “Now the question is if
we can create something that is stylish and stunning.”

In his personal life, he continues
to test what is possible, requesting that a fiber-optic connection be installed
to his house on the border of London’s affluent Chelsea and South Kensington
neighborhoods.

“I want to find out what it’s like
to have a gigabit connection to the home,” he said. “It is not because I need
to watch porn in high-definition but because I want to see what you do
differently.”

He says Canonical is not just a
do-gooder project by someone with the time, money and inclination to tackle
Microsoft head-on. His vision is to make Ubuntu the standard for the next
couple of billion people who acquire PCs.

Source  : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1