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Posted on 09/11/2006 8:49:57 AM PDT by N3WBI3
ark Shuttleworth is rich enough to cause some havoc in the feel-good Linux community. In January 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Shuttleworth sold his South African security software firm, Thawte, to VeriSign for $700 million in stock. Shuttleworth cashed out almost immediately, walking away with the entire purchase price, just as VeriSign's stock began its rapid descent. “Life has been kind to me,” he says.
But the 32-year-old has no children and doesn’t feel much need to hang on to his money. He spent $20 million in 2002 to orbit the Earth for a week in a Russian Soyuz. “I don’t intend to create a dynasty,” he says.
Instead, Shuttleworth wants to give back, by offering universal access to a free operating system to run PCs and servers. The world already has several “free” versions of the open-source Linux operating system, but Shuttleworth’s version, called Ubuntu, undercuts them all on price--and works better, according to many respected sources.
Purveyors of supposedly “free” open-source software, Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ) and Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), make their money charging support fees for every desktop or server using their software. You can’t get their software at all without paying something for support.
Support fees for Ubuntu (translation: “humanity to others” in a South African Bantu language) are comparable to Red Hat’s and Novell’s, but they’re completely voluntary. Some of Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) developers use Ubuntu, for instance, but the company doesn't pay because it services its own machines. Other users might pay only to support those machines they deem crucial to operations.
“ Deutsche Bank could deploy 10,000 Ubuntu servers, and they would not have to pay us anything,” says Shuttleworth in a hypothetical example. “But my guess is for 1,000 of those servers, they would want a 24-by-7 support contract.”
Ubuntu now has 4 million users, half of which are governments, universities and a smattering of businesses. It adds new ones at a rate of 8% per month. After its public release in October 2004, Ubuntu quickly deposed Red Hat's Fedora as the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch, a Web site that caters to Linux users. Ubuntu works in 22 languages, and Canonical, the company Shuttleworth set up to distribute his software, will send a free Ubuntu CD anywhere in the world. New users rave about the simple user interface, which has gained recent converts in a couple of well-known bloggers who switched from Apple Computer's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) OS X.
In May, Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) announced plans to offer Ubuntu on Sun’s Niagara chips, which power its newer Sparc servers. While Sparc servers aren’t a particularly big market, the stunt made clear that Shuttleworth aims beyond home hobbyists.
Canonical has burned through $15 million of Shuttleworth's money in two and a half years. He says that it will take him at least another two years to even know whether it has a chance to become profitable, and that it may never return his investment. But that doesn't matter. He's paying all the bills either way, along with setting up a $10 million endowment for the Ubuntu Foundation that's earning interest for a day when his attentions may drift elsewhere. (Shuttleworth tried out in early 2005 for the Donald Trump role on a South African version of The Apprentice, but lost to a politically connected head of a mining company.)
Competitors Red Hat and Novell say that they’re not worried and that Ubuntu's a welcome competitor. Todd Barr, director of enterprise marketing at Red Hat, which has more than 80% of the commercial Linux market, says Ubuntu has done a great job of “energizing the community” around open-source software.
But if Ubuntu starts gaining users in the corporate market, Red Hat has a lot to lose. The Raleigh, N.C., company netted $80 million on $278 million in revenue in its last fiscal year. A price war could swallow that 28% profit margin quickly. But though Ubuntu has enjoyed surprisingly fast growth in emerging economies such as Poland, Lithuania and Brazil, it so far has found little support among corporations, admits Jane Silber, Canonical's head of operations.
Peter Yared, a former Sun engineer who now runs ActiveGrid, a company that services software built on Linux, says that for now his company and most other service vendors support only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux. What would it take for him to support Ubuntu? “Five customers asking for it,” he says.
The big score, of course, would be to steal users away from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), whose Windows Vista has been plagued by delays. “Until now, Linux has only transformed the proprietary Unix market,” says Shuttleworth. “Guys like HP, IBM and Sun, who made their own proprietary versions of Unix. That's pretty much been blown away over the last four years.”
For Shuttleworth, free software is an inevitable progression, whether it comes from his company or not. So he claims to be unafraid of whatever Microsoft might throw at him if it feels threatened. “We're a bit like one head of the hydra, right? If you lop us off, there's a bunch of others that'll spring up in our place.”
Novell also offers a free Suse
OSS PING
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Thansk Shadowace for the article..
Wish Ubuntu/Xubuntu was as easy to install/run on a USB drive as Puppy Linux.
I've tried the LiveCD version and I really like it. I'm in the midst of an upgrade right now, so the spare parts I end up with may very well be re-born as an Ubuntu box. I currently have one system that is a dual boot with Gentoo and Knoppix. I consider myself a complete noob in regards to Linux, but I am putting forth an effort to try and become more proficient.
I'm working on my MCSA/MCSE certs right now, and have seriously considered going for the Linux cert once I'm finished with those. I'm just a tinkerer at this point, but I would like to get some cross-platform abilities to make myself more marketable.
Can you use DVI monitors yet with Linux? I tried ubuntu and got pissed because i couldn't adjust screen resolutions. I'm supposed to spend 30+ minutes figuring this out?? And I know how to find my way around XP and previous Windows
A fool and his money are soon parted.
I agree that the use of the phrase "supposedly 'free'" is a little disingenuous, but the article does go on to speak of using Linux in the corporate environment, where service contracts are par for the course. I like the idea that Ubuntu would be completely free for us to employ in our development/test environments without worrying about per-cpu license costs, with the production servers being under contract. This makes a lot of sense in an environment where you'd like to be able to test out different deployment strategies.
I've installed Kubuntu under vmware, and am waiting for my wife to sign off on me installing it elsewhere. I like it. We're a Fedora household at the moment though.
thanks
Exactly,
One of the reasons that *butu typ distributions are not taking off on the servers is because when placed in a striaght cost comparison whit a stable RHEL or SUSE they dont offer enough to counter the quality of support you can get from Red Hat or Novell..
True, but it remains to be seen if he is a fool. Shuttleworth's goals are high, but if they pay off, he'll make back that $15 million and much more.
Sometimes one must retreat to win.
What he's doing is taking a big gamble in the hopes that somewhere down the line he'll hit paydirt.
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