Ben King does a thorough treatment on Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical & Ubuntu in the Financial Times (print edition) today, truncated on the Web.
The only news to Linux-watchers will be the globetrotting pace Mark has set for himself to sign up accounts for the Ubuntu desktop. His message is modest: bluster is absent and he only emphasizes that the Canonical/Ubuntu project is characterized by high risk. There's no telling, he says, if Ubuntu will be a marginal 2-percenter or a mother-of-all-desktops 50-percenter.
Getting Ubuntu across The Chasm is the trick. But I will tell you that no Linux effort matches Canonical/Ubuntu in its common sense approach to The Chasm, husbanding resources and focusing energy on emerging locales like South- and West-African townships where poverty and fragmented langauge cultures have been impenetrable for the expensive, mainstream desktop.
It remains to be seen if a form of Ubuntu is the targeted system for the Little Green Laptop. This would make sense given The Shuttleworth Foundation's commitments to So. Africa tribal language localization, and also because our trusted acquaintance, Canonical's Mako Hill, is a member of the MIT Media Lab.
The reason the Little Green Laptop is one of the most interesting stories through the rest of this decade is that Negroponte's project could single-handedly double the global installed base of Internet-connected PC devices within a few short years. Given the fact that Linux will run on that little hand-cranked system, Microsoft's share of installed systems goes down to 50% in a sharp-ish manner. What's more, the Little Green Laptop, if OpenOffice is the suite of choice, will make OpenDocument the 50% global file format. Add to this scenario the number of state or regional govenments following in the footsteps of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Peter Quinn and we can begin to visualize a better world for ICT systems and the flow of information.
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