A Fool’s Wisdom

Jeff Waugh was interviewed on FLOSS Weekly Semi-regularly 16 hosted by Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte. Although released in February it was recorded in 2006.

The interview is great. Some of the highlights for me are learning more about the early days of Ubuntu, where Jeff sees Ubuntu now, and where he is as an open source professional. Jeff regularly demos his deft wit.

“Then they buy 100 Linux servers because Linux is suddenly real to them. This bizarre thing that the desktop makes it real.”

Jeff is one of the many people that I admire for their contribution to free culture through their work on open source. He has made significant contributions through leadership and evangelism with linux.conf.au, GNOME and Ubuntu, and is now back with GNOME.

It is because of Jeff and people like Jeff that I run Ubuntu and I am as passionate about free culture and open source. Thank you Jeff!

Also Experience:

2006-11 Linux Format Jeff Waugh (LXF 87)

2005-12-27 Linux Journal An Evening with Jeff Waugh

2004-09-16 OS News Interview with Jeff Waugh On Ubuntu Linux

Jeff Waugh’s entry on Wikipedia

FLOSS Weekly 16 notes:

0:45 promises it will be FLOSS weekly, Chris DiBona has had a baby
4:05 How Jeff got started in OSS
5:45 Linux Conf AU
8:15 Open source developers traveling to USA
9:30 Australia importing USA copyright & DMCA, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO )
11:00 Start of Ubuntu, Canonical, and Mark Shuttleworth
13:00 Gap in the market for Ubuntu

* fully free distro, enterprise vs community, dual play thing (fedora vs red hat)
* ship every six months
* one CD
* awesome, beautiful desktop; “Then they buy 100 Linux servers because Linux is suddenly real to them. This bizarre thing that the desktop makes it real”
(Debian, python, GNOME)
* Business model, create a network of companies around the world working on it, a super distro!

15:45 especially lickable (naked) people as backgrounds and the controversy
20:30 Mark letter to open SUSE mailing list, community vs company, Novell and Microsoft
(25:45) sound bite
25:00 “The amazing thing about all of this is that in <em>practical</em> terms, you look through the agreements and it doesn’t stand for anything. Basically what they have said is they are not going to act like gutter trash to each other customers.”
28:30 “Novell had legitimized a whole bunch of things from Microsoft’s point of view on the industry”

Patent covenant for non-compensated individual developers * biz model of open source * “you can have it as a toy, but you can’t turn it into something that competes with us” * “to commercial open source and to create opportunities in the industry through open source is not want Microsoft wants to see” * “as soon as you want to play in the industry it is time to pay up”

30:45 Leaving Canonical, swimming upstream

Want to spend a lot of time focusing on GNOME, as opposed to the whole distribution stack * mobile and embedded initiative OLPC (Sugar), Nokia 77, FIC phone (GTK-based)

34:00 Got into computers
36:00 Coding (as little as possible) * contributions to GNOME as release management (manager)
37:45 (Google /) O’Reilly Evangelist thing * badger badger
43:30 Working for Canonical * London for biz dev * Support center in Montreal * “all the hackers work from home”
46:30 Personal life * wife * own company
52:00 Perky Pants * Pants On, Pants Off * Pantage
56:00 Ubuntu uncharted waters

* Launchpad
* Ubuntu derivatives
* Proprietary hardware drivers (extremes Linux Mint vs  gNewSense); hardware enablement

1:00:00 proprietary software - Flash, Real player, DivX, playing DVDs
1:02:30 Zune
1:06:00 OSS and Money
1:10:00 Linux is a species
1:11:15 Post show hosts chat; Ubuntu * Really, really like their users