Nicolas Barcet Free zone of nijaba

According to the statistics page on the Cloud Market, which claims to be "the most complete catalog of Amazon EC2 images", images using Ubuntu as the base platform have the largest share in their catalog.

My colleague Thierry Carrez just posted a blog this weekend discussing the new autoregistration features of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that are coming up in Ubuntu 10.04LTS Server Edition.

Thanks a lot to everyone that came to Skills Matter tonight for my presentation. I have really appreciated the quality of your questions and hope that my answers were satisfying.

Some people may say that I am a statistics junky... Well that's certainly true! But what do you want, being a product manager for a product that does not require ANY form of user registration, you have a tendancy to cling to any piece of data you may find that shows that you are not working in vain. Indeed, and to the opposite of most, if not all, of our competitors, we have absolutely no way to determine what is our install base.  We don't control our mirors, we don't have any ping back home mechanisms, and we are not considering adding any.  So, here I am, collecting as much information I can from outside sources...

Well, october was not too bad in that sense:

Ubuntu is positioning itself as a true cloud OS, and seems so far to be the only Linux distribution to have done so, but too often we are being asked why and where we are going.  I am not going to try to redefine what cloud means in this post, as this has been done countless times . If I just remind you that cloud can be divided in three layers: the infrastructure (IaaS), the development platform (PaaS) and the application (SaaS), I think that it should be enough to make sure we are thinking about the same thing.

So far, Ubuntu has produced three major components out of its cloud strategy: two at the infrastructure layer and one at the software layer:

• Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2 (IaaS)
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud powered by Eucalyptus (IaaS)
• UbuntuOne (SaaS)
  

Even though UbuntuOne is obviously a cloud product, and an important initiative for Canonical to deliver added functionality to its large user base, it should clearly be distinguished from the other two components, as one distinguishes the shovels from the buildings it allows to make.  I'll only talk here about "shovels" (infrastructure components), and try to summarize where we are aiming with that. The Ubuntu mission is clearly to select the best components from open source, assemble and refine them, to provide the best possible user experience in order to leverage it against the biggest monopoly the software industry has ever known.  In other word to provide a use-able alternative to the operating system/productivity suite that currently dominates the world.  Our cloud strategy clearly inscribe itself within this mission, let me try to explain you why and how.

A few minutes ago my colleague Simon Wardley asked me a simple question: do we have any graphs that shows the adoption of Ubuntu Server Edition over time, other than Google trend?  I could not think of any, so I figured to produce one out of the results from the Alfresco Open Source Barometer since they have now released their results three times. Here it is:

The Eclipse Foundation just released its 2009 Community Survey , and this brings some very good news for Linux and Ubuntu.

Great news for Linux, as it has clearly gained ground very fast both as a development and as a deployment platform since 2007.  Ars Technica covers the details, but here is the graph they have produced of this growth:

Looking into the details of the survey, Ubuntu is clearly the second OS for Development (14,4%)  behind Windows (63,9%) and more than twice the share of MacOSX (6,9%) :

Talking with a new colleague of mine the other day, I came to realize how blind I had been to one of our greatest strength in comparison with other linux distribution in one very fundamental aspect of it: our repositories structure .

I recently had a discussion with a few people on whether one should filter the net or not for his kids. Here are a few thoughts I consider worth sharing.

I've got 3 kids (9, 13, 15), each one has his own laptop since they are able to read (and even before for the last one).

I took, since the very beginning the stance of educating my kids on what can be found and what can happen on the net.  I have also told them to tell my wife or me when they feel offended. I have also showed them how to block unsolicited contact on chats. In fact, I decided to apply to them the same principles that I got throughout my education^[1] . So far, only once was I asked by my youngest one how can she avoid seeing some sites when she does a search, and showed her how to use a filtered version of Google (that was 3 month ago).

Even though I have warned her about DRM multiple times, my wife loves purchasing her music on iTunes and did so quite extensively for at least the past two years.  A week ago she calls me for help, as one her favorite's artist music cannot be read on her iTunes or iPod anymore.  Each times she tries, it ask for her iTunes music account password, seems to say that it validates it and then ask for her password again!