Jane Silber Interview

"I noticed in the announcement made on Dec 17th, on the Canonical Blog, when asked about "How will this impact Mark's role on the Ubuntu Community Council and the Ubuntu Technical Board?" you stated, "One thing this move will bring about is a clearer separation of the role of CEO of Canonical and the leader of the Ubuntu community. It will be two different people now, which I think will be helpful in both achieving their joint and individual goals more quickly." Can you elaborate on what those joint goals of Canonical and Ubuntu are and what the individual goals are besides the obvious commercial differences?

"JS: Canonical and Ubuntu have many common goals. First among those is to make Ubuntu the most widely adopted free software platform, and Canonical invests heavily in the development and marketing of Ubuntu to make that happen. Elsewhere, the goals diverge in places where something is of less interest or less suited to one than the other, rather than the goals being in conflict. For example, Canonical has a large team that works with OEMs to get emerging, pre-production hardware enabled for Ubuntu. The contractual and liability requirements for such work simply aren't well suited to community work. In contrast, local advocacy (e.g., installfests, local events, etc) is much better suited to the LoCo teams in the Ubuntu community than to Canonical."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Ubuntu: 9 Priorities for Canonical's Incoming CEO(Dec 21, 2009)
• Shuttleworth Steps Down as Canonical Restructures(Dec 17, 2009)
• Shuttleworth steps down as Ubuntu CEO(Dec 17, 2009)
• Keeping Ubuntu CDs available(Oct 22, 2009)