Η πλήρης συνέντευξη εδώ.
Περί συγχρονισμού των releases των διαφόρων projects που απαρτίζουν το Linux desktop...
Περί Gnome, KDE και innovation στο desktopderStandard.at: So what about pushing harder to align the big distributions and get upstream projects to follow that cycle?
Shuttleworth: Well you know that's a big push for me, I very much want to achieve that. (...)
derStandard.at: Do you see a real chance for that happening?
Shuttleworth: Yes. I think it's quite feasible that one of the other major distros is making a limited commitment to that. There are some talks on this.
There's a lot of precedence in economics that some level of coordination helps draw more customers, more users to everybody. There is a fear I think amongst the distributions that if we release at the same time as them users will be able to choose Apples to Apples. But the reality is, each of the distributions has a different set of values and that has nothing to do with which version of X.org the are using.
Περί ApplederStandard.at: It looks like everyone has chosen GNOME as their default desktop, do you think that observation is true?
Shuttleworth: Yeah, but I don't think that's as definitive as that. If I look at the work that has been done in the KDE community, it is very vibrant. I use KDE on my desktop, I enjoy seeing the pace of change there, there is a lot of innovation in KDE4. I think the KDE guys have a point when they say their approach has made it easier for them to make leaps forward than the GNOME approach which has very predictable release schedules. The flipside to that is that this predictability and also the choice of the LGPL has made GNOME very good for business.
Rather than saying: "GNOME wins, KDE looses" I'd like us to say: "How can we get this communities to sit down and talk to each other"? We really need to have both, stable release cycles and the ability to evolve quickly and make big leaps like KDE4.
(...)
derStandard.at: So you would favor GNOME to switch over to QT?
Shuttleworth: Well, I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That's very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.
Whether we'll be able to have the FSF excited about something, have GNOME excited about something, have Nokia excited about something which makes life better for developers - that's gonna be the interesting challenge for me. I'd like to see both desktops focusing on a common infrastructure. And we've already seen that, a lot of the Freedesktop initiatives have been embraced by both projects - HAL, d-bus for instance.(...)
derStandard.at: Recently there was a discussion about "decadence" in the GNOME community, discussing if GNOME is solely in a state of maintenance anymore. Do you think there have to be some bigger changes to get GNOME innovating again?
Shuttleworth: I think GNOME really set the pace about good guidance, good release management and good stability for downstream developers.(...) But it's equally important to have a very clearly articulated strategy for how to we will introduce waves of innovation. And I think the KDE-guys have a point when they say, if all you do is have an everlasting commitment to a stable API/ABI and do releases once every six months, you can never make big shifts of innovation.(...)
derStandard.at: You used KDE as an example for big leaps, but isn't there also a danger in that, seeing how the KDE-project seems to struggle with some of the unfortunate side-effects of such a very big leap?
Shuttleworth: Yeah, that's a really interesting point. That's why I think it's not as simple as saying "six months release and than a big release which is perfect and then has no changes for two years". Because it won't be perfect the first time around as those big dislocations do hurt. That's why I think a very careful conversation between the lead thinkers, focused on real experience, focused on the real commitment to continue to deliver for the industry that stability, that predictability but also let's you introduce change. How you introduce change is very important.(...)
και φτάνοντας στον πυρήνα του θέματος...derStandard.at: If you look on the desktop market today there is one operating system that is growing significantly and it's not Linux. It's OS X. What do you think is the reason for that?
Shuttleworth: First of all, we should really understand this, as it's an important observation: The fact that OS X is growing, tells us that Windows is weakening. The fact that OS X is growing and Linux isn't, tells you that OS X is offering things that Linux is not. One of those is the pace of change, the level of innovation. You really have to give credit to Apple for driving innovation. Another of those things is their focus on the web as an experience. They recognize very strongly that the web is the killer application of the PC today and not Microsoft today.
There is a real opportunity for us to deliver a great web experience, but we have to focus very strongly on getting this done.
(Έμφαση δικιά μου.)derStandard.at: What do you see as the main obstacles holding back the success of the Linux desktop?
Shuttleworth: I think we don't yet deliver a good enough user experience. I think we deliver a user experience for people that have a reason to want to be on the Linux platform, either because of price or because of freedom. If that was your primary reason, Linux is the right answer.
But if you are somebody who is not too concerned about price, who is not too concerned about freedom, I don't think we can say the Linux desktop offers the very best experience. And that's something we have to change, that's something I'm committed to work on, focusing increasing amounts of resources of Canonical on figuring out on how we actually move the desktop experience forward to compete with Mac OS X.
Αν κάποιος μπορεί να γυρίσει το τιμόνι στην μέχρι τώρα πλήρη αποτυχία του Linux desktop, είναι αυτός.
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