"Two forces in particular are driving changes to Linux. One is a push to develop Linux into a standard, more predictable platform for developers and users. The other is to leverage Linux, and open source in general, as mediums through which innovation gets delivered to users.
"Those who create Linux distributions have a massive task ahead: taking the myriad open source offerings out there and pulling them into a unified whole. That's certainly a goal for Ubuntu Linux, says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, which provides commercial support for the popular Linux variant. Ubuntu 8.10 was specifically assembled as the next step toward unification. Among the improvements with this in mind: automation that lets users install unsupported or commercial handlers for multimedia codecs."
