Linux get serious about taking on Apple
From The Register:
Billionaire, cosmonaut and founder of the fast-growing Ubuntu Linux distro Mark Shuttleworth dreams impossible dreams.
No, not a return to the stars. He believes in something that's far harder for mortal open source engineers to achieve.
That dream? To produce a desktop more beautiful to ordinary users than legions of Apple programmers supping on the milk of chief exec Steve Jobs' alleged brilliance are capable of producing. That includes a desktop not funded by a clutter of annoying banner or Flash-based ads, but paid for by subscription-based services.
Now you're done dreaming, go home and code for the victory.
In a Tuesday evening O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) keynote, Shuttleworth called on delegates to make a concerted effort not just to catch Apple but to overtake the company in the quality of the desktop experience they deliver users.
His company Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, is working to make the Ubuntu desktop "more beautiful" in the next two years, he told OSCON.
"I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that's art," Shuttleworth said.
"Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware," he said. "You can paint anything on the screen because it's all software."
Read the full story here.
Making Linux prettier would help ine race against Apple, but it's just one part of a complex formula that includes tight integration between hardware and software development, a fast, easy-to-use and great looking operating system complimented by easy-to-use yet powerful personal media management software (pictures, audio, video).
I just don't think the open source community has the money to challenge Apple. Microsoft does, but it's throwing it down the drain on trying to acquire Yahoo! and developing table-size versions of the iPhone.
