I’ve mentioned Ubuntu in this column before. Stable, streamlined, and thoughtful, it may be my favorite Linux distribution overall. It has improved with each new release, which appear at regular intervals — about every six months. But the new version, 6.06 LTS, code-named Dapper Drake, is different.
For starters, it’s the first release that’s available in a server version. More significantly, based on the maturity of the Linux kernel, Ubuntu’s new installer, and other components that make up the distribution, for the first time Shuttleworth has declared this release ready for enterprise use.
The “LTS” in the product name stands for Long Term Support. Canonical — the Shuttleworth-founded company that maintains Ubuntu — is so confident of the Drake’s viability that it is offering to support the release for a full five years, compared with 18 months for earlier versions. The question is, Will the market bite?
Ubuntu for the enterprise represents a unique fusion of ideas: the world of commerce and the world of free software rolled into one. As opposed to Red Hat or Suse, there is no “enterprise edition” of Ubuntu. Canonical’s enterprise customers will get the exact same software that anyone can get free of charge from the Ubuntu download site. What’s more, the distribution itself remains decisively free in that other sense of the word.
“We have already, on occasions, made decisions not to explore certain kinds of relationships with third-party companies,” Shuttleworth says, “because we feel they would not be in keeping with our community.”
That means you won’t find Adobe Acrobat Reader on the Ubuntu installation disc, or Macromedia’s Flash Player. In fact, you won’t even find Java — something that’s sure to raise some eyebrows among enterprise customers. All these things can be obtained from third parties and will run on Ubuntu, of course. They just aren’t there by default because they’re not free software.
Dapper Drake is the first stage in that master plan. Type “lamp” at the server install prompt, and a short while later you’ll have a fully configured LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server, ready to run. In the future, Shuttleworth hopes to deliver many more such appliancelike configurations, including mail servers, Asterisk servers, or possibly even the JBoss Java application server stack (if the licensing issues around Java get worked out).
Is free, commodity enterprise software an idea whose time has come? Mark Shuttleworth is no stranger to putting his money where his mouth is; he’s already invested millions of his own into Ubuntu. What remains to be seen is whether the business world will do the same. But if enterprises are leery of betting their businesses on free software, then a polished, stable, supported product such as Ubuntu may be all it takes to convince them.
Filed under: Opinion
