From the ‘Jaunty is coming‘ files:
Mark Shuttleworth founder of Ubuntu and his CTO Matt Zimmerman held a press conference this AM to pre-announce the launch of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, which will become available this Thursday April 23rd. Aside from the product details on the upcoming release, Shuttleworth provided insight into what he sees the Oracle buy of Sun means to Ubuntu, and the wider open source ecosystem itself.
“What is interesting to me about this move is that it really cements the idea that free software and open source are the profound driving forces behind software today,” Shuttleworth said in response to a question from me.
He added that it’s very hard to name a large proprietary software company which has been created since the 1990’s. He argued that the major sources in software today are either free software or powered by free software, Google Yahoo etc.
“The fact that Oracle has just announced a multi-billion dollar acquisition of a company that describes itself as the world’s biggest Free Software and Open Source company to me is enormously instructive,” Shuttleworth said. “To me it suggests that it cements the idea that open source and free software are the big game in town. And everyone is trying to figure out what that means and how they integrate it, what’ they can’t do is ignore it.”