[ Thanks to Marcel
Gagne for this link. ]
“A few days ago, Mark Shuttleworth took some time to
address critics who scoff at Canonical’s contributions to GNOME and
the Linux kernel itself by sharing his thoughts on the subject in
his personal blog. The post, titled “Reflections on Ubuntu,
Canonical and the march to free software adoption”, reflecting on
Canonical and Ubuntu’s contributions to the world of free and open
source software. There are a couple of interesting stories, some
obvious rationalization, some genuine insights, and more than a few
nods to the various forces that come together to create a Linux
distribution.“These include not only the people behind the Linux kernel, but
GNU and the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME.
OpenOffice.org (aka Oracle and SUN Microsystems before that),
Sendmail, Apache, the Internet Systems Consortium, IBM, Google, Red
Hat, Novell (and SUSE), etc, etc, etc. In his post, Mark
Shuttleworth named a few. I’ve added a bunch of others. The point
being that Ubuntu isn’t just Linux and Linux isn’t just GNU, and so
on. There are many thousands of people and a huge number of
companies that contribute to FOSS.“For years now, I’ve wrestled with the question of how free
software, and Linux, makes it into the hands of the average person.
I have written about Linux and hundreds of packages in magazines
and in books. I’ve given talks and presentations, taught classes,
and done radio and television trying to show people how free
software is ready to do what they need to do, with the added bonus
that the world is a better for place whenever open source and open
standards are strong. It’s a message I believe in and one I’ve
never stopped giving, but . . . I am thrilled by all the strides
that have been made by FOSS and Linux but . . . “