No Speaker: Intro Music
TW: Welcome to Episode 6 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, I'm Tony and last week Alan, Dave and I went to the Ubuntu Developers summit in Prague. In this episode Alan and I talk about our impressions of UDS while sitting at the airport waiting to go home. We also set a new competition and in a change from our usual format we've got a great interview with Mark Shuttleworth, which we've split in two. Sounds like a fun packed show, let's get on with it.
TW: UDS for Intrepid is just finished, it's Saturday morning now and definitely the morning after the night before. So what are you thoughts about FOSS Camp and UDS?
AP: Well I was lucky enough to get sponsored for FOSS Camp and UDS by Canonical, they payed my hotel and travel and all that and I first of all want to thank then for, you know, giving me the opportunity to come out here.This is the third UDS I've been to and they're always a great event. The fist time you go it's a bit overwhelming and it's somewhat strange because there are someone people there who already know each other and you might know some of the people through communication on-line via IRC, the Forums or mailing list but then when you meet them for real it kind of cements those relationships.One of the big things I like about UDS is cementing relationships that have been built up on-line and at FOSS Camp we had an event where upstream, so that's people who provide packages and people who provide applications to the Ubuntu distribution would come along and we'd talk to together about relationships between distros, and relationships between distros and upstream and things that we might want to fix. It was a good couple of days on Friday and Saturday last week and then we had the five days of UDS, from Monday to Friday.
TW: UDS is quite a big event similarly to FOSDEM in a way there's lots of different threads and areas but unlike FOSDEM where it's talks and presentations from people in the project to people who aren't in the project, it's more of a sort of round table discussion, it really is a summit rather than a conference so you can see why they chose that name.
AP: Yes it's always quite clear on the Wiki page that describes each UDS it's quite clear this isn't a conference. It's fine for people to come and if they want to pay their own way and turn up and help out that's great, but it's not like FOSDEM where you sit down and ingest information from people giving talks.It's more about contributing back and so these round table discussions which are streamed over the Internet and people can join in via IRC and so on during these conversations. And that's really what they are they're conversations between relevant parties. During those conversations you form preliminary plans for whats going to be in the next version of Ubuntu.
TW: And decisions are made as well you know. Do we do this? Do we drop support for this? Do we include this application. And it is actually really the place where Intrepid will be given it's structure, a skeletal structure, and things will change during the course of things but having come away from this week I think the developers and things have got a really clear idea of the way they're heading at the moment.
AP: Yeah and that's always nice to see and in fact you do see change over the following six months because new applications arrive and new packages arrive in the repositories and that changes some of the feel and maybe the artwork is under development and that gets changed part way through the cycle and so on and so while yes there is a skeletal structure started here it's certainly built upon over the next sixth months.
TW: That was one of the things I hadn't expected to see, I assumed it would basically be entirely developers but we had people like Ken who does the artwork for Ubuntu and other people who do similar kind of design work, and things like that, involved in discussions as well. So it's not just a case of "oh how do we code this?" or "How do we hack this stuff together?".
AP: Yeah it's surprising there's surprisingly little, you know, ones and zeros kind of like really deeply technical talk. I mean obviously there is some fairly technical talk but a lot of it is at a higher level, like a view from a thousand feet, of whats going to be happen.And yeah I've met people here who are not developers, I'm not a developer I see myself as, if you think of a set concentric circles you've got right in the middle the core team who some work for Canonical and some don't and just outside that you've got all the developers who are also contributing and then the further out you get you've got people who are less and less involved in that development process.They may be in the community and they help out in other ways but they are not necessarily directly affecting packages in the system and I consider myself to be on that outside periphery watching the developers. So a lot of the time it's difficult to join in with some of those development conversations, but equally there are other sessions where I have been able to contribute and it's been very good to know that some of my input will help form a little part of what goes on to become Intrepid in October later this year.
TW: Yeah I agree although saying that there are concentric circles sets up a sort of a boundary system that I didn't really see reflected but
AP: It's kind of fuzzy lines.
TW: Yeah but one of the nice things about UDS is that you can just walk up and talk to people. I don't suppose you get any closer to the centre than Mark Shuttleworth and he's just milling around and we went out to a club last night and he was on the back row of the bus with us and chatting away and all the other developers and the kind of the core team are just floating around, people like Scott James Remnant and Jono Bacon, and people and hanging out and things in the evening and talking to them during the day about Ubuntu and Ubuntu related stuff.So it's not like there's firm boundary's, and it does seem to be really easy for people to get involved in bit's that they want to get involved in. In particularly the being able to dial in to sessions, there's an Icecast stream so you can listen into the session but there's also a VOIP number so you can dial in and take part in a discussion if your not able to physically be here which is great because you don't need a huge amount of infrastructure to do that it's just all using software supplied with Ubuntu.
AP: And how many other platforms, how many other operating systems would give you the opportunity to influence the direction of the next release? As a complete, in inverted commas, 'outsider' being able to influence and being able to talk to the core developers and, you know, ask them how things work and why certain decisions were made and get the real inside track, it's unique.I don't know of any other, I mean there are other Linux distributions who do similar things, but I can't see Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer sitting on the back of the bus with you and me going to a nightclub on a Friday night, which is what happened last night.It's the level of community and the closeness off the community. When I say those concentric circles they're very fuzzy and I'm only looking at it from one perspective but when you look at it at people level the people are very close and there's a video that you shot of everyone running to give Daniel Holbach a hug and this was organised because someone thought that Daniel wasn't very happy one day so he organised every to give Daniel a big hug and that kind of spirit, that kind of community spirit is great.
TW: Yeah, I agree and it's, I think Jono said that that thing where we all flash hugged Daniel was the essence of Ubuntu, was the spirit of Ubuntu, it was just kind of getting involved in that sort of thing as much as it is the technical stuff.
AP: So the next UDS we have to look forward to will be after Intrepid. So Intrepid releases or is scheduled to release in October 2008 and then usually a few weeks of calm and then the next UDS which there's a rumour it's going to be back across the pond in the U.S. It's funny I kind of look forward to each of these UDSes and I try and schedule a bit of time in my calendar hoping that I can get sponsored and get to go because it is such a great event.
TW: Yeah, I really enjoyed the social stuff in the evenings, because of what I was doing I was quite kind of in my little room doing my videoing and talks. By the way you can see those at youtube.com/UbuntuDevelopers , that's what I've been doing this week is interviewing various people and it's been really good to meet those people and chat to them both on-camera and off.
No Speaker: MUSICAL INTERLUDE
TW: We're here with Mark Shuttleworth, Hi Mark.
MS: Howdy, how are you?
TW: Not too bad, Not too bad. Are you enjoying UDS then.
MS: Loving it, thank you.
TW: OK, let's get on with the questions.
AP: The first one I have is, one of the things about Ubuntu and Linux in general is it's all about choice and I've noticed by reading the headers of your mail that you use Mozilla Thunderbird.
MS: Emm hmm.
AP: What software do you use on a daily basis you couldn't get by without?
MS: I guess the thing that defines me most from a software perspective is Python because it's the tool that I've used for, gosh, ten - fifteen years to shape the things that I'm interested in and to try and articulate the things that I'm interested in, in a way that will make sense to other coders right and a way that will make sense to other developersSo the biggest personal software choice I guess I've made in my career has been to use python very heavily and to do what I can to encourage the spread of that idea. Other than that I am a heavy user of Mozilla and Mozilla technologies on all the platforms that I work with, I have a Mac so I install Firefox on that and if I have to use Windows I'll usually pull Firefox down onto that.I'd love to see Thunderbird more widely adopted. We haven't really been able to make it the default mail client in Ubuntu because it misses a couple of key feature but for the things that I do I think it's a phenomenal mail client and I really love the extensions capability. I think that sort of a key idea that enables innovation to flourish.To me free software is partly about choice, but it is also about access to just amazing pipelines of innovation.
AP: Is it difficult making those choices?
MS: It is in fact probably the hardest challenge in the first phases of the project was the initial whittling down of all of Debian to a set of things that we thought presented people with a compelling out of the box experience.You can't help but exclude phenomenally good work and in many cases there isn't necessarily a clear definitive winner there are different tools which are, depending on the perspective you're looking through or looking from, which are a better.If you really need one set of features then of course one tool jumps out at you and if you need a different set of features or have a different way of working then a different tool jumps out at you. And that process within Ubuntu of whittling down to a preferred out of the box application is both socially and technically quite a tricky process. We do a lot of it right at the beginning but it's an ongoing process. The ones that you name there are by and large things that have become part of the standard out of the box experience since Warty.So it's an ongoing experiance or process. It's very important for us not to conflate personal preferences with this decision. Thunderbird is my personal prefered mail client but I don't project that into the distrobution in any way because my sense is that a blanced perspective still puts evolution as the best first choice.It is a dynamic process, we may well change that decision later but the team really tries to seperate out their personal preferences of editor or language or tool from what's best for the community.
AP: At the last UDS in Boston there was a rather heated discussion about whether we should switch from Rythmbox to Banshee.It must be very difficult to throw one product out in favour of something else.
MS: It's a high cost decisions, yes. Because users who upgrade suddenly, potentially, find themselves in an odd situation where there may be two tools for the same thing and other people who are new to the project start talking about the one they're not familiar with.So it's not as though we can be too dynamic about it, we're very conscious of the cost of making a switch, we don't want to make a switch likely.The other thing is that you end up getting opinions from lots of different perspectives. There are people who focus on their use of the tool and there are also people who focus on, for example, the general philosophical alignment of the tool. So OpenOffice is interesting. KDE have their own office platform and Gnome has it's own office platform, AbiWord and Gnumeric, and these are both exceptionally good bodies of code. All three of them are great bodies of code through different glasses. We take a lot of flak from the Gnome community for not shipping epiphany for example as the default browser. And to a certain extent for not shipping Gnumeric as the default spreadsheet but ultimately we try and make the decision that reflects the very best of what the whole Free Software community has to offer.
DW: Now recently there was a major SSH and SSL vulnerability, how do you feel the community reacted to that?
MS: Well, first it was a very significant vulnerability and for someone who's got a strong personal interest in Cyrptography it was very clear as soon as we uncovered this that it was going to be a very serious issue. So we put a lot of time and effort over a very concentrated period of time to get the best possible response.The team that was working on that was largely Canonical Security and Infastructure team but also the Debian guys. And I think the end result was a really good response to a very serious issue. I don't think one can overstate the magnitude of the problem but the response, I think, was very very professional.We shipped a set of updates which immediately detected whether or not people where affected, immediately put in place safe guards so that if third parties were affected and tried to connect to them they could propagate that information about the problem to them.We did quite a lot of analysis after all the response was in place about how this defect came into the software. With all the benefit of hindsight one can only ascribe it to human error. Like any sort of tragedy or disaster it's a series of errors.I think the Debian maintainers have taken a lot of flak but many people don't realise that they actually did the right thing. They took this patch to the upstream developers, they took it to the main documented forum for the discussion of these patches, they were given a thumbs up, albeit a sort of quick sketch analysis and so they applied that patch.Our ecosystem, our process generally produces very high quality results. Our relationship with Debian, the fact we combine Debians sort of super specialised maintainer approach with the Ubuntu whole system approach produces a very very high quality of output but there will be mistakes and what's important then is how well and how effectively we respond to that mistake.
TW: Do you think having such a major vulnerability so early in an LTS release has had a negative impact? Has it affected the employees at Canonical or the wider communities perception of Ubuntu?
MS: Of course it has. It's a significant set back and everybody takes it personally. I didn't see any indication of people so "Oh well this wasn't our bug" or "this wasn't our patch". We understand that we are fundamentally responsible for the bits that go onto our user hard disks, it doesn't matter where a piece of code came from.And yeah the timing on an LTS is really not great but from my perspective it's always better to deal with an issue immediately and I'm not going to let concerns about PR get in the way of use doing the effective thing.
AP: I notice shipit CDs have been stopped distribution of those because they contain the vulnerability, is that so?
MS: The server CDs actually have the SSHD on there and so they are more likely to be a problem. And so yes we will stop distributing those and we will ramp up production of a re-rolled set of images that doesn't have the issue.
AP: Will that wait for 8.04.1 or is that something your going to do now?
MS: We'll get the printing presses going with an updated set of images and the point 1 release will go out in due course.
DW: What's the current status of Gobuntu?
MS: So there will be another release of Gobuntu and we'll do an 8.04 Gobuntu release.We had a BoF about this yesterday here at UDS and I think we've come to the view that the right ting for us to do is first to continue to work on the F6 option which is the install Ubuntu with no restricted drivers option.
DW: The give me Freedom option.
MS: Well you have a whole lot of freedom on standard Ubuntu CD.
AP: Nice trolling their Dave (launghs)
MS: You know I find that when folks are having a discussion about this it's very easy for people who agree on 99% of things to use that 1% that they disagree on as like a bludgeon to malign on another about and I really find that not constructive and it's a really problem in the Free Software community when that becomes the dominant factor. The truth is, you know if you read the archives of the Gobuntu list there was no kind of census on what actually constitutes freedom. We had one guy coming up and saying Gobuntu should ship IceWeasel and someone else saying "no, no, no wait that's just a trademark issue there's no freedom restriction there that's not a problem" and someone else comes along and says "We should only work on machines that run with Linux BIOSes" and someone else saying "What are you crazy?". So when you get down to that sort of very fundamentalist view, there's nothing wrong with it that's why we created Gobuntu, we wanted to articulate that we where unable to sustain a community that had consensus on when you go beyond what Ubuntu provides what that should mean.And so we looked at what we were going to do as first do more work on the F6 option, and second work with the gNewSense guys to figure out if there is things we could do to make their lives easier. They have an established community and for better or worse they have a set of guidelines that they will stick to.Not everybody who was interested in Gobuntu will be interested in gNewSense so they are kinda going to lose out because there isn't anything that meats their specific set of definitions but I think the gNewSense guys do an admirable set of work and if we an do anything to make their lives easier then we well.But Gobuntu comes to the end of it's life at 8.04 and we'll make that release and then wind it down.
TW: You've got a very high public profile but because of that profile you get sometimes a lot of negative reaction on things like your blog and in news reports. Does that get to you personally, are you able to just shrug it off or does it linger and wind you up a bit?
MS: I do get wound up. You know some guy came onto my blog and spout a whole bunch of really quite viscous, nasty stuff and then I think to a certain extent that's healthy to to remind yourself that one's own convictions are one's convictions and somebody else's ideas are their ideas and I can't be held responsible for somebody else.I sometimes sort of wonder should I publish that, some guy mouthing off on my blog and an generally do you know. I've only once withheld a comment because it was a guy telling me how he was about to try and hack the site and he failed but I think it's important to be part of public debate because Free Software attracts people with very smart and very good insights into a lot of different things.It's a little disappointing sometimes when you have positions put forward that are very very narrowly defined. We sort of invite everybody to stand up and act like they're an expert. Sometimes I see people putting forward a position that just seems to me at least to be based on very very narrow sense of reality
TW: Do you do anything to kind of get away from that, distance yourself or just put it behind.
MS: ??UNKNOWN?? Yes exactly, don't press send, think a little about it. So there was a bit of blog interaction recently where I'm really trying to get people to think about this idea of having more co-ordination in the Free Software ecosystem. And I don't know exactly what form that co-ordination would take but I do think that having a stronger commitment to the idea of co-ordination will be valuable and good things will come out of it.Anyway so some guy has responded on his blog and he's painted a very, you know he's taken a very personal attack he's made it into a very personal thing. You know "Mark Shuttleworth only says this because he wants that" and blah, blah, blah his fluffy cloudy ideas etc. etc. so I wanted to respond personally you know "Screw you and all of your hippie lieutenants" (laughing) but instead what I did was just write about the ideas and try and let the ideas stand for themselves right and focus the discussion on the ideas if they carry the day then they carry the day if they don't they don't.
TW: That's one thing that because of the profile you can't just let one rip back. If someone had a go at me on my blog then I could do and on my own head be it but you've got the kind of pressure of leading the organisation.
MS: Yeah. And when I make mistakes, which I do, it costs the whole community. I though Novell made a mistake once upon a time and I kind of teased them about it in a slightly inappropriate way and everyone in Ubuntu felt a bit ashamed that I had done that and rightly so. And I felt the lack of love.
No Speaker: MUSICAL INTERLUDE
AP: We've got another competition this week. We've got a lot of these Canonical shop vouchers to give away over the coming months. They're pretty neat in that you can use the token to buy stuff or you can use it to buy a part of something and if there's any value left over you can use it again later on. You can also use multiple vouchers so if you happen to win our competition multiple times then you could collect enough vouchers to buy yourself a CD maybe or something more expensive perhaps.
TW: And there's all sorts of things on the shop there's the Ubuntu bags, there's T-Shirts, all sorts of other bits.
AP: I've got one of the bags, the messenger bag or man bag as some people call it and I've had a few people comment on it and ask me if it's any good and have look at it. It's really useful. I've managed to fit two laptops and all associated gumph in it so it's big enough but also if you're only carrying a little laptop there's plenty of space for loads of other stuff to go in there as well.
TW: And if you want to see what you can get from the store it's http://shop.canonical.com
AP: Yeah that's right. It's all grouped into categories and there's Apparel and CDs and loads of other bits and bobs on there as well. You can also actually buy support contracts from Canonical through that store as well.
TW: I don't suppose £20 is going to make much of a dent in that though.
AP: Well no but it helps, every little helps.
TW: So head over there and have a look and see what you could get money off if you win the competition.
AP: So have we got a question for this weeks competition
U: This weeks competition which we will draw at the end of our next episode. The question for that is "What is the name of the Ubuntu installer for Windows that was first released in Hardy?" so that's "What is the name of the Ubuntu installer for Windows that was first released in Hardy?"
AP: And you can email your answers to competition@ubuntu-uk.org
TW: Yeah that's a special address, different from the normal one, please make sure you send it to the right one.
AP: Yeah and we'll filter out all the wrong answers and put together all the right answers and Mark Shuttleworth will pick the winner.
TW: Pick it out of a hat.
AP: A kind of virtual hat, yes.
No Speaker: MUSICAL INTERLUDE
AP: With Ubuntu and other ventures such as HBD, which we obviously in the Ubuntu community we don't tend to hear too much about, that's your other business ventures.
MS: The other 90% of my life.
AP: Ah OK. You clearly have a lot of time occupied with these activities. How do you switch off and unwind and do you find that difficult to do?
MS: Actually Ubuntu probably takes 90% of my time and energy so it's an unusual move because notionally I'm custodian of a body of wealth that ultimately I want to see put to good use and so it's a little self indulgent to spend all of my time on one project which is, relatively speaking, a small portion of that investment portfolio. But to me this project represents the single thing that I can best do in the world. It's a unique combination of investment opportunity because I really think Canonical is a great investment opportunity. We are helping to redefine the software industry and in a very real sense software is technology right. The average persons experience of technology increasingly is driven by software. Your iPhone is a software experience, the hardware is increasingly minimalist. So to me it's a phenomenal opportunity both from a commercial prospective but also from a social perspective. I personally know the enormously empowering impact of developing skills based around Free Software and so for me to be able to participate in bringing that to a wider audience feels like the right thing to be doing. And it takes a weird kind of crackpot to want to devote energy to something that is so specific but it's the best thing I think I could be doing in the world.It's a unique position to be in and a position where you can choose exactly what you want to do but also beyond that choose how you want to make other things happen in the world in an entirely spontaneous kind of way like if you want to invest in Telecommunications in Asia or if you want to give money to Anti-Abortion causes, which I think would be a travesty, you really can choose how you want to exert influence in the world. It's a great privilege, they're not that many people who have that sort of flexibility and I think it says a lot about someone when you see how they do that.So a couple of things first make no mistake I really enjoy my life, you know, I don't do things I really hate doing and I have a lot of fun, I have some nice toys and I get some great holidays, and I have great friends that I get to see that I wouldn't otherwise get to see so I'm not exactly an ashen sack cloth type, I don't
AP: You're not another Paul Sladen
MS: And I know if Paul was a billionaire he wouldn't change a bit so that's the cool thing about him. But I do enjoy what I have but then I also think very carefully about the investments that I make because those are, not charity, but they have a big influence in the world. If I look at my investments in Affrica for example I see how they are changing society they are rewarding economically, financially, but they also create jobs, they create skills, they a social cohesion and alignment so I feel really good about those as well.And then Ubuntu is special to me. It's this unique combination of empowering people all over the world. You know there is no single charity that I could give money to that could have the same impact in terms of giving smart people the tools to do amazing things. It's also a really interesting commercial opportunity right.
AP: You mainly live in the UK as I understand it?
MS: London
AP: Is there anything you miss from South Africa? Is there anything you'd like to bring back over here or something or that would take you back there?
MS: I think I will go back to South Africa in due course, you know, it really spiritually it is my home Africa is, and I've never had any illusions about leaving so mush as spending time elsewhere and the UK has been very good to me. I've great respect for many of it's values and so hopefully those will stick with me wherever I go. Next.
DW: How about three more years from now, what do you expect to see? I mean are we still going to be pushing out a release every six months and what else can we expect to see?
MS: Well I certainly expect us to be pushing out a release every six months and I also expect us to have done another LTS in that time and these are commitments we can make to our users and our future users so it's very important that we stick to them and it's a very effective way for us to work. So on the release cycle basis I think things are very predictable.The thing I most want to see is people using Linux on a train, on a plane, or at home or at school even if many of those people aren't aware that it's Linux. And the amazing thing about Linux Torvalds is I think he doesn't need those people to know that he wrote some critical code in this whole enterprise. I think that's what where setting out to do, we're setting out to build software for human beings, we're setting out to help define the average person will interact with technology which means interacting with software.So that's kind of my dream for the next three years is to see the percentage of people who actively chose Linux, whether it's Fedora or Ubuntu or Gentoo or whatever as a total proportion of all the users of Linux diminish greatly. Now their contribution will never diminish, but in effect the value of their contribution will increase and so that's what I really hope to see. You know Debian developers will be able to take pride in the fact that there are literally tens of millions of machines that ultimately, tens of million of people who benefit every day from the contribution that they make to society both professional and volunteer. So that's what I'd like to see and I hope Ubuntu plays a reasonable role in making that happen.
DW: Now I'll be interested to see what your current opinion is of the community and where you think the next few years what you would like the community to progress to.
MS: Well we have an amazingly broad community. We have guys who love the forums, they contribute a huge amount to shaping the thinking in the forums, shaping the discussion, maintaining the standard of excellence, the code of conduct, making that a productive place for people to spend time. That's an enormous contribution to the project. We have guys who spend a lot of time translating and focused on a particular audience, Documentation, Advocacy, the LoCo Teams. To me it's very important to think of the community in those broadest, broadest possible senses. I would also extend our community out into other projects Debian in particular an upstreams we need to be less conscious of the divides and more conscious of the shared goals that we have.If you look at it at a developer perspective I think we have built a unique community that cares about the system as a whole. If you look at MOTU for example these are guys who are passionate about the whole experience some of them will be more focused on one set of packages or another set of packages but fundamentally the MOTU and the Core Dev care about the whole experience and that's quite unique, that's unusual in the Free Software world most people in the Free Software world are particularly interested in one or other tool, they hack on Gnash or on GCC, or on OpenOffice, or on Firefox, or on any one of a number of things and that's why they do it.
AP: You seem to be able to pull these people together though. I mean at a place like this, we're at UDS where I've seen Gnash developers, Firefox developers, all these people from upstream that you've pulled in together and there's a kind of meeting of minds.
MS: We have guys here from Fedora, from SuSE, from Debian, from other distros and as you point out from upstreams, we're really trying to live that collaborative open mime and I think it works. The guys who are here are typically the guys who feel the same way so the guys from Firefox who care about how their bits actually land on the desktops of somebody. It frustrates me sometimes when I see upstream communities do some amazing work then the distros don't highlight that work, I saw an example, someone was talking about some scaling work that had been done in Apache but in order to take advantage of it the packages needed to be restructured in a particular way, and the distros just don't know that, unless we can collaborate effectively with the upstreams their work won't necessarily reach it's full potential in the hands of anyone other than a super specialist.
AP: What's the real killer thing you'd like to see in Intrepid?
MS: I would like to see it work really well on a small screen. I would like to see it work really well on a screen that you can, if not stick in your pocket, that you can lug around without feeling like you're lugging around a laptop. And there's a ton of other stuff going on and huge stuff going on but I want to see us shifting the dial in favour of that kind of use case.
DW: Now one of the things which has also been coming up is the Ubuntu Mobile, when can we actually expect to see this available to a consumer?
MS: There is a company right now that has a version of it that their shopping around to retail channels and so on an if that goes to market then it could go very quickly. It's going to depend on which companies decide to run with it. Linux is exploding in the mobile space right, Motorola talks about 60% of their phones moving to Linux, Nokia's just started talking about Linux playing an increasingly important role there. I don't think we fully yet understand exactly what the role of the distributions are there but the vision I think that the team have is this idea of being able to develop using a consistent set of tools, a consistent approach to packaging, something that could run on a server or something that could run on a little nettop or a little handled device. And that's an awesome vision, it's all about innovation and specialist skills are an obstacle to innovation.I have this little treadmill and it's got a screen on it, a touch screen and it's very clear that there are very few people who have the ability to influence how that touch screen works because there are just so many little things that are wrong with it. Now if that thing was running something like Ubuntu Mobile where it had open archives and you get get thousands of different people to participate and collaborate on how it works that would be the best damn treadmill touchscreen experience.
DW: Certianly, because you could SSH while you're running.
MS: Exactly! You know what I really want to do is read the news, I want to have like a blog reader and Firefox and so on and a touch/gesture orientated thing and I want to read the news while I'm on the treadmill.
DW: But also I think one of the other great things is it could be customisable and it will run custom applications on crazy devices.That's the thing, we perceive it as crazy devices now but in a few years time, it's like people thinking having Linux in your pocket or Linux on a machine that's got a 7 inch display and no hard drive, you know a few years ago you might have thought that was crazy but now it's the law.
MS: So just think of this, think of all the places where you have something that will become a touch screen, like every photo frame in your house could become a touch screen, you'd have one at the entry point o your house, you'd have one to control sound and lighting and video. All these things that we currently interact with that are separate devices, just make them all touch screens. And then articulate the vision, you could have any piece of functionality on any screen at any time and figure out how we make that work. So I want Firefox on my treadmill, why can't I? Or I want my music control system on the treadmill because I want to hop on the treadmill and turn the music volume up and why can't I do that? Streaming video to that same device, and then when I get off and I'm walking out the door I want to be able to turn off the air-con and the lighting. So imagine a world where literally everything, every surface can become a place where you can drop any Ubuntu package. To me that's what the mobile effort is all about.
TW: I love the idea of a treadmill that runs Linux or Ubuntu because think of all the fat geeks who would buy it because it's got Linux on it and then they would become thin geeks and therefore increase the longevity of the Open Source community.Mark thank you very much for talking with us today.
MS: Great to hang out with you guys.
No Speaker: MUSICAL INTERLUDE
TW: That about wraps up episode 6, we hope you enjoyed the interview. We're going to have more interviews for you in the next show from UDS. We talked to lots of interesting people and we're going to get them out to you.
AP: Yeah we've got a right diverse range of topics. We've spoken to a few people from the Ubuntu project and outside the Ubuntu project as well.
TW: So send in your competition entries
AP: And if you have any comments or questions for us you can contact us in a number of ways, you can get us via email if you send an email to podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
TW: you can join #ubuntu-uk on the Freenode networkor http://twitter.com/uupc is our twitter account
AP: you can also leave up to thirty seconds of voice mail, the phone number is on our website and all that's left for us to do is thank the people who mirror our podcast and that includes BitFolk and Showmedo
TW: And thanks to Mark for being interviewed by us and giving us so much of his time. And we'll see you next time.
AP: Bye
No Speaker: ENDING MUSIC