back to article Shuttleworth sees fewer clouds in Ubuntu's future

There are some tough decisions ahead about which cloud open sourcers should support in the next major version of Ubuntu. Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has said that "firm decisions" are required about the cloud platforms that can be supported. Shuttleworth made the announcement while revealing the animal- …

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  1. Eugene Crosser
    Stop

    Wait a sec,

    Shuttleworth did not say that! 11.10 is 'oneiric', not 12.04 LTS.

  2. PushF12
    Flame

    oneieric... oneric... ugh

    "Oneiric Ocelot" is too hard to type.

  3. Stephen Michael Kellat
    WTF?

    Wrong version number

    Unless the release in October is being skipped, 12.04 LTS won't be the Ocelot release. 11.10 will be. As to what animal is picked that starts with a "P" for 12.04...who knows?

    1. spaxe
      Joke

      that should be...

      ...pink panther?

    2. M Gale
      Linux

      An animal for "p"?

      Hm, I'll have to think about that one.

    3. Eugene Crosser

      Plegmatic Pinguin?

      (or Pig?)

    4. tapanit
      Linux

      O, P, Q ...

      "As to what animal is picked that starts with a "P" for 12.04...who knows?"

      Lots of those to choose from (I doubt they have the chuzpah to go for Perky Penguin though), but the next one will be harder... Querulous Quail? Quotidian Quetzal? Queamish Queenfish? Queer Quillback? Quirky Quillfish? Can't think of any more... except Qagga, but an extinct animal would be a bit, err, ominous.

      Maybe they'll jump Q and go straight to R (Racy Rat?).

  4. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Clouds

    They come and they go.

    They scud across the skies

    And piss all over those below.

  5. Shannon Jacobs
    Megaphone

    What Linux and Ubuntu needs are better economic models

    I've been a computer professional for over 30 years and have used Ubuntu for the last five or six years. I'm big on REAL choice and freedom, which makes me anti-Microsoft (in spite of their bogus-choice-based advertising campaigns) and anti-Apple (as they milk their fanbois and fangoils [Is that the proper feminine form?]).

    From that position, I would really like to see Linux succeed, and for a while I thought Ubuntu was the best candidate. However, over the last few years Ubuntu has actually been going downhill and become MORE of a geek OS option, rather than less. I believe that the peak of real-world usability was about four or five versions ago, though that may be biased because my requirements include Japanese. Since Japanese-related problems have been increasing, perhaps the real problem is that Ubuntu has been de-emphasizing international support in favor of English. (However, I can't really buy that excuse my primary environment is English...)

    The economic model of Ubuntu is big-charity, and the thrust of this article emphasizes just how the big donors call the shots in that economic model. I don't know of any examples where that has been a sustained success unless you measure success by using up the big donor's money. I think that Microsoft produces awful software, but you have to acknowledge that their economic models have worked very effectively, not just for profits but for controlling the direction of the computer industry in their favor.

    I think that LInux and OSS need a better economic model. What I suggest is a small-donor economic model patterned roughly after the OLD stock markets, before they evolved into today's speculative casinos. Many small donors should be able to indicate what features they want and vote with their donations to pay for those projects--where the budgets of the proposed projects included adequate testing, which is the main area where Ubuntu appears to have been falling down over the last few years. This should actually be a kind of competition, where proposals would compete for donors on the basis of such factors as track record and satisfaction of the donors to previous projects. Let the best proposal win the donors. (However, there's actually nothing wrong if two or three projects tackle the same objectives and if they all succeed. That's just more choice and more freedom for everyone.)

    Various ways it could be done, but here's one concrete suggestion from a few years ago:

    http://eco-epistemology.blogspot.com/2009/11/economics-of-small-donors-reverse.html

    I'd like to see success for Linux in general and even for Ubuntu in particular. Even more than that, I'd like to see REAL freedom and choice in the computer software field. However, I do not believe that current economic models are going to do it.

    1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
      Grenade

      InterNetional Platform Control Consoles for Big Boys and Girls/SMART Sons and Daughters LOVERS*

      "The economic model of Ubuntu is big-charity, and the thrust of this article emphasizes just how the big donors call the shots in that economic model." ..... Shannon Jacobs Posted Tuesday 8th March 2011 00:26 GM

      Hi, Shannon Jacobs,

      The economic model of Ubuntu is Enterprising Great Game Entrepreneurial Leadership. And all you have to do to confirm that, is run it by Mark Shuttleworth for his canonical on the platform.

      Indeed, if El Reg are on the ball and want to try out some HyperRadioProActive IT, they could ask the question for everyone of Mark, and get back to readers here with the answer, for surely they have contact channels that taps Clouds and Clouds Exe. for ......... well, Colossal Reigns and Titanic Rains are just two of the Openings/Opportunities/Exploitable Executive ZerodDay Vulnerabilities that easily Flood World Markets with Novel and Noble Steganographic Secrets .......in the Zen and the Ken of White Knight Black Hats with Magical Invisibility ....... Global Operating Devices with Cloaking Covers in Every Conceivable Colour/Phorm/Utility and Fab Facility.

      *Live Operational Virtual Environment Researching Systems.

      You want Change? We want Change and are Legion and the Dark Continent with ITs Can Do Mindsets can Deliver you the Change that the Wild West is Petrified and Cowed into Not Delivering for the Benefit of a Right Royally Perverted Few ........ or it just may be that they just don't have the Necessary SMART Enablements either.

      cc Nairobi SE, Kenya.

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      @Shannon Jacobs

      I agree completely with your analysis and your sentiments, and even that Ubuntu peaked around Hardy Heron, but what I have difficulty with is whether limiting shareholding to small investors could be achieved, and whether it would work.

      I also have a problem in how you would keep the shares with small investors, unless they were bought and sold through a market other than one of the stock markets, or managed completely internally making it a privately held company with an internalised share market (and I don't know how that would be organised or regulated for a large number of investors).

      Also, having shares is a method of raising capital to invest. It is not a way of attracting a revenue stream, regardless of how it is implemented.

      With shares, there is always the expectation that the shareholder could get their money back. I think that you are eluding to a micro-donation scheme, where you give them money and expect to gain some influence as a result. This is more like a subscription.

      I've briefly looked at the charity shares model and I must admit that I don't understand how it works (probably my bad). It looks to me if you effectively lend your money to a charity for them to use and get financial value, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping and getting value back in the way of ethical satisfaction rather than financial gain. I can't see how that can be a business model for an organisation like Canonical. They still need to get some revenue stream in.

      Of course, I may have misunderstood what you are saying (in fact, that is probably quite likely).

    3. doperative
      Linux

      Ubuntu more of a geek OS option?

      > I've been a computer professional for over 30 years .., Shannon Jacobs

      So have I but I never mention that as it might sound like I was using the logical fallacy of appealing to authority.

      > over the last few years Ubuntu has actually been going downhill and become MORE of a geek OS option, rather than less. I believe that the peak of real-world usability was about four or five versions ago .., Shannon Jacobs

      "geek OS option", you have just got to be kidding. I can't for the life of me see what you're on about. Ubuntu just works, straight out of the box. Browsing, email, word processing and media player. No technical skill required apart from the ability to click in click-boxes. (no don't mention some obscure hardware/driver configuration)

    4. mhenriday

      Shannon, what problems are you experiencing

      in using Japanese on an Ubuntu machine ? I have occasion to use both Chinese and Japanese on my 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 box, and find that SCIM provides me with the features I need (others have recommended IBus, but I have no personal experience with that input system)....

      Henri

  6. Andy E
    Coat

    What I hate about Unix and its derivatives...

    I cut my teeth on Digitals VMS many, many years ago and one of the things I really liked about that operating system was the command line environment. It had a consistent syntax with the commands and qualifiers. If I wanted to print a file you would type in 'Print'. If you wanted to back something up you would type in 'Backup'. If you wanted to list a directories contents you typed in 'Directory'. Most of the commands were intuitive and could be shortened to three characters once you became familiar with them.. You could refine the commands with '/Created' or '/Modified' date selections for example. As I said, there was a consistent syntax across all the commands.

    Every Unix/Linux command line environment I have looked at has been a nightmare. There's a wide variety of utilities with non-intuitive names and overlapping features. There is an inconsistent approach to the way switches are used and again they are non-intuitive. I'm amazed that this approach has continued for so long. I always get the impression the utilities were written by clever people who just happen to be lazy and can't spell properly. Hence you get utilities like rsync and one letter switches. It's just madness.

    Rant over. I'll get my coat, it's the one with the Welcome to 'Plain English Campaign' pamphlet in the pocket.

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Coat

      @Andy E

      The downside of the VMS DCL command line model was that for every command, you had to add entries to the DCL command dictionary, whatever that was called (it's been a long, long time since I did any DCL configuration, and much of that was on RSX/11M not VMS). All of the command line parsing and in-line help that allowed abbreviations was done by the DCL command processor, although I do believe that it passed any unprocessed arguments through to the program as a last resort.

      One of the most useful and irritating features (both at the same time) is that UNIX-like operating systems left that to the commands , although if you look at ancient UNIXes, there were very strong conventions that should have been followed (if you look back at the USENET archives, there are many quite animated discussions about whether the shell should do more command line processing than it did/does). This meant that you could easily add commands to UNIX, and that internal shell commands, functions, aliases and external programs appeared almost seamless.

      One of the quirks, however, was that some of the ancient commands, many still used today, never did abide by the conventions (the most obvious of examples of this are the "dd" and "find" commands, that have been there almost since Epoch began, and never did conform).

      Over time and UNIX versions, the conventions broke down. One character flags gave way to words, and as soon as that happened, you have to code around whether the arguments like "-Fart" are equivalent to "-F -a -r -t", or whether there is a wordy argument which actually tells the program to break wind (this is a quick example off the top of my head from the "ls" command. There may be better ones).

      Then the BSD/GNU people got involved, and introduced what I regard as the abomination of the -- (double minus) argument, supposedly to allow the syntax to be extended, but actually misused my many post-linux developers to completely replace the original UNIX flag processing implemented by getopts.

      Couple this with the fact that often the GNU and GNU-like commands were never documented by proper man pages (or even their supposed native "info" command), or even by informative usage strings, and that there was effectively no controlling influence (a flaw in the Open Source contributory model itself) and you get to today's mess. I can totally sympathise with you with it being difficult and awkward to use (I actually count VAX/VMS as being the OS I would prefer to use after UNIX)

      I look back fondly to V7 and SVR2 and SVR3 days, when conventions meant something, and people bothered to use them.

      My coat is the sad old gabardine raincoat with the Lyons annotated UNIX source in the pocket (which, in case anybody bothers to read to the bottom of my past comments, I lost, but have found again).

    2. phoenix
      Thumb Up

      I agree

      only VMS gone Unix is still with us. There are other reasons to keep one OS over another other than ease of CLI commands.

      Anyway some of that lot were responsible for Windows NT and the subsequent hell that has unleashed in the world.

    3. doperative
      Linux

      Unix/Linux command line environment is a nightmare

      > Every Unix/Linux command line environment I have looked at has been a nightmare .., Andy E

      I beg to differ, I find BASH in conjunction with scripts to be relatively consistant across the various versions as in ifconfig does the same thing on all, whether SuSE or Ubuntu. Indeed I sometimes find myself firing up IPCONFG on Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, as Microsoft keep moving the gui network bits around :). Besides that, command line is generally only usefull on servers or automating some task ..

    4. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Happy

      @Andy E

      "I always get the impression the utilities were written by clever people who just happen to be lazy and can't spell properly"

      Actually, it was more like the Teletype ASR-33's in common use as terminals back when UNIX was being formed being sooooooooooooo sloooooooow, that people abbreviated commands and flags so that they could work reasonably quickly. It is also the reason why ed is incredibly terse, but ultimately very powerful as a line editor. I recommend to every serious UNIX/Linux user that they learn ed, just so they can use vi and sed effectively.

      Another explanation is that they were lazy, a positive attribute for all good system admins. (do what's needed efficiently and with the least effort). At least, that's my opinion.

  7. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
    Joke

    Wild guess at first piss-take version of the name

    Onanistic Ocelot.

    That is all.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Bah, shuttleworth

    With all the wank coming out of Canonical these days, surely Onanistic Ocelot would be more suitable?

  9. Richard Wharram

    I should imagine it will be...

    Queefing Quoll

  10. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    What's with all the silly names?

    How does he expect people to take Ubuntu seriously when the release codenames sound like they come out of some wipe-clean kiddies' book?

  11. jotheberlock

    Actually

    Qt is still owned by Nokia. Only commercial support has been sold.

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