Cool new product

Came across this today from  Planet Ubuntu. Great idea and great job people.  Keep up the good work, site bookmarked

Shuttleworth responds to Microsoft/Ubuntu rumors

For some reason there has been a rumor of an agreement a la Novel/Microsoft or MS and Xandros, featuring MS and Ubuntu. It appears that someone took a quote out of context when searching Shuttleworth quotes. Mark thinks it would be great to work with Microsoft in a way that would promote both freedom and interop, not in a way that provide patent indeminification. The good news is the Ubuntu community has debunked the rumors and stories floating around the blogsphere. This post is perhaps one of the best, in fact it is the one Mark quotes in his blog entry responding to the actual criticism and the rumor.

In his entry he restates his desire to work together with MS to promote interop, but not patent indeminification.  As someone who works w/ MS products for a living and does consulting for a product that specializes in Microsoft products, I wish that Microsoft would work further to make things better then force people to use their product or sue them for patent infringment.  I wish I could use Active Directory to manage my Linux boxes better, to better network between my LInux box and my windows file server.  All kinds of things I wish I could do.  MS Office on Linux would be an awesome addition, or perhaps better standards work between their products and already established standards instead of creating their own.  When will Microsoft wake up from the nineties tech world and join the current tech world were open source products and Microsoft products need MUST work together.

Best quote of Mark’s to sum up the whole thing:  (BTW isn’t it great that a CEO responds so openly?)

My goal is to carry free software forward as far as I can, and then to help others take the baton to carry it further. At Canonical, we believe that we can be successful and also make a huge contribution to that goal. In the Ubuntu community, we believe that the freedom in free software is what’s powerful, not the openness of the code. Our role is not to be the ideologues -in-chief of the movement, our role is to deliver the benefits of that freedom to the widest possible audience. We recognize the value in “good now to get perfect later” (today we require free apps, tomorrow free drivers too, and someday free firmware to be part of the default Ubuntu configuration) we always act in support of the goals of the free software community as we perceive them.

Tha sums everything up….